Google is launching a new privacy tool for Google Apps Unlimited users today. The new Data Loss Prevention feature will make it easier for businesses to make sure that their employees don’t mistakenly (or not so mistakenly) email certain types of sensitive information to people outside of the company.
Businesses that subscribe to this plan for their employees now have the option to turn on this tool and select one of the new predefined rules that, for example, automatically reject or quarantine any email that contains a social security or credit card number. Businesses can choose from these predefined rules and also set up custom detectors (a confidential project keyword, for example). Google says its working on adding more predefined rules, too.
Google created a set of pre-defined rules for data like social security numbers in the U.S., Canada and France, driver’s license and National Health Service numbers in the U.K., as well as for all credit card numbers, bank routing numbers and Swift codes for bank account numbers.
It’s worth noting that Google will scan both the email body and attachments for potential matches.
Rules can be applied to incoming and outgoing messages. Admins are also able to apply these rules to specific departments and employees. For internal messages, they are also able to add a line like “[Internal Only]” to emails that contain information that would have been rejected if the sender had tried to send this email to an external recipient.
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If you’re on a budget, use Excel to plan out how much you can afford to spend on each person this holiday season.
Try Office 365 to get the new Office 2016 apps including Excel!
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Watch how a racing team turns to cloud services for speed and agility on and off the track
Lotus F1 Team is all about efficiency for both its race cars and its internal operations. The organization adopted Microsoft Office 365 productivity tools to improve its communications and collaboration capabilities, even during the critical seconds of a race. Employees and IT staff now spend less time dealing with technology, which leaves them available to focus on how to trim seconds off every lap around the track.
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
Wednesdays With Will: Improving The Service In Customer Service
Wednesdays With Will: Improving The Service In Customer Service
By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist
In our last few installments, we touched on how your marketing and sales teams can more easily acquire new business by leveraging a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). As a business owner, you know that client acquisition is only half the battle. Once they become your customer, that’s when the real work starts. Sadly, this is often an overlooked aspect for some businesses which can lead to frustration for both the client and your own employees in supporting them. Today we are going to cover how you can help setup your customer support and customer service teams for success.
During the sales process, your marketing and sales team have set the expectations as to what will be delivered when a prospective customer becomes a client. As we all know, a promise is only as good as how well you are able execute it into reality. Sadly, there is a common tale of the chasm between what was promised by Marketing/Sales and what is delivered by Services. Worse, it will sometimes lead to finger pointing as to who is at fault…Marketing/Sales for overpromising or Services for under delivering. What if there was a way to mitigate if not prevent this from happening by having everyone on the same page.
In the previous blogs, we discussed the benefits of increased transparency and collaboration between your marketing and sales teams as you bring the prospective customer through the sales cycle. What if you could take it a step further to provide a streamlined handoff to your Services team? By leveraging a platform like Microsoft Dynamics CRM it is now possible. Under a single pane of glass, you are able to collaborate more easily between disparate teams (Marketing, Sales, Services, etc.) while coordinating enterprise-level support services. It enhances ease of use not only for your internal teams but also from the customer perspective. Let’s discuss how.
As I mentioned, there is often a disconnect between Marketing/Sales and Services. One of the most powerful aspects of collaboration is enhanced communication. If your Marketing/Sales team has a better understanding of what Services are capable of delivering, there is less chance of overpromising. If your Services team has a clear understanding of what the client is entitled to, it makes it easier for them to deliver or prepare and make adjustments accordingly.
Dynamics CRM provides your Services team with the tools to successfully deliver. A service agent will be able to view pertinent information regarding the account such as service entitlements, case history, customer service scripts, and context-based information. The context based information is pretty interesting because it uses machine learning to recommend information that would be most useful based on similar past experiences. Great time saver! Besides the information that is provided some of the tools include a Service Level Agreement (SLA) timer, a guided resolution process flow, and resource management/dispatch. What I love about the resource management/dispatch function is the ability to easily find the person with the correct skillset that is closest to the service destination. Another great time saver and a way to improve customer satisfaction.
Speaking of customer satisfaction, Microsoft Dynamics CRM will help make your customer your greatest advocate. As times change so have the ways customers prefer to interact with their chosen partner. Did you know the average customer uses 3 or more different channels of engagement with a company today? Dynamics CRM is able to provide a consistent customer experience whether your client chooses to communication through web, chat, social, email, or phone. Giving the client the option to interact the way they feel most comfortable promotes a stronger dialogue.
Social media has given businesses a new level of insight as to how they are doing as an organization and how they are perceived. This is important because it allows you to rectify an error before it becomes “big news” and pinpoint areas of improvement. On the flipside, it also lets you know what you are doing great and why your clients appreciate you.
