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The recent rise of malware and ransomware attacks has brought with it increased fear and paranoia associated with the safety of customer data. How can you guarantee that your company will not fall prey to a malware outbreak that even the largest of firms in Australia couldn’t get rid of? The answer lies in third party security solutions – by adopting state-of-the art security software and exercising some common sense when it comes to downloading files from the internet. Related: Single Customer Conversation View What are the Components of Customers Data that Have to be Secured?

We typically perceive cybercriminals as this elusive group of genius hackers operating in an underground tunnel with some of the best safety features on their fingertips to bail out in case things go haywire. The truth however is that most of these cybercriminals merely have a surface level knowledge of coding. The malwares they design with their poor programming knowledge can best be described as the work not of a ‘genius’ hacker, but of a script kiddie. They don’t really design potent viruses. Instead, they pick up existing scripts and codes and try to spread as much havoc as they possibly can.

An example would be the recent Petya malware outbreak. It primarily comprised of leaked NSA tools merged into a tiny little executable file which was emailed to unwitting victims. The problem again with these executable files is that they wouldn’t really spread and affect networks unless someone clicked on them after somehow managing to avoid all the red flags which their browser, Windows operating system AND their antivirus software would immediately raise. “You sure you want to click on this potentially dangerous file from an untrustworthy source?” A malware’s main headache is to make its way into your system – the rest is child’s play. Petya and WannaCry ransomware attacks primarily rely on what we call phishing attacks – cashing in on the user’s own lack of awareness. This does not mean, however, that potent cyber attacks don’t usually happen. In 2011 Sony’s PlayStation Network was hacked, which leaked out the data and credentials of more than 77 million user accounts. If Sony, a massive corporate giant is not immune to cyber threats, what then of small and medium sized firms that really don’t have strong in-house cyber security options?

Fortunately there are powerful third party vendors offering reliable cyber security solutions for your company ensuring that you don’t fall prey to DDOS (denial of service) attacks, cross-site scripting and SQL injection. Some of these are listed below;

1. IBM security

IBM z14 mainframe manages to bring encryption across data networks, devices and applications. Other encryption solutions are extremely taxing on the resources of a system and drastically reduce performance but not IBM z14. A wide scale use of encryption is the perfect solution to protect your customer data, something which IBM z14 easily achieves without hampering your mainframe’s performance. It can run 12 billion encrypted transactions per day – ensuring that all your application and cloud service data is protected around the clock.

2. Mimecast

Your company thrives on communicating with your customer over emails, and when you’re handling thousands of emails in bulk, things can quickly take a turn for the worse – you won’t really know how many of your incoming emails are phishing and malware attacks. Mimecast brings in the most comprehensive email filtering solution to your business. It works both on your own network infrastructure and the cloud.

3. Cisco

Cisco is the top of security vendors for businesses of all sizes, whether it is fortune 500 companies or small to mid-sized businesses on a tighter budget. They have Talos which detects incoming threats in real time by using the largest threat intelligence network available, monitoring both web traffic and emails. Some of its biggest achievements were decrypting the TeslaCrypt ransomware attack, which was raking in $60 million annually from files which it had encrypted.

4. ProofPoint

ProofPoint specializes in protecting against URL and social media account threats. Their services ensure that you don’t have to waste time on management and administrative tasks such as end-user email filtering. You don’t have to download any programs to your networks since everything is powered over the cloud. It also ensures that your critical emails manage to get through all bottlenecks, these include partial network failures.

5. Nexusguard

Business environments of today’s world are not only extremely competitive, but they are also complex at the same time. With that being said, for a business to come out on top and have an edge over their competitors, the importance of well-devised sales strategies cannot be emphasised enough. Much like properly thought out marketing strategies, the sales strategy which is used by a business needs to be comprehensive and elaborate enough to ensure that the revenue and profit targets of the business are met with great ease. 

As simple as this sounds, the actual process of developing a sales strategy from scratch is much more complicated than one might imagine. For this reason, it is imperative to thoroughly review your current sales strategy and find any activities or processes which you are certain are negatively affecting the sales and revenue of your business. 

Related: Epic and Proven Sales Strategies After contemplation and thorough review comes the time to study your business model all over again. The corporate world today is full of changes and uncertainties which is why agility is extremely important for every business and organisation. These changes, however, often require the business model of companies to be revised. More often than not, when revising business models, companies tend to ignore their sales strategies which is why even when they are apparently on the right track, they fail to reach their targets and make the profit or revenue which was intended. While there are several different types of strategies which one can implement from strategies to reduce costs to strategies to make your processes more efficient, the importance of strategies which can help boost online sales surpasses them all. If you, too, would like to see an increase in your online sales and see unprecedented increase in both your revenue and your profit, we have the perfect solution for you: Plan Resourcefully Most people already know that resourceful planning is the first and foremost step involved in increasing sales and generating revenue. The problem, however, lies in the fact that most of these people do not understand how to plan resourcefully or plan ahead. The best way to approach this step of devising your sales strategies is to list down your intended goals. Whether you only wish to double your sales through your online sales strategy or if you have some additional goals, it is important to write down everything. Once that is done, you will be able to focus on developing a viable and successful strategy easily. One important thing to note, however, is that it is essential for you to be specific when you are setting your goals. Additionally, it is always best to have a target goal, and an additional goal which you might be able to reach with a little more effort and spending. This way, you will most likely aim for sales higher than your main goal, ultimately making your strategy effective. With all of your goals set and down in ink, it will be possible for you to allocate the proper budgets and resources to your sales strategy and not be extravagant or frivolous in your spending or budgeting. Feature Unique and Unparalleled Content Being the driving factor for sales and keeping your customers coming back for more, the content which is available on your website plays a major role in your online sales. Regardless of whether you’re using a direct or indirect sales campaign, the content on your website or online platform has to be interesting and must have a degree of urgency to it. With so much content available, how can I make the content on my website stand out from the rest?

