How People Use Payment Cards Some people don?t even keep cash on their person anymore, instead opting to use payment cards for their ease of use. About what percentage of your transactions do you use a card for? In particular, countries in the European Union have a lower percentage of cash usage compared to card usage, while less developed parts of the world rely on cash. In countries that have the technology to take advantage of payment cards, data privacy laws are much more specific and comprehensive. Digital wallets may have seemed like the future, but they are far from a sustainable system, as retailers and other organizations aren?t guaranteed to take these types of payment. Therefore, the de facto payment method, unless you carry around a full wallet, is to use your card. Some businesses will try to incentivize card payments, while using cash in certain situations (think use of an automated teller machine) could cost consumers more in the long run for goods or services. What Data Loss Means for Your Business The more often consumers purchase goods or services with payment cards, the more likely it becomes that those credentials could be put at risk. With the number of hackers out in the wild, there is a considerable price on your business? sensitive data–including card information. While it might be more common in e-commerce sites, you can never be too careful with how your business stores and protects sensitive payment card information. If businesses fail to secure this data, the repercussions could be extreme. While it could mean a loss of consumer confidence, it could also lead to a series of smaller events that gradually erode your organization?s profitability. Either way, whether it?s a series of minor inconveniences or a major disruption, you?re still facing down a disaster. Payment Card Index Digital Security Standard Not all countries are as progressive with individual data security as the nations of the EU, but there are still measures that have been taken to standardize card information security. The Payment Card Index Digital Security Standard, or what is typically called PCI compliance, is the strategy payment card companies have come to. The requirements they expect every business that accepts payment cards to meet include: Monitor and test network. Maintain security network and systems to ensure customer privacy. Protect cardholder data. Maintain system that manages and reduces vulnerabilities. Maintain strong access control. Maintain information security policy. These requirements might seem stringent and difficult to produce, but an easy way to make it happen is to work with White Mountain IT Services. We can help you maintain a secure network for all of your organization?s sensitive information, including card information. To learn more, reach out to us at (603) 889-0800.

You Can Identify Better Sales Prospects Your sales team can leverage technology to help them identify new prospects. For example, they can use a Customer Relationship Management software (or CRM) to identify sales opportunities and see how their deal is moving through the sales pipeline. Your team can use the software to gather data and use the insight to learn more about their potential customers and refine the overall sales process. CRM software can also help your company’s business leaders develop accurate plans and future sales forecasts. You Can Follow Up with Potential Leads Faster Sales don’t happen overnight, that’s why it is so important for your company to immediately follow up with leads. Luckily, technology can help automate this process so your team can increase their chances of making a sale and save valuable time at the same time. There are many tools available to keep your salespeople on the right track and either send out emails automatically on their behalf or schedule reminders in their calendar to follow up with leads.   You Can Integrate Different Tools to Improve Overall Efficiency Technology can also integrate different software and applications, ranging from CRM software to accounting programs and other tools that can make your business more efficient. Streamlined systems can make it easier for your sales people to communicate with people, develop relationships and analyze customer data. You Can Use Technology to Elevate Your Brand Regardless if your company focuses on selling to consumers or other businesses, the right tools can elevate your brand and make a great first impression. For example, simple tools like Conference Pad, an app that gives presenters the ability to control multiple iPads at once during a presentation and turn to the next slide, can make a huge impression without much effort. There are many other tools that can help your company gain an advantage during sales pitches or during other public events. In Conclusion Technology can make your brand more appealing, improve the company’s overall efficiency, and allow your sales team to identify and close leads faster. That’s why you should equip your sales team and other staff members with the latest technology. And although it may be tempting, there’s no need to try every single new technology you hear about. Try to focus on using tools that will help streamline your business and increase revenue instead. Remember, technology is important but you should still encourage your sales team not to sit behind their screens and online tools all day long. Your sales people should also still invest some of their time interacting with customers in person whenever possible since relationships are crucial to the sales process.   Hire Us for Your Professional IT Management and Support Services We know adopting new technology can be intimidating at first, especially if you don’t know where to start. That’s why our company provides IT management and IT consulting services you can trust. White Mountain IT Services has been helping businesses around the country with technical support for more than three decades. Our experts can help you identify new technologies and innovative tools that will allow your sales team to be more efficient and close more sales. Please contact us today for more details.

