Business Etiquette for Responding to Mail & Email

by D. Laverne O’Neal, Demand Media

Maintaining high standards in business communication is a sign of professionalism. Poorly structured and untimely responses — whether via email or postal mail — make customers feel underappreciated and undervalued and can potentially result in lost business. Consequently, observing proper etiquette for responding to mail and email is key component of communications strategy for any small business.

Email — Respond Within 24 Hours

Responding to an email within 24 hours is good etiquette. Responding sooner is better because customers will be assured their concerns are being heard and their needs attended to. If a customer’s concern is negative or powerfully expressed, a phone call may be a more appropriate response than a return email. A call implies you consider the matter too important for an electronic response. Just hearing a human voice can help clients feel respected.

Postal Mail — Respond Within Five Days

Five business days is the standard business letter response time. Postal mail can take two to three days or longer to reach even a local client. A further delayed mail response can indicate to a customer that your company is disinterested in his business, or worse, unprofessional and sloppily run. Again, if a client letter expresses hostility or threatens to discontinue the business relationship, a phone call or personal visit is the best response.

Email — Subject Line

Use an appropriate heading in the email subject line. A heading that is specific to the customer’s concerns lets him know you have crafted an individual response rather than sending along a form letter. For example, the heading “response time issues” works better than “your recent concerns.”

Email or Letter Content

Open the letter or email with an expression of thanks, such as “Thank you for your recent correspondence regarding … .” This lets a client know you read his note and sets the stage for a reasoned response. It also conveys gratitude that the customer took the time to write to your company. Next, get straight to the point, addressing the customer’s concern directly and succinctly. Provide any explanation as to why the customer encountered a problem, but keep it brief. Close the letter by thanking the customer for his business and providing a phone number or email address to which he can forward further concerns.

Style and Grammar

The tone of the letter should correspond to the nature of the issue at hand. If a customer wrote to express his great satisfaction, a friendly, enthusiastic response is in order. If, instead, the client communication had a negative tone, the response should be business like but polite and should invite further communication to ensure concerns are fully addressed. Proper grammar and spelling are de rigueur, whether you respond by mail or email. A letter or message rife with misspellings makes you look incompetent and may encourage a customer or client to take his business elsewhere.

Goat and Horse Story..!!

Once there was a farmer who had a goat and a horse. One day horse become ill so farmer called veterinarian.

Vet said, “Your horse has a virus. He must take medicine for three days. I will come back and give him medicines for three days And on third day if he is still not better we have to kill him.”

Goat listened to all this conversation. Next day vet started medicine for horse. Vet gave him medicine and left.

After vet left goat approached the horse and said, “Be strong my friends or else they are going to put you to sleep forever.”

Similarly on second day vet left after giving horse medicine. Goat came to horse and said, “Come on buddy get up or else you are going to die!! Come on get up..!!”

On third day, after giving horse medicine vet examined horse and said to farmer that, “Unfortunately we have to kill him. Otherwise the virus might spread and infect other horses.”

This time after vet left again goat came to horse and tried to help him.

Goat said, “Listen friend, Its now or never!!
Get up, come on have courage!!
Come on get up!! That’s it, Come on get up slowly.
Great! come on, One, Two, Three…
Good rum faster..!!
Run Run More!!
Yes, You did it!! ow you are champion..”

All of sudden the farmer came back, saw the horse running in the field and began shouting, “Its miracle! My horse is cured. We must have a grand party. LETS KILL THE GOAT.”

Moral:

This often happen in life and work place. No one truly knows who deserves the merit of success and contributing toward success. Who is actually contributing the necessary support to make things happen. Be Grateful.

Remember “To Live Without Recognition is a Skill”

Shadow IT

What is Shadow IT?

According to Techopedia, the term “shadow IT” “is used to describe IT solutions and systems created and applied inside companies and organizations without their authorization.”

Data is the property of the organization and should remain with the organization when an employee leaves or is terminated. Protecting this data is critical, but that task requires IT to offer employee access to the services/applications they want, while maintaining control over the data created using these products.

Why is it happening?