The answer to this extremely common question lies in creativity. In addition to trying your hand on different avenues of content including images and videos, it is important to play around with the formatting and increase readability of your content to ensure that it serves its purpose and helps you reach your goal of increasing sales and boosting profits. Before any of this, however, it is extremely important for you to know your target audience. The importance of understand the target audience and studying market trends cannot be undermined when you are trying to develop a strategy. It is crucial to take into account anything and everything which is controversial and avoid using that in your content to prevent backlash and other negative repercussions. Additionally, study the culture and other factors which influence sales in your industry and make the best possible use of the data and analytics to increase your online presence and visibility using social media and the likes. In addition to the content of the website, it is extremely important to fix any and all technical bugs and problems with your online platform or website. If the page loads too slowly or if the website design is not appealing, the chances of you making any sales through your website automatically decrease.

Accessibility can also boost your click through rate by making easy to use your products anywhere. This means making the SaaS platform mobile friendly to ensure that no feature gets deactivated or unused by the difference in the user platform. With the number of smartphones and tablet users increasing every year, it is high time to make use of this aspect already.

An SaaS platform, also known as a Software as a Service platform, usually functions by distribution through a third party. Developed for a wide range of different services, a SaaS platform can also make an impact on the total CTR a.k.a the Click Through Rate of a business as well. In fact, some people have claimed to experience double or even triple the usual amount they would have gotten otherwise. 

If you’re wondering how you can do the same, take a look at the following factors that you can make use off:

Offer a Free Trial

While offering freebies usually garners a lot of interest, don’t sell yourself short here. If you’re looking to make money off your products any time soon, offer a free trial period for them. Many customers are more than happy to sign up and free trials have been proven to improve the click through rate drastically. Moreover, it also improves the chances that the other person is going to sign up to get complete access to your products and services.

Highlight Your Value Proposition

Your value proposition is going to the main thing which your customers are going to be interested in. Make sure that this is highlighted and visible. Moreover, do your best to ensure that it is described succinctly. Brevity is the sole of wit here and you need to make sure that your value proposition reflects. Not only does it improve the click through rate, it also ensures that your customers don’t have to go through a body of text to understand what your product does. Be simple, be clear and most importantly; be concise.

Making Use of Social Proof

Social proof has started to grasp attention due to the hive minded sociological impact it makes. One bee samples a flower and tells others where the sweet nectar is for them to go and harvest when they want to. Yet, this is rather delicate to manipulate since if enough people have a negative experience, it can make a huge impact on others willingness to try the product. Similarly, if a number of people will have a positive experience, they will be more than ready to recommend the product to others around them. Word of mouth makes a bigger dent than you would have thought.

List Your Clients

Worked with any big names lately? Even if you haven’t, just list down all your clients that you feel are noteworthy for your SaaS platform. This works like a seal of approval, showcasing to your customers that you know what you’re doing. Moreover, it makes the click through rate increase very easily since many people often trust other businesses. If they’re making use of a certain SaaS platform, then others will be more than interested to join in too.

List Your Users

Sometimes, the number of users you’ve got is worth noticing. This is common to see in Facebook, Twitter and even other sites such as Slack, HootSuite and more. Their number of users usually ranges from 10 million or less and it is no less of an achievement. With so many satisfied users, your click through rate will also increase as people can see that your products and services deliver on what they promise to do.

Smart Case Studies

Case studies are intriguing and they also shed more light regarding the difference made with the help of your services and products. This can be seen in a number of different SaaS websites and even products such as Nike, Adidas and Reebok. Their products are designed for athletes and they do their best to not just show those shoes; they also make an effort to educate the average buyer regarding the benefits that their products bring to others. Keep in mind that this isn’t necessary if your product is not one that can be used to make a case study.

Easy to Use Format

SaaS platforms don’t have to be complicated. By opting for an easy to use platform, you will instantly improve your click through rate as more people opt to use your products. For example: Microsoft Word and Google Docs are pretty much the same but Google has the lead here because Docs is easier to use for collaboration purposes. Whether it is an Excel sheet or a Word document, as many as four to five users can easily work on one document with ease.

Accessible on all Platforms

To truly transform an organisation digitally means that it must adapt to the digital tools, processes or services, that would genuinely transform the whole organisational structure permanently and not just for the current practices. While many organisations misunderstand digital transformation as the transformation only connected to the technological aspects of the business, the key to digital transformation is basically driving the change by re-envisioning the way a business operates, also considering the marketing and profit aspect of the business. As per Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, said;

“In today’s era of volatility, there is no other way but to re-invent. The only sustainable advantage you can have over others is agility and that’s about it. Also because nothing else is sustainable, everything else you create, somebody else will replicate” So why are many organisations still operating with old practices and without transforming their structure digitally? There are many organisations that are still in the process of developing their organisational structure digitally, by adapting more technological advancement, and acquiring the relevant skills. And whenever any organisation steps up to transform itself digitally or to improve their marketing and profit strategies, it is considered as an exciting frontier for business development. However, there are some organisations which have already acquired all the essential tools to digitise their structure, but they are still facing business loss. This is because their management has miserably failed in the proper implementation of the transformation within an organisation.