We?ve gone ahead and assembled some helpful workplace habits and policies that will be good for your employees? overall wellness. Healthy Foods in the Office There?s no denying that the presence of snacks in the office is seen as a major workplace benefit in the eyes of many employees. This is advantageous to you, the employer, as you can cultivate a positive feeling in the office just by having something available. However, by choosing one snack over the other, you can influence greater changes that you might not have considered connected before. For instance, it is a general fact that the snacks that are more readily made available aren?t exactly the healthiest ones out there, and the few healthier options that exist tend to be much pricier than the cheap and easy alternatives. However, consider the environment you cultivate in your office by doing so – and how much less frequently healthy people tend to be out of the office, using sick time. While there is no harm in offering a few ?convenience? snacks, try to also encourage your employees to make healthier choices. They?ll feel better, and will therefore be more productive. Promote Water Sipping Dehydration is a much more serious problem than most people realize, to the point that even a mild case (as in, dehydrated by one percent) of it has been recorded as decreasing productivity by a full 12 percent, causing reduced alertness and concentration. Once you reach three-or-four percent, productivity drops by 25 percent. What?s worse, many people are chronically dehydrated. This means that their bodies have just gotten used to it, so they don?t feel as thirsty as they should. Try to encourage that your employees drink plenty of water, however you can. Encourage Movement Whenever Possible While plenty of studies have shown it, did we ever really need scientific support to convince us that sitting on our backsides all day isn?t exactly great for us? Unfortunately, a lot of the work that goes on in the traditional office is done at a desk. However, this doesn?t mean that there aren?t solutions that can expand on those capabilities. Convertible sit-to-stand desks and desktop mounts have grown to be very popular, allowing users to alternate between sitting and standing throughout their workday. It may not seem like much, but it can add up to quite the difference in your user productivity. Try purchasing one to allow a few of your users a chance to try it before committing the expense of outfitting the whole office with them. Get Some Greenery Plants have long been a staple in office decoration, and often can have benefits that greatly outweigh the maintenance that they require. As a matter of fact, certain plants have been shown to have particular properties that make them ideal for offices that face certain limitations or would like to accomplish something greater with their greenery. For example, there are many varieties of the pothos hanging plant that can do quite well in an office environment (as attested to the fact that they are often considered the quintessential office plant). Not only do these plants do their best in the middling light conditions of many offices, they don?t need as much water as you?d imagine, and they have been shown to improve air quality levels. […]

Data backup works by backing up your data and providing the ability to restore your data. Using this solution, you can make any large issues, or even small annoyances, trivial at best. It doesn?t take an expert to notice how a computer shutting down before you can save an important document can derail operations for employees who need that file. In situations like this, an incremental backup will be able to resolve the issue in no time at all. Simply put, instead of worrying about how to get that document back, you can turn back time to a point where that file existed on your business? infrastructure. This gives you the option of reverting documents and files back to a point where they aren?t affected by whatever ails you. These small inconveniences can effectively be mitigated simply by restoring a previous version of your document, making it seem like the issue never happened at all. This might seem like a small benefit but think about it in the grand scale. You effectively make it so that you?ll never have to worry about employee mistakes killing productivity (to a certain degree, anyway). When employees don?t have to worry about mistakes eliminating all of their hard work, they can instead focus on getting as much work done as possible, improving productivity and reducing the margin of error. White Mountain IT Services can help your business put together a data backup plan that works for you. Our network-attached and cloud-based backup solutions can allow for incremental backups frequently throughout the workday, creating minimal data loss in any disaster event, no matter how small. To learn more, reach out to us at (603) 889-0800.

Google.com We should begin by saying that there are very few resources in the world as useful as google.com. In fact, the act of searching the Internet is now the verb ?google?. With that kind of success, it isn?t a surprise that people could get a little frustrated when they ?google? a query only to not get the results they were expecting. This scenario is exactly why you should learn that there are search commands that you can make inside of Google search to help you get the results you are looking for. Today, we will look at a few ways that you can get the search result you are after, not the one corporations pay a pretty penny to give you. Google Search Tip #1: Use the Tabs Depending on your search query, you may want to get an image, or a video, or some news. Google provides this functionality on every search results page. There are tabs for images, news, videos, maps, shopping, books, flights, and finance. By selecting these options, you will get results that are more in line with what you wanted your query to return. Google Search Tip #2: Use Quotes If you are searching for something specific, using quotes can help you minimize the amount of results returned that don?t exactly match your search query. Example: ?happy days? By putting your search parameters in quotes, it searches the term or phrase exactly as you typed it rather than using the keywords in any order. This can return more specific information. Google Search Tip #3: Use a Hyphen to Exclude Words Lots of words in English have multiple meanings. If you find yourself entering a search query that you know will return ambiguous results because the term has multiple meanings, try searching the term, add a space, and then subtract the meanings you don?t want to see. Example: scale -weight By removing the topic of one of the homonyms from the equation, you will get more targeted and accurate results. Google Search Tip #4: Use a Colon to Search Specific Sites If you know what you are looking for, but need to quickly find something on a specific website, using Google to find it is simple. All you have to do is type in the keywords you want to search followed by a space, the command ?site:?, and the website. Example: Virtualization site:azure.microsoft.com By adding the specific keyword you want to see and the site you want to search, Google will return some extremely specific search results. Google Search Tip #5: Search Locally Google knows way more than you think about you. One thing that Google typically understands is where you are, which means you can literally use Google to find any location in the world, or down the street. Example: Laundromats nearby. By searching for anything you need, you can get a list of local services, restaurants, and other locations; and, the directions to get there. Google Search Tip #6: Don?t Always Avoid the Ads We?ve all had it ingrained in our brains to avoid clicking ads on the Internet, but Google has a very complex vetting process when it delivers ads based on your search. Businesses pay for these ads and choose the destination, but Google?s bots are always checking to make sure […]