The phenomenon usually begins with an enterprise department or team getting frustrated with the IT department’s perceived inability to deliver what they think they need, when they think they need it.

As a result, they go off and do their own thing, usually without the knowledge of IT. The problem usually continues with IT unaware, until technical problems develop, or until integration with other corporate applications is needed.

When IT is brought into the loop by users now needing help, it is not usually viewed as a pleasant surprise by the CIO or IT director.

Shadow IT occurs when users select their own IT services without informing the IT department. This can include file sync and share (FSS), backup platforms, and project or customer automation services that offer file sharing via attachments.

One mission of an IT administrator is to protect data, but these programs make it difficult because they exist outside of the corporate data protection process.

The single biggest challenge

Shadow IT creates for the data storage protection process is that data can be created, modified and shared without ever touching a file server under the supervision of IT.

The most common example of this is file sync and share(FSS) where data can be created locally on a laptop or tablet, stored in a user’s FSS account and subsequently shared to whomever the user deems appropriate. IT administrators can’t back it up because they don’t even know the data exists.

Risks of Shadow IT

Shadow IT can expose an organization to a host of data privacy and security-related compliance  risks.

When cloud-based applications or other IT resources are procured without the knowledge or approval of the IT department, an organization loses the ability to control the data flowing over those services.

The cloud service provider may or may not apply identity management, access control or back-up practices required to protect the data, potentially exposing data to unauthorized access and compliance violations.

Also, when software licenses are purchased outside the IT department’s knowledge or purview, those licenses aren’t managed within the organization’s central software management program. This leads to potential licensing compliance complications.

If improperly licensed software is discovered, an organization can be subjected to an audit — which is costly on multiple fronts — or fines.

Mitigate the risks associated with shadow IT

To reduce the compliance risks associated with shadow IT, executives are advised to meet regularly with business counterparts to review cloud services and performance, as well as new requirements and challenges.

Business users should be included when defining a companywide strategy for purchasing Software as a Service, and a checklist can help ensure a consistent method.

If you can reduce paperwork or other red tape involved in deploying IT resources and speed the service procurement process, users may be less inclined to bypass the IT department.

Regular vendor communication and application maintenance can help IT departments rein in shadow IT as well.

If business users know that the company will save money by procuring cloud-based services through their IT department, they may be less motivated to make the purchases on their own. Increasingly, there are industry-specific cloud services that offer security and other compliance-related features tailored to the customer’s needs.

Vendors have also been coming up with more tools to facilitate identity and access management for Software as a Service.

Give users the tools they need so they do not have to search outside of the organization for endpoint protection and FSS

Perform in-house backup of cloud-based application data to protect against accidental data loss or intentional data deletion

Conclusion:-

Shadow IT, cloud-based applications and personal devices are now our competition.

The only way we can ensure that we perform better than our competitors is by getting closer to the customer (Business User), understanding their challenges and delivering solutions that provide what they need.