One of the most popular methods of customer support today is self-service. It makes complete sense as to why it has become the trend. With the increased popularity and use of internet search engines over the past 20 years, most people are more comfortable searching for an answer themselves vs asking for assistance. Microsoft has recognized this trend and recently incorporated a solution into Dynamics CRM. Clients now have access to the answers they are seeking regarding your product or service through a company branded online portal. Once again, it leverages machine learning so it provides recommended context based topics to assist as you type in your query. If you are unable to find the answer to your questions, you can easily create a new case in the same portal. It will then be answered, saved, and available for future use for others with the same question.
The last topic I would like to touch on is engagement experience and brand loyalty. A platform like Microsoft Dynamics CRM will help streamline how your internal teams work together and hopefully improve employee satisfaction and retention but that’s only half the story when it comes to Services. Having the ability to effectively assist your clients and for them to easily be assisted is the beginning of the story around brand loyalty. The more they enjoy interacting with your organization, the greater chance there is of them becoming not only a loyalist but an evangelist for your brand. This will often lead to new leads, opportunities, and sales generated by your clients!
There is much more to discuss when it comes to the Services portion of Dynamics CRM but I like to keep these articles short and to the point. As always, I encourage you to reach out to me to discuss these topics in deeper detail. I hope you enjoyed and found this week’s article informative. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Ward here. Till next time…
About the author:
Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
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Office 365 provides customers with a continuous stream of innovative features that provide significant productivity improvements while keeping information highly secure. We are working on resources and tools to help you leverage Office 365 information security features and controls, so you can manage security in your Office 365 tenant. The Office 365 Service Trust Portal (STP), launched earlier this year, is an example of a feature that provides deep insights into how Office 365 services are operated and independently audited.
Now we are pleased to present the customer security considerations (CSC) workbook that can be used to facilitate a quick review and implementation of the security controls available in Office 365. The CSC workbook is designed to provide you with information on key security and compliance features to consider when adopting, deploying and managing Office 365.
The CSC workbook, which currently is implemented as a Microsoft Excel workbook, is in preview. Your feedback will allow us to improve the CSC workbook for your business needs, and we hope to receive your feedback. Over time, the number of pivots will increase and additional compliance scenarios will be incorporated.
The CSC workbook contains two security-based pivots on the same set of features and information. One pivot is the Office 365 Customer Control Considerations section. Information in this section is organized into five scenarios listing the features that can be used to manage information security risks:
•Data Resiliency—Considerations for protecting and recovering information from potential data corruption.
•Access Control—Things to consider around managing identity and access control using Office 365 and Azure features.
•Data Leakage—Considerations around using encryption and controlling forwarding.
•Security and Compliance Investigations—Considerations for conducting compliance searches and forensics investigations, as well as logging and hold actions in Office 365.
•Incident Response and Recovery—Things to consider around security incident response and recovery.
In addition to these five scenarios, an all-up list of considerations is provided.
The second pivot is the Office 365 Risk Assessment Scenarios section. Information in this section is organized by risks/threats and how you will implement various controls to manage these risks:
•Malicious Customer Administrator
•Former Employee
•Credential Theft
•Malware
•Trusted Device Compromised
•Attacker Foothold
•Microsoft Operator
We hope that the CSC workbook provides you with quick information on how to help secure your Office 365 service with features/configurations that you manage. Based on the usage of this tool and your valuable feedback, we hope to expand the scope of considerations as appropriate and make it even more user friendly in the future.
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Ariela Suster’s company has one bold goal, to employ at-risk youth in El Salvador giving them an alternative to a culture of violence and gangs. She uses Skype on her Surface to stay connected with her team, designs new jewelry lines with Surface Pen, and manages her books using Microsoft Office and other full desktop software.
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
We enjoyed #collaborating with everyone today at the Microsoft Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) in Arizona!
The Microsoft Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) is a hands-on introduction to Microsoft’s suite of productivity tools. A true-to-life user experience, CIE takes you through everyday business situations, such as working remotely, analyzing sales data and collaborating with coworkers, and lets you see how Microsoft products make it all easy, convenient and secure.
This workshop will have you experience firsthand how you could utilize productivity tools to solve your biggest business challenges in a real-world setting.
Upcoming CIE Workshops
12/17 Orange County: Microsoft Technology Center3 Park Plaza, Suite 1600, Irvine CA
12/17 San Diego: Managed Solution Headquarters 9655 Granite Ridge Drive, Suite 550 San Diego, CA
The new PowerPoint Designer and Morph features are here! See the evolution of PowerPoint.
Post by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office team.
Exclusively available to Office 365 subscribers, PowerPoint Designer and Morph are premium authoring and editing features. PowerPoint Designer and Morph are available first in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows desktop and Windows Mobile, but expect to see these same features rolling out to other platforms in the coming months.
Businesses that subscribe to this plan for their employees now have the option to turn on this tool and select one of the new predefined rules that, for example, automatically reject or quarantine any email that contains a social security or credit card number. Businesses can choose from these predefined rules and also set up custom detectors (a confidential project keyword, for example). Google says its working on adding more predefined rules, too.
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