Related: Digital Transformation – Where to Start Digital Transformation Best Practices Whereas the proper implementation is achievable by designing some more effective strategies, the real problem lies with the organisations that still lack digital transformation and are frequently suffering from marketing and profit loss. If you are wondering how do these organisations suffer from marketing and profit loss due to lack of digital transformation, let us discuss some of the many consequences of not transforming a business digitally, in the competitive market industries of Australia today. Poor Customer Relationship The proliferation of many digital devices and channels give customers greater access to latest information, and various ways to collaborate and communicate. The physical reality has now drastically transformed into a digital one through digital businesses, communities, and assets that are fundamentally shifting the way customers now interact with each other and with businesses. Think of a situation in which your customer wishes to compare the prices of your offered services, but is unable to do so without making a call to your helpdesk. Sounds irritating? Certainly, it is! These days, consumers have real time access to mobile data and the internet and all the information is readily available to them with just a tap on their phones. It’s an era of two way instant communication and if your business is not in easy reach by the customers, then you are most likely to lose your existence in the shortest possible time. How can we prevent that? A business can take the largest portion of the market share by making itself accessible to its consumer through multi-channel platforms. With that, you can not only build a good reputation for your business and shift the perspective of your consumers, but you may also avoid losing a good marketing and profit making opportunity. Losing Engagement with the Employees and Suppliers While organisations tend to fully understand the need to attain cross-channel and collaborative engagement with their consumers, they are sometimes less conscious and considerate of the same need that applies equally to their suppliers as well as employees. The powerful platform of social media is dramatically breaking down the various barriers between such groups and instead of having direct interaction with the customer, employees, and customers, organisations are now digitally interacting with people all over the world. This global interaction has allowed many organisations to reinvent their businesses and to meet potential prospects, suppliers and resources from all over the world. Nevertheless, such B2C and B2B interactions are scaling the businesses’ marketing and profit aspects in the direction that was never anticipated before. Losing Competition and Facing More Business Challenges Organisations that have not considered digital transformation are now striving for their survival in the highly competitive market industry in Australia, irrespective of their product/service specifications. The growing trend of the consumers is to invest their acquisitions with a specific set of brands. This trending perspective of consumers is a result of two forces that combine together. Firstly consumer wants more choices and with minimal interactions and secondly organisations tend to maintain interactions through multi channel platforms, in order to, develop and retain a better share of wallet by means of deeper consumer relationships.

We've been in the go to market space for over 15 years & have seen countless enterprise projects who fail to adequately engage & interact with their customers online. To help your business online, here are some tips that will help you master customer conversation & build a loyal following to your brand. 

It is no surprise that making sales to the existing or current customers is the most revenue generating aspect of a business. Thereby, businesses are paying more attention and investing more in developing additional resources and putting more sale efforts into their existing customers.

Although building a sales team to increase the sale revenue of a business seems logical, however, many modern organisations in Australia are now stepping up and utilising their customer channels support or customer support teams to find and conquer the hidden opportunities of sales. They are now building the customer channels support teams that work mutually with the sales team to improve the sales revenue for the business.

So how can we manage a customer support team to find hidden sale opportunities?

While this may sound a bit off track for a customer channels support team, it is quite easily achievable just by a little bit consideration and by attention to the existing customer base and their growing expectations and needs from your company.

Related: 7 Customer Service Skills Your Customer Support Team Needs to Have How to Do Customer Service The Right Way

While the traditional teams of customer service working in your organisation may be striving and getting trained to sound like a sympathetic human, have a pleasant voice and be knowledgeable about the services offered, they must also take a step ahead and built rapport with the prospect so that they can be converted into successful clients.

However, if you are still wondering about the steps that can build your customer channel support team into a revenue generating team, then let’s discuss some of these simple practices below.

Cross-sell and Upsell

A customer channel support team is about facilitating the queries and concerns of the customers, providing them knowledge about the offered services and helping them in using the services through various channels offered by the organisation. Such an interaction on its own is never a sales opportunity.

For instance, you cannot expect to pitch a new product or offered service to a customer who is already irate over the customer services they are currently receiving. Your first job is to satisfy the customer by providing support that is required to solve their issue. If your customer support team is good in handling aggressive, irate or dissatisfied customers, then there lies a big opportunity for sales as well.

Once a customer is happy with the services or gets a resolution from the customer support, this builds trust with the customer and they are more likely to listen to you further. As you have already provided the solution, there is no harm in extending the support and offering them some additional discounted services to enhance their customer experience even more. Make sure the offered services are fulfilling their needs or in accordance with their services already being taken by the customer.

Treating the customer with respect is the key

The foremost aspect of a customer channel support team is to treat the customer respectfully no matter what the situation is or how angry your customer is.  Nothing can be more damaging to a customer channel support team than treating the customer as per the mood. A good customer service is about providing a standard level of support at all times and that is where the hidden opportunity of sales lies.  

A smart customer support representative, can easily shift the direction of their interaction with the unpleased customer by giving them value. And such opportunities are typically considered as the best chances to sell additional services to the customers as you show empathy towards them, providing them the best possible solution to improve the customer experience, which is likely to increase the sale revenue of the business as well.

Modify the solutions as per customer needs

A good customer channel support team knows how to handle the varying needs of customers and how to modify their offered services and products to meet the needs of customers wisely. For this, your customer channel support team must be well knowledgeable with the company’s offered services and must be trained enough to place and pitch the services/products smartly to match the growing needs of the customer.

For this, the customer support team will first have to gauge the customer needs by asking them some questions in relevance to interaction and customer concern. For instance, if a customer is showing concern over receiving only 2% discount rate for grocery shopping, you can ask them the mode of conveyance used for going shopping and if the customer responds positively, you may offer them the feature or service that is likely to save them, for example 5%, on their fuel.

