December 3rd, 2013 by Elma Jane
De-clutter
A messy workplace is annoying, distracting, and can get out of hand. Keep clutter at bay by regularly tidying up.
Clutter can also exist inside the mind. Having piles of paper on your desk can keep you from finding a pen, having too many thoughts can curb your focus.
Fix this by de-cluttering your mind. Use a mind-mapping tool to organize all the ideas, tasks, or worries in your head.
Eat your Frog Early
When you arrive in the office every morning, do you dive right into your biggest task or do you get the minor stuff out of the way first? Author and personal development coach Brian Tracy says that the former is more effective in terms of productivity.
In his book Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, Tracy cited a famous Mark Twain quote, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”
He used frog eating as a metaphor for task completion, in which the frog “is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.” Finish that task as early as possible, and you can spend the rest of the day knowing that you’ve accomplished a big goal.
Resist the urge to complete smaller jobs first. Doing so will only feed your procrastination and won’t take you any further towards completing your big tasks.
When deciding on what to prioritize in your business, always put your highest-impact goals at the top of your to-do list. What step can you take today that will have the biggest effect on your company? Start with that, and either delegate or hold-off on the low-level tasks. This tough to do.
Follow the 80-20 Rule
The 80-20 rule, developed by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto states that for many situations, about 80 percent of the effects or outcomes come from just 20 percent of the causes.
In business, the 80-20 rule comes into play when 80 percent of a company’s clients are generated from 20 percent of its sales staff, or when 80 percent of returns come from 20 percent of its customers.
Determine how the 80-20 principle applies to your business, then address that 20 percent so you can generate more results, or eliminate problems.
For instance, if you discover that 80 percent of your profits come from 20 percent of your customers, then nurture your relationships with those customers and reward them for their loyalty. Or perhaps you notice that 20 percent of your online marketing efforts are bringing in 80 percent of your site traffic. Stop spending resources on the low-performing strategies, and focus your efforts on the channels that work.
Have a Meeting Policy
If you must hold meetings in your company, keep them brief. Always have an agenda and a clear purpose for the meeting.
You may also want to consider having company-wide policies that tell people when and how to set-up meetings. Some companies for example, always hold meetings on the same day and time each week…e.g., Monday mornings, Thursday afternoons. This schedule enables people to plan their days and weeks more effectively.
Optimize your Relationships with Vendors
You optimize your site for speed and user-friendliness. Why not do the same for your suppliers and service providers?
Check with your vendors to ensure you’re working efficiently. Ask if there’s anything you can do to make their jobs easier, or recommend any improvements that they can implement. Don’t view your relationship as a service provider and client. Instead, treat your vendors as your partners.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, Environmentally Green, Internet Payment Gateway, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale Tagged with: agenda, business, ecommerce, loyalty, marketing, mind-mapping, online, optimize, organize, policies, prioritize, procrastinate, procrastinating, procrastination, spending, strategies, suppliers, task
October 31st, 2013 by Elma Jane
While credit card processors and retailers have made strides to combat credit card fraud, it is still rampant across the U.S. In fact, credit card fraud jumped 17 percent between January, 2011, and September, 2012, according to the most recent data from the FICO Falcon Fraud Manager Consortium.
Debit cards obviously have better safeguard measures in place, since debit card fraud rose less than 1 percent between January, 2011, and September, 2012. Plus, the average fraud loss per compromised account fell by 3 percent.
Card-not-present (CNP) fraud is the biggest challenge by far, accounting for 47 percent of all credit card fraud. CNP fraud – which includes payments via the internet, mail and phone – grew 25 percent over the two-year period. So, where the problems with credit cards lie.
Unfortunately, CNP fraud may get worse before it gets better, in FICO’s Banking Analytics Blog. This problem may even intensify as the US moves away from magnetic stripe and toward EMV [chip] card technology. In other countries adopting chip-based authentication technology, we’ve seen counterfeit fraud decline, but as a counterbalance, fraudsters often ramp up efforts around CNP fraud.
However, there was a glimmer of light in the credit card fraud fiasco. While card fraud attempts rose, the average loss per compromised account dropped 10 percent. Plus, the ratio of fraud to non-fraud spending remained constant. “In other words, the volume of card fraud increased proportionally to the volume of consumer credit card spending.
Even though many retailers have implemented successful fraud prevention programs, Visa provides retailers with the warning signs for CNP fraud, including:
Multiple cards used from a single IP address. Orders made up of “big ticket” items. Orders that include several of the same item. Shipping to an international address. Transactions with similar account numbers.
Posted in Digital Wallet Privacy, EMV EuroPay MasterCard Visa, Mail Order Telephone Order, Payment Card Industry PCI Security Tagged with: account, analytics, authentication, banking, big ticket, card-not-present, chip card, chip-based, cnp, counterfeit, credit-card, debit cards, EMV, fraud, fraudsters, international, internet, magnetic stripe, mail, non-fraud, orders, payments, phone, prevent, processors, retailers, safeguard, spending, transactions, visa
October 24th, 2013 by Elma Jane
Buoyed by an improving economy, business travelers are once again taking to the skies and spending more on corporate travel. The Global Business Travel Association has projected that $273.3 billion in travel dollars will be spent in 2013, and “that’s a whole lot of spending for corporate travel managers and individual business travelers to evaluate and track.”
Recognizing this problem, MasterCard launched Travel Controller on October 21. The new product is designed to give corporate users greater control over their travel expenses by directly addressing data concerns.
“Companies today are more than ever looking for more and better ways to help manage their corporate travel expense, to manage travelers that are outside of policy, and most importantly, reduce the amount of money they spend on travel.
Travel Controller is designed to be a modern solution to the problems posed by traditional lodge cards. Unlike these options, Travel Controller allows corporate users to identify individual travelers, trips and transactions, providing businesses greater insight into this spending than the available offerings that dominate the market.
Travel controller uses latest virtual card technology to generate a unique account number for each individual transaction, each hotel reservation and each ticket that’s purchased. And when its generating that card, it captures that data that’s important to the company for how they manage that.
Whether that’s the details of the transaction or things more specific to the trip or traveler or the way the company manages its budgets, all of this information is provided 100 percent of the time. This removes the headaches associated with central travel while still giving that control element that companies are looking for.
Travel Controller is around the goals of an end user organization, as a company that’s trying to manage their travel expenses more effectively.
There is a defined data set, and built in flexibility for companies to define their own customer-specific fields, that are important so that the data you get back isn’t just thousands of pieces of information, but rather its those things that are most important and its brought to you in a way that makes it easy to take advantage of.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing, Financial Services, Merchant Services Account, Travel Agency Agents, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: account, addressing, amount, association, business, card, controller, corporate, data set, dollars, dominate, element, expenses, generating, global, improving, individual, information, lodge, market, MasterCard, money, policy, reduce, spend, spending, traditional, transactions, travel, travelers, trips, unique, virtual