If IT is seen as a trusted advisor and is agile enough to provide what is needed, when it’s needed, there is no reason for the customer to look elsewhere.

~~~Compiled from Various articles…

 

 

 

Basic Printer Security Recommendations…from Computer world

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TOP AREAS OF FOCUS – IT

ECOMMERCE AND GROWTH IN INDIA

CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS
Electronic commerce or e-commerce refers to a wide range of online business activities for products and services. It also pertains to “any form of business transaction in which the parties interact electronically rather than by physical exchanges or direct physical contact.”
A more complete definition is:
E-commerce is the use of electronic communications and digital information processing technology in business transactions to create, transform, and redefine relationships for value creation between or among organizations, and between organizations and individuals.
DIFFERENT TYPE OF E-COMMERCE:
The major different types of e-commerce are:
Business-to-business (B2B); business to- consumer (B2C); business-to-government (B2G); consumer-to-consumer (C2C); and mobile commerce (m-commerce).
We can divide E-commerce into three broad categories which include physical services, physical goods and virtual goods.
Another category that is gradually making its mark is the local commerce (couponing, yellow pages, classifieds etc.) which offers significant overlaps with E-commerce.
The 1st category of physical services is definitely the major contributor which includes travel ticketing, jobs, matrimonial and event management websites with travel sites accounting for 75% of all E-commerce industries! It provides attractive deals too.
The 2nd category of physical goods is the one currently gaining considerable attention, thanks to the hype created by new startups/stores being launched daily. Leaders in this division are Flipkart, Infibeam, Homeshop18, Indiatimes, Naaptol, Letsbuy etc. each of which offers everything from mobile phones to pet food.

The 3rd and final category of virtual goods and gift vouchers like online music, software’s, movies, games, Taj Hotel gift vouchers, Reebok gift vouchers, Pizza Hut gift vouchers etc. have been relatively lagging behind in India as compared to Europe and America, primarily due to piracy concerns and the social perspective of Indians. But the scenario is expected to change with the digital downloads segment expected to grow in the Indian Ecommerce market due to the explosion of mobile devices and the services available over the Internet at special discounts.
Growth expected In INDIA
The Indian e-commerce industry is going to experience exponential growth between now and 2020. This tremendous growth is going to be witnessed across all demographics.

According to a Goldman Sachs report released last year, the e-commerce market will account for 2.5% of India’s gross domestic product by 2030, growing 15 times and reaching $300 billion. The current size of e-commerce is $20 billion.
The biggest growth will be in the number of women who will be buying their items online. In urban India, the number of women shoppers will grow by as much as 30 percent while the rural areas will see a staggering growth of 157 percent in 2016 as per the report of IAMAI-IMRB and Nielsen Informate.
The growth of the number of women shoppers (and males ones) will be as a result of the increase in the internet penetration (71 percent male and 29 percent female internet users), youth who are empowered and greater adoption of e-commerce by the general Indian population. Women typically spend more time online shopping when compared to men and this bodes well for the Indian e-commerce industry.

Recent statistics show that retail e-commerce sales in India have grown tremendously, from 2.3 billion U.S. dollars in 2012 to an estimated 17.5 billion U.S. dollars, representing an almost eight-fold growth. As of 2015, the retail e-commerce sales as a percent of total retail sales in India are set to account for 0.9 percent of all retail sales in India, but this figure is also expected to grow in the near future, reaching 1.4 percent in 2018.
According to recent data, the number of digital buyers in India alone is expected to reach 41 million by 2016, representing some 27 percent of the total number of internet users in the country.
Online retailing comprises about 15%. India has close to 10 million online shoppers and is growing at an estimated 40-45% CAGR vis-à-vis a global growth rate of 8-10%. Electronics and apparel are the biggest categories in terms of sales.
Some of the characteristics that define e-commerce in India are:
• Cash on Delivery as a preferred payment method. India has a vibrant cash economy as a result of which 80% of Indian e-commerce tends to be Cash On Delivery (COD)
• Direct imports constitute a large component of online sales. Demand for international consumer products (including online purchases from international retailers) is growing much faster than in-country supply from authorised distributors. E-commerce uses sophisticated technology and logistics to create a cross-border supply chain that allows consumers to shop online for international products that are delivered duty paid to their doorstep.
• The future Mobile commerce is the next logical step for Indian merchants. With the growth of mobile phones and increased issuing and use of debit and credit cards, mobile commerce will deliver strong growth over the coming years. Mobile technology gives us the edge over our competitors.
• Social media networks such as Facebook are likely to increasingly become channels for sales and consumer engagement. First Data already offers a loyalty solution for the Facebook social media network as well as mobile payments opportunities using our Trusted Service Manager (TSM) service, which powers part of the Google Wallet which has made headlines recently.
• With Google Wallet, millions of consumers will no longer need to carry their leather wallets. This mobile application securely stores credit cards, offers, gift cards and more on their mobile phone.
This virtual wallet is changing the face of commerce by enabling customers to simply make “tap and go” payments with their mobile devices, while increasing loyalty at merchant locations. New and exciting developments in India will enable our merchants to attract new tech savvy customers who are ready to use their mobile devices for secure online transactions.
Conclusion:-
The Indian e-commerce market already has hundreds of verticals but the list isn’t exhausted yet. Indian consumers can expect to see newer and more exciting things in the e-commerce sphere in the coming years.

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