The incident of the data breach of Home Depot – Australia’s well-known company to get home improvement tools for the ‘DIY’ project, is just one of the many reported incidences of cyber attacks worldwide.

When a reputable company is attacked by hackers or cyber criminals, the company not only loses a handsome sum of money, as Home Depot lost $179 million, but also ends up paying money to the entities and financial institutions that indirectly get affected with such cyber attacks, which are, the real victims of a weak cyber security system.

Related: Five Companies Who Have Lost thousands of Customer Payments

The Repercussions of a Cyber Attack

Whenever you read about a multimillion-dollar theft in a bank, or a million passwords leaked on the web or a scam milking billions from vulnerable users - what you are reading is a reflection of a weak cyber security system. In short, a failed attempt of protecting processes, systems or data that eventually enabled exploitation.

Sometimes, the repercussions of this failed attempt of managing a strong cyber security network can be quite an embarrassment for companies or even individuals. However, at other times, this failure may lead to significant operational and financial harm. To think the worst, even a loss of life can occur.

So what really stimulates these cyber attacks and what do these attackers aim to achieve with that?

Cyber attacks come in a variety of methods, ranging from blackmail, attacks on websites, theft, manipulation, extortion or even destruction. The tools that are usually used to carry out the intermittent attacks vary and include ransom ware, malware, social engineering, spyware and even alterations to devices, for instance, ATM skimmers.

If an organisation or financial institution such as a bank does not support a strong cyber security system or there is no check over its functionality to adapt the changing mechanism of cyber attacks, this becomes a major concern with regards to customer data protection.

Cyber Attacks Affecting Customer Payments:

Criminals have successfully discovered the ways to exploit market and financial systems that are associated with the internet such as ACH – Automated Clearing House. Although cybercriminals are not always after money but a majority of these criminal attempts are for financial gains, affecting the customer payments eventually.

By attacking the system user instead of the system itself, the cyber attackers earn direct excess to a various credit card or bank accounts including other financial systems that easily allow them to make unauthorised transactions.

Online Payment Systems Appeal to Attackers:

The system of making online payments is highly appealing for cyber attackers. Having a designed system to accept customer payments is a critically important aspect of online businesses and also the last step of a customer’s purchase journey.

The Technique Used:

To affect customer payment, one of the reported incidents used a technique in which hackers recruited many volunteers for help and all of them installed special software for an attack on their systems that collectively become a large botnet.

The installed software was designed to carry out a large Distributed Denial of Service–DDoS—attack on a company’s network. Using a chat platform, instructions were sent to the computers in botnet to initiate the attack on the network of the company. Due to this large scale attack and involvement of many people, the customer payment system was quickly interrupted and remained inaccessible for almost 10 hours.

In line with the above example, whenever an online payment system is attacked by cyber criminals, it creates a huge financial impact on many businesses. It halts the business operations for an unknown period of time, which is why companies are now outsourcing their online payment system to ensure strong cyber security.

Credit Card information: an attraction to Cyber Criminals

While many businesses offer the option of saving credit card information to make the shopping experience more convenient, it gives an excellent platform to cyber attackers to play around with the information. Cyber attackers usually attack payment processing vendors because it has a greater chance for a big score.

In the brick and mortar world, there are a variety of techniques to charge a credit card at POS terminals or ATMs. In addition, there are some specifically designed attack vectors to target vendors of online payment processing directly.

And the same attack on payment system was observed in the case of Home Depot a few years back;

The payment system of Home Depot was badly attacked by hackers which resulted in linking the credit card information of customers along with their purchase details, being sold online. This simple attack created a huge financial loss for Home Depot and affected the customers who made the payments in the last six months. This resulted in the company being sued despite compensating almost 50 million affected customers with a one-year free credit monitoring services.

Internet marketing may be the hottest thing around right now, but not everyone is able to find success in the industry. There are many stories of businesses failing to achieve results because they are unable to capitalize on the conversion rate of their website.

When businesses are unable to convert customers, they fail to achieve their target and end up not making any profits.

No business can sustain losses consistently. The rule of the game in the digital age is to optimise your conversion rate if you want to succeed in the industry. The digital world isn’t fair, and you will witness businesses coming out with unfair tactics to try and take every advantage they can find in the game.

The problem is serious for new companies because they are competing with already established businesses which makes attracting customers and conversions difficult. But why are conversions so difficult earlier on in the game? It is because everyone is looking to do the same thing, convert visitors.

Related: Ways to Optimise Conversion Rate

If you don’t then you’re not going to compete with anyone. Internet marketing is all about conversions, and with competition so stiff, you must raise your game and find out ways to improve your conversion rate. Don’t be afraid to experiment or change things when you don’t see results because you need to be ahead of the game, instead of playing catch up.

Optimising conversion rates isn’t that difficult according to some experts, who have cracked the code to achieving astonishing conversion rates. So, if you are willing to change things up and want to achieve higher conversion rates easily, all you must do is follow these 10 steps to achieve results.

1. Offer FREE Stuff

There is nothing that gets attention faster for people than the word FREE. It is not a secret that people love free stuff and will always look for deals, promotions, and offers that give them free stuff, whether in the real world or the virtual one. You can improve your conversion rates easily by offering free stuff to your customers, especially in the beginning because you need those conversions to survive.

2. Showcase Your Awards

If your product or business has won awards, you need to take advantage of it by showcasing it to everyone. Awards help give credibility to a business, which helps your business achieve greater conversion rates online. It helps build trust with customers which leads to conversions.

3. Give them Value

You need to advertise how your product and services are going to add value into the lives of people. This can be done in multiple ways, through special promotions and offers, where you’re offering customers a good deal. If they feel that they are gaining something of value, customers will do more business.

4. Testimonials

The next step is capitalising on the trust you have built with customers, with the steps above, and you can do that by reaffirming them through testimonials. Once customers see that your product has helped so many people, they will be more likely to purchase it and try it for themselves.

5. Make Up A Good Headline

This means advertising your business, like you would if you were selling newspapers on the street. You need to come out with a tagline or headline that gets people rushing to check out your website, and buying your products or services. You can do this through content marketing, which should help you create hype about your brand.

6. Now Use the Power of Videos

To really ensure that your conversion rates don’t dwindle, you need to utilise the power of videos. Businesses have quickly understood the value of visual marketing. People like to purchase things they can see before purchasing online. However, make sure that you make the videos short because no one has time to watch a 20-minute video.

7. Don’t Put Up Any Stock Photos

If you don’t want your conversion rates to drop off a clip, don’t put up any stock pictures no matter what. People can easily identify genuine pictures from stock images, and no one wants to work with a business that relies on stock photos. Use real pictures if you can to build trust with businesses.

8. Create Urgency

You must create urgency if you want to see results with your conversion rates, and you can do that by creating an image in the mind of customers that they need your product fast, and will never get another chance to get such a good deal on this product.

9. Simplify Things

If you make the entire process of conversion too complicated, you will not see high numbers. Customers don’t have time to answer a hundred questions and want to be taken to the checkout ASAP. This means the faster you get them to checkout, the greater your conversion numbers will be.

10. Don’t Forget the CTA Button

Tax Implications - The growth of eCommerce in AustraliaSales tax issues for eCommerce businessesSome tax implications specific to the eCommerce industry

No matter what type of business you own, a sales tax is applied to it in some way or another. Whether your sales tax implications are looked after by your accountants or whether you do it yourself, you need to hold good understanding of the obligations, the risks attached, and the ways to improve the effectiveness of business in terms of tax.

For a business, selling to its international customers may be easier than making domestic sales. This is because these businesses often don’t need to charge tax when they sell the services to international customers.

In Australia, sale tax regulations have been shaken up by the eCommerce industry. But they are still a bit confusing due to various location issues. When it comes to selling your product or service through eCommerce channels though, businesses are free from geographical limitations and their customer base is built of people visiting their online store from all over the world. The customers who make purchases online are usually from different states, and even countries.

Related: eCommerce Conversational Customer Support Software CTR Benchmarks for the e-Commerce Industry

Considering the current economic situation and the many opportunities that are created by eCommerce growth, Australian eCommerce sales are likely to exceed $45 billion, with worldwide sales being over $1 Trillion. Year over year, the Australian eCommerce is growing at the fastest rate i.e. at an excess of almost 20% in addition to the mobile eCommerce industry, which is growing by 40% annually.

While there is still a lot of room for the growth of eCommerce in Australia, let us have a look at some important aspects of sales tax implications for the eCommerce industry.

Interestingly, the sales tax implications in Australia vary significantly with the presented budget each year. While these sale tax implications are different as per the legal structure of a business, in Australia, in terms of GST, the owner of eCommerce must think, if the business is subject to GST. This is because there are a few exceptions to it.

If your eCommerce business is required to fulfil GST requirements, you will have to get yourself registered for it. Similarly, if your business is not registered to pay GST, you might not get credit over the claimed GST for the expenditures you incur.

There are a couple of things about sales tax that are worth pointing out when we speak of sales tax implications in Australia. The foremost analysis that any online business owner must make is to identify if the business is an established venture or just another hobby.

To identify this, there is an effortless list of questions provided by ATO. Once you answer these questions, you will be in a better position to identify the nature of your business and how far you will be taking it, in the near future.

Along with that, you should also ensure that the online records of your business are capable of collecting GST, and some other financial data, so that you may then include it into the tax returns.

Another unusual aspect that people must always be aware of is that if their website is actually housed in a data centre that is offshore, then they may become subject to tax implications. Businesses unwittingly become tax subjected in a foreign country, especially when the sales are primarily affected by the website.

Therefore, you must understand from where the website, in particular, is being hosted and where the contracts are being formed. This is to ensure that you do not expose yourself to the risk. The best approach, however, is to talk to your legal advisors about such situations, and especially when it’s time to set up the website, or subsequently, if it’s already there.

As per current tax implications:

Coming into effect on July 1st, overseas businesses that have annual turnover of around $75,000 or even more, are required to register themselves with the ATO in order to collect GST on all the goods being sold. These also include the purchases under the low value (current) threshold of $1,000.

Self-assessment as per Australia’s Taxation System

The taxation system in Australia is based on a well-designed self-assessment model. In this system, the taxpayer is considered responsible to lodge their tax returns on their own. Companies and individuals are equally required to file an Income Tax Return on an annual basis, whereas other entities may have some more requirements in terms of GST.

Audit of Tax Returns

Not every filed tax return is actually audited or reviewed by the ATO. Instead, the assessment of every taxpayer is considered to be true. But at times, the ATO does audit the companies’ and individuals’ tax returns in order to ensure that the self-assessment of the tax payer is consistent with the actual tax affairs.

In the bottom line, cyber attackers will remain motivated to invade your internal systems. The key is to make stronger source codes, in addition to a proven and effective security system, that will not only lock down the system but will also track the suspicious activities.

When it comes to cybercrime, several Australian organizations, including legal firms, courier companies, and even Cadbury have faced such vicious cyber attacks. While the majority of times these cyber attacks are known to us almost immediately, there has been some reported cyber crimes which were identified when the businesses have already lost a huge amount of customer data.

Just like Shadow Brokers, a mysterious group of hackers that surfaced in August – 2016,  the identity of some of these attackers remains unidentified for a long time, and businesses on the other hand, remain prone to these attacks, growing in their impact as the time passes by.

Cyber crimes are carried out with many purposes, and are not just limited to businesses or entire organizations or to capture customer data, but they can also be carried out to attack an individual yet influential figure. Speaking of this, hacking of the personal accounts of social media savvy Mark Zuckerberg was the biggest cybersecurity failure in the year 2016.

Related: What are the Components of Customers Data that Have to be Secured?

Which is why, everybody can be vulnerable to cyber attack and at any time – losing the potential customer data. To your surprise, there have been many big names that have face the ordeal of cyber attacks in the recent past; including one of the biggest search engines used worldwide – YAHOO!

YAHOO faced an unexpected event!

In the year of frequent mega-breaches, Yahoo kept the distinction, by potentially exposing the largest amount to customer data at risk. The cyber attackers use a technique called ‘credential stuffing’, which typically uses the password and username of one account, to get access to or hack the other account.

Last September, facing the huge cyber attack, Yahoo confirmed that almost 500 million users were compromised due to that cyber attack. The attack included email addresses, names, encrypted passwords and even phone numbers – everything that could be counted as the important and confidential part of customer data.  

The company stated that the data was received from a 2014 intrusion into their systems by the ‘state sponsored actors’. The announcement was made in the middle of the acquisition of Verizon Communications, for 4.8 billion dollars, possibly affecting the deal as well.

JP Morgan had criminals in their systems for almost a month!

JP Morgan – the largest bank of USA – discovered a severe security breach in 2014, stating that the attackers had already intruded their systems a month ago. During the time period of a month, millions of businesses as well as individuals accounts were illegally accessed. Whereas the bank already maintains a cybersecurity system, the attack was reported as the biggest of all attacks on banks, in the history.

As per the New York Times report, the vicious attack could have been avoided by simply installing a simple security fix, at the right time, to an overlooked server. Even though the bank had already compromised many of its users or customer data, it started spending millions of dollars for maintaining an advanced and affected cybersecurity system later on.  

Sony Pictures lost it in an instant!

Back in 2014, Sony Pictures faced an event that created a lasting impact on the worldwide movie industry. This event not only shattered the business relationships but even sparked a movement, fighting for the gender pay equality in entire Hollywood.

All of this happened when a hack locked out the voicemails and emails of Sone employees for days. While Sony expected the loss up to email or voicemails, the leaked information also included the personal information of many crew members, salaries of hundreds of many employees, information of high profile actors, along with hundreds of confidential emails. Moreover, all the movies that were awaiting release were made available by the hackers, for download.

Tumblr compromised their ‘salted and hashed passwords’!

Tumblr revealed a cyber attack in the year 2016, but to surprise you, the attack was actually carried out in the year 2013. After three years of giving full access to its users’ credentials to cyber attackers, Tumblr identified the access of the third party, to obtain access to almost 65 million Tumblr accounts, as a result of a data breach.  

The personal information obtained from these 65 million accounts was actually offered for sale by the hackers. This information includes the encrypted passwords and email addresses. Since the breach came to light in 2016, the number of compromised user accounts/customer data made it, as one of the biggest reported, security breaches at that time, in the entire world, ever.

My Space credentials were sold in an online hacker forum!

To establish a profitable, successful, and sustainable online business, you need to invest resources and time in your customers. This is especially true, if you want them to enter your buying cycle and remain a part of it. You may achieve this through a full-fledged marketing campaign or by utilising CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) techniques. But in the end, it boils down to one important aspect: customer experience.

Image source: Salesforce In other words, what kind of experience you’re providing during interactions at different touch points, ultimately determines whether they want to associate with your business or not.

Related: Ways to Create a Customer Experience Strategy with Woveon

Over the past few years, businesses have revamped their strategies and built them around the needs and wants of their customers to improve user experience and retention. This has given customers the power of discretion to walk away from a business that delivers poor service without hesitation. In fact, according to recent research, more than 90 percent of customers in New Zealand and Australia have done so in the past year.

So if you are wondering how you can quickly and easily optimise customer experience of your online business, here are 9 things you can do:

1. Give Several Support Options

What customers want from a company? High-quality products or services and high responsiveness, among other things. Customers want to have their queries addressed promptly and quickly. You can offer support through multiple channels, such as voice, chat, email, and social media, and let them choose the option they prefer.

2. Help Customers through Engaging Content

Another great way to enhance customer experience while improving efficiency is to provide informative content that enables customers to help themselves. You can post videos and include a comprehensive FAQ page addressing common issues. Videos are great for showcasing products or service features, how-tos, and explaining complex topics.

Bonus Tip: Try to make the content easy-to-understand and interesting for an enjoyable experience.

3. Omni-Channel Integration Strategy

Achieving a high rank on search engines and attracting organic traffic are just a few of the many benefits of regularly posting fresh content on different channels. A study on Omni-Channel Experience Strategy Insights showed that 74 percent of the businesses surveyed believe that having an integrated omni-channel strategy is highly important for improved customer experience.

However, it also indicated that the existing interaction touchpoints should be optimised before businesses can move on with a channel integration strategy. Customers find it convenient when organisations have a centralised knowledge-base in place, while businesses benefit from identifying gaps with the help of customer analytics and feedback.

4. Page Loading Speed Matters … A Lot

A responsive, fast-loading website is a critical part of ensuring a positive customer experience. Your visitors’ experience with your business begins from the moment your website loads on their screen. Research has shown that over 73 percent users have visited a slow-loading website, while 51 percent said that they have encountered a website that froze, crashed, or issued an error upon loading. Believe it or not; a single second of delay in page loading can reduce the chances of conversions by 7 percent.

5. Site Performance – The Deal Breaker

Faster websites with easy navigation create a much better user experience, and are ranked higher in search engine rankings as well. To ensure optimal site performance, you should review your website and see whether there are any broken links or unnecessary elements that take longer to load. Assess the performance of your web hosting and consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN), as both can dramatically speed up your website for both local and global customers.

6. Highlight and Appreciate Customers

There is no better feeling for a customer than to be appreciated or acknowledged publicly by a business for being an important part of their client base. Giving your customers a moment under the spotlight can allow you to win their loyalty for a lifetime.

You can post about your valued customers on your social media page, website, blog, or any other channel, and let others know why they are special to you. This creates a sense of community and demonstrates a customer-focused attitude, driving existing customers to strive for the same acknowledgement, while attracting new users at the same time.

7. Take Customer Feedback Seriously

What is the best possible way of understanding a customer’s needs? To ask them directly what they expect from your business. If you provide your customers with a simple and easy mechanism for giving feedback across all touchpoints, it will enable you to monitor customer expectations and craft solutions to address key issues as they come up.

8. Your Staff’s Feedback is Valuable

Your customer support agents are on the front line dealing with agitated and frustrated customers. They have a better idea of what your customers’ needs, wants, and pain points are. You should seek regular feedback from your staff to get insights into which areas need improvement, and ask for their input on how you can enhance customer experience.

9. Customers Don’t Like Repeating Themselves

Have you ever wondered why some digital implementation projects fail? It could be from various problems, which cause failure in any project. A study by IBM found that around 40% of IT projects that are tight on budget, goal, and schedule tend to fail. This is brought on by the business because they fail to learn from previous mistakes and tend to have the same business operations in place.

It is not always easy to admit your mistakes, but when it comes to digital implementation projects there can be no margin for error.

That is the reason why we are going to be covering 5 of the biggest reasons why digital implementation projects have failed, and the lesson that came out from it.

Mistakes can be made on any project and by anyone, so never be complacent enough to assume that you will never make mistakes when handling digital implementation projects. No matter what the cause of the failure, you can always take some lessons from it so that you don’t repeat your mistakes.

Related: Digital Transformation Best Practices Management Guide to Digital Transformation

The Reasons Why Projects Fail

The age-old question of why digital implementation projects fail is down to various factors. You may think that you may know some of them, but let’s uncover them in detail so that you know the real reason why projects fail. 

Here are five reasons why digital implementation projects fail, and the important lessons you can learn from them: 

1. Failing to use a process

This is one of the most common reasons why projects tend to fail, and it is mostly because you believe that you don’t need to use a process because it doesn’t bring enough value. Skipping any process when you’re working on a digital implementation project can cause you a lot of problems. This happens on most projects because management tries to save time by cutting corners and therefore eliminating processes they think aren’t crucial. It is the simple things that matter when it comes to digital implementation projects because every process is important.

The Lesson: Always trust the process

It may seem unnecessary but to ensure success for your digital implementation project, you need to keep faith in the process. Even if that means taking more time, you should go through everything, from discovery, to estimation, and to QA processes. You need to protect the process and set a good example for everyone by making sure that they follow your lead.

2. Panicking when things don’t go to plan

It can be difficult to focus on the project when things don’t go to plan, but you shouldn’t panic, because it will only make things worse. There is nothing worse than losing control of the project, but you should remain calm when it seems easier to panic. If you lose control of the project, you will never regain it, and the entire project will fail as a result.

The Lesson: Keep going

When things aren’t going to plan, you should remain calm, and analyse the project. Investigate the problem instead of losing control, which will jeopardise the project.

3. Become Friendly with your clients

Being nice to your team and clients may is alright, but you shouldn’t go out of your way to become too friendly with them. This isn’t to say that if your clients or team become your friends there will be a lack of professionalism, but it can lead to you taking your eye off the prize. There have been instances where mistakes were let go because you were too friendly, or processes were ignored because you were too friendly with your team.

4. The Lesson: Stay professional

You need to be professional for the sake of the project, and if you can do that while being friendly then all the better. However, never compromise the project for the sake of your friendship with clients.

5. Not making tough decisions

When it comes to digital implementation projects you need to be tough so that you can properly dissect the project and ensure its success. At such times, you need to place the blame firmly at the feet of individuals that are hampering the project. You must make choices that seem difficult but are necessary for the sake of the project, because it will lead to your project going the distance.The 

6. Lesson: Stay on top of things

You need to keep your eye on the ball always, which means not becoming soft with certain individuals, because if you let your standards drop the project will fail.

7. Lack of communication

This is one of the most common reasons why projects tend to fail because lack of communication is a serious problem. You need to be an effective communicator if you want to ensure that your digital implementation project succeeds.

The Lesson: Always communicate

The benefits of Artificial Intelligence and/or Machine Learning technology have become integral to today’s businesses. Just decades ago, they were just mere speculation but now they have become a key aspect for carrying out so many operations that a modern business, especially a large one that has a huge customer base, can’t function well without it. But first let’s clear out the confusion as many people interchange Artificial Intelligence with Machine Learning even though they are different technologies on their own.

Artificial Intelligence is making machines mimic human thought process (mainly calculation and decision making) while ML is a sub category of AI that relies more on the machine, learning on its own, without any human intervention. But in a broader sense, ML is part of AI with a slight difference. There is a lot more on the development side when it comes to sensing human emotions and cognition. There have also been some test-run technologies being incorporated in the AI systems of today that business are using for gathering data and so far, they have been successful.

A simple example would be Apple’s Siri and Google’s “Ok Google” voice command technology. If Siri doesn’t understand what you are saying, it will try clarifying it again or if you ask something silly from it, you will get the same kind of answer, more or less.  Amazon launched its Echo—a machine that recognizes your voice, mood and does whatever you ask it to do. So Artificial Intelligence is slowly yet steadily being incorporated into our lives.

Related: Quick Intro: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Woveon: Using AI to Create a Better Conversation with Your Customer

One of the major areas AI and ML are helping businesses is by providing customer services and that has played a huge role in being cost efficient and providing quality customer service.

Here are the key benefits of having AI/ML for your customer service department:

1. Virtual help

Someday, Artificial Intelligence might completely remove humans at the other end when dealing with customers but for now, it is still under the ropes of basic communication. It will only be a matter of time when the data bank gives it enough ability to fully deal with all customer service situations. Businesses that have 24/7 customer care services are relying heavily on chat bots, voice assistive technology and other Artificial Intelligence  tools that can help optimize their productivity as well as retain the maximum amount of customers, especially if, while calling a helpdesk, a voice assistive technology can guide someone through a step by step process without requiring a human at the other end.

Other businesses that have an international customer base can also hugely benefit from this because of the time difference. Although movies have always shown a dark future when it comes to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, but so far, it has only been beneficial for us. 2. Saves time and money

A lot of times, customers are calling about the simplest of things that can be solved by AI/ML technology and do not require an actual person to be sitting at the end of the line. Companies have to outsource dozens and even hundreds of customer care reps overseas just to meet the demand of the customer service calls that need to be catered to.

If companies install AI based software instead, that works as a customer service representative, a lot of the common problems faces by the customers can be resolved. Complex situations or problems could then be filtered towards the human customer service representatives and thus it could save the company, both time and money. 3. Gathering data

AI/ML can learn a lot by gathering data into its data bank. The algorithms and different information provided over the longer course of time can vastly improve a company’s customer base. The AI customer rep can also ask people for feedback, prompt to fill online questionnaires and so much more that would give new insights for the marketing campaign before launching any new product or service.

4. Customizable approach

AI/ML with its unique data sensing technology and use of algorithms can deduce and offer a more customizable approach to dealing with customers. As it is now on the verge of recognizing human emotions and moods, it can deal with customers according to their tone of voice. If, for e.g., a customer is angry, then it can use more of an apologetic tone to soothe the customer. It can look up the history of a customer with the company and deal accordingly.

When it comes to lead generation to lift your sales and customer base, what really influences the bottom line? It is the strategy that a business adapts by using the latest technology.

Many businesses invest a handsome amount of money and spend a lot of time in building a customer base on baseless strategies. Metaphorically – pouring water into a leaky bucket. However, the need is to fix the bucket first (strong and effective sale and marketing strategies courses) and then to pour the water (traffic) into the bucket for maximum results.

Speaking of business strategies, every strategy adopted by the business must meet the current market requirements to be the most effective one. And for that, the business needs smart tools such as machine learning courses and artificial intelligence courses to stay ahead of the game.

What does Woveon, in particular, have to offer in terms of lead generation?

While the advanced tools that are in practice nowadays are using AI – Artificial intelligence - as their advanced mechanism to facilitate lead generation, Woveon uses advance ML – Machine Learning and AI – Artificial Intelligence programs, for the identification of valuable customers. This unmatched feature of Woveon is being smartly utilised by many big organisations in Australia for lead generation and also being learned through various AI and ML courses.

Being an efficient tool to engage with clients, Woveon utilises social listening, machine learning and collects data to suggest personalised content, identify valuable clients and prioritise queries. Knowing some of the many uses of Woveon, let us take a look at some smart strategies, which can be learned through various courses, to use this unmatched technology for boosting businesses’ customer base with lead generation.

Market Strategies, Woveon and Lead Generation

By using Woveon, many businesses are excelling in their market strategies. This is because Woveon has provided a comprehensive customer service experience, and helps the business in coming closer to their customers. Woveon has enabled businesses to make their presence known through various mediums such as social media and allows teams to collaboratively work together.

Modern organisations are taking advantage of Woveon to reach out to their customers in the shortest possible time and to build their online presence. Since this gives a business a chance to combine all channels into a single platform, Woveon AI and ML programs take a lot of pressure off from the customer service representatives.

Woveon is increasingly helping organisations in building a strong presence with their existing customers and in acquiring new customers through advanced and consistent marketing strategies that are based on Woveon technology.

Sale Strategies, Woveon and Lead Generation

Lead generation is the basis of a business to lift sales and to build a customer base. Woveon, for this purpose, is a proven and an excellent tool for lead generation. But how does Woveon do it so remarkably? That is because Woveon takes advantage of an unmatched technology that combines AI and ML i.e. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning which eventually facilitate choosing valuable and relevant customers for the business.

These customers are basically individuals who are active and smartly involved with the business through social media. It identifies and prioritises the most genuine leads. Hence, the lead generation becomes more effective, the sales of the business improve, and also, the conversion ratio get better.

Business strategies, Woveon and Lead Generation

A reputed business amongst the customers, is the one that is highly responsive. For this, a business must continue trying to outdo its competitors by fostering the fastest response time and customer service to its clients. Since many businesses still fail to deliver the services on time, Woveon has now changed the game remarkably in this regard.

It is not only best to respond to customer queries in time but also to make the whole customer interaction a lot easier for a business. It helps in prioritising queries and in addressing customers on various platforms, which keep the customers happy and supports lead generation exceptionally. With that, it also helps the business in keeping track of their most loyal customers, hence building a reputation. It allows the business to interact with the customer on a personal level and helps in generating more leads.