Use VoIP for your business’ Modern form of Communication

/in /by

The old communication methods that we all use and are extremely accustomed to were examined in the first piece, and it was stated why those methods just don’t function as well any more in the contemporary, prosperous world that we are fortunate enough to be living in. They no longer contribute to productivity, make efficient use of time, or fulfil their original intent. A change is necessary at this time.

Communication is unquestionably the most important piece of the puzzle that is your organisation. Regardless of the business you operate in, it is imperative that your staff always engages in effective and professional communication with both your clientele and one another. Customers want to be able to contact you whenever they need to in the modern world because there are no longer any established working hours.

The rest of this piece will go through modern communication tactics that could one day assist you and your team give clients better service.

VoIP – The modern replacement for traditional Telephony

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. You can make direct calls with VoIP from a computer or VoIP phone from any location. Even if you keep the same contact number that your customers are used to, calls are automatically redirected to various devices. You can pretend to be somewhere even though you are not thanks to this clever trick. We’ll go into more depth about this later.

The ‘office setting’, from anywhere

Using VoIP, you can project a particular image onto your clientele. With VoIP, your employees can appear to be at their workstations while actually being on the golf course, in a coffee shop, or at the in-laws for supper. They are constantly susceptible to some deception. Professionalism is achievable in even the most relaxed circumstances. By using VoIP, you may improve your professional standards to levels they have never been while keeping your customers unaware of any changes in how business is conducted. The same reliable firm’s phone number will still be used, and when someone answers, the standard “Hey,…., how may I help?” will be stated. For your clients, all of this is essential; consistency is critical since it builds their familiarity with and trust in your company as a whole and adds to its success.

Mobility

Since all conventional phone lines are ordinary phone lines, just one phone number has been issued to them. As you are aware, the Covid-19 pandemic’s ongoing impacts and its suffocating repercussions have surprisingly enhanced the appeal of remote work over the past year or so. If traditional connectivity is still utilised, your staff will need to memorise complex codes and keys to dial so that their device appears as the office number. This task takes a lot of time, and there is a lot of room for confusion and mistakes.

Relationships

We may all agree that voicemail is an excellent piece of technology, ostensibly allowing us to “never” miss a message, but it is unable to keep up with how we work in the modern office. VoIP is a better option because it allows you to decide where and for how long calls ring. You have complete control over how calls are received; for instance, you may want the first ring to originate from your workplace, the second from your home, and the third from your mobile. This gives you the opportunity to make a very specific promise to your clients: that you won’t ever miss one of their calls.

Reliability

No of the industry you work in, making promises to clients is perilous. If you make promises to customers, you must be very certain that you can keep them since doing otherwise could harm the reputation of your company as a whole or, even worse, cause you to lose revenue. By having the opportunity to direct your calls to specified locations, you can guarantee that a certain quality of service is delivered. Whatever the circumstance, there is never a reason for business to stop.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is one of the most popular business tools today. It is well known for being a major player in the Microsoft toolset. Microsoft Teams was first released in 2017, although it did not initially acquire popularity at the rate it has recently. However, due to the epidemic, Teams has now satisfied a demand that was desperately in need of being satisfied. With an astounding 250 million daily active users, it currently commands a significant global following. Teams is fully integrated into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and makes it simple for your team to share files and organise work (if we listed all of its features, we’d be here all day). By consolidating all of your tasks in one easy-to-use spot, you can do away with internal emailing and lead your business into the future of work.

Meetings made easier by Teams

In the previous article, this was briefly discussed. In order to make room for everyone, meetings have generally been held in a drab office with a crowded staff. This may be the cause of the infrequent meetings that many organisation have had recently. The modern period has made it possible to have effective meeting settings, but that doesn’t even consider how difficult they might be for people who have a somewhat larger staff.

Teams Meetings allow you to choose a time that works for the attendees and instantly add it to their calendars, allowing you to plan a meeting in advance. It is a ground-breaking tool since it completely eliminates the hours it used to take to organise a time that worked with everyone’s busy work schedules. Microsoft Teams eliminates the concern of losing a critical team member or one who travels regularly for work by enabling your team to participate in meetings from any location in the world with an internet connection.

Since using these tools can be scary at first, consultation may be the best option if you don’t think you can do it on your own.

Being aware of how the workplace’s technology landscape is constantly changing is essential if you want your own business to prosper in the current era. You may rest easy knowing that your team is well-equipped with the skills and knowledge essential to not only execute their jobs well, but also progress your company, if you use the tried-and-true tactics that are acceptable for your business.

Quality IT Support

4TC take time to understand the daily challenges that your business faces. We then provide cost-effective tech solutions to these issues that will help you save time, protect vital data, and enable you and your staff to be more effective with your time management. Utilising your IT to its full potential is essential to guarantee that you and your business can thrive and grow into the future. If you would like to find out more on how 4TC Services can provide affordable tech management to your business, drop us an email or call us now for a full demonstration.

Get more from remote working with VoIP

/in /by

The classic office was permanently gone from the contemporary workplace only a few years ago. It is no accident that our reliance on technology has increased as it has developed quickly. A completely new mode of functioning has emerged as a result of this reliance. We all know that technology will develop and evolve in ways that the majority of us cannot fathom, but are you sure you’re constantly making the most of it to benefit from this evolution?

Any company in the world is free to invest money in the newest technology developments, but certain aspects of business operations must always remain the same. Communication is without a doubt one of the most crucial elements since a successful communication system is essential to the continued survival of every organisation today. The strict requirements of your clients must constantly be followed by all internal and external communication channels.

Our reliance on technology has led to a huge number of businesses marketing their goods as the best communication tools available. Now that we have a better understanding of some existing business communication practises, let’s get a sneak peek at some potential developments that could occur in the future.

The Conventional Method of Communication

Email

Email has steadily become the most significant corporate communication tool. Because it has been doing this since the 1970s, we could say that it is more than tried and tested. It has been successful in connecting the office as well as people and businesses all around the world since its creation. Rarely does technology have such a long shelf life. Email is a miracle, making it arguably the best method of business communication ever. The ability to transfer a crucial communication or document across an entire workplace and halfway around the world, with both recipients receiving it at the same time, was revolutionary in the 1970s. In contrast to today, when instant texting, simple video conferencing, and other technological marvels are ubiquitous, communication techniques were still developing in the 1970s. Though the question is no longer “Wow, how amazing is email? “, but rather “Is email good enough?

While it wasn’t always the case, most of the emails we get on a daily basis these days are simply not valuable enough. In today’s workplace, they are typically ineffective, time-consuming, and distracting. There is no place in business for scrolling through multiple pages of spam to find the vital ones.

Email can be tiresome at times; you might have to exchange messages back and forth for hours before you finally get to the point. Whatever the reason, as we have indicated, squandering time at work nowadays is unpleasant.

The phone

Since the phone was first created, not much has changed, and its significance in the workplace hasn’t altered either. Nothing beats interacting with your clients while using your tone of voice and deliberate word choice, as you are definitely aware. These approaches are almost usually much more efficient than sending an email. The phone is still not only the first but also by far the greatest option for a spontaneous encounter that is of the utmost necessity and urgency, even though there are fantastic alternatives for planned business meetings, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

Don’t go too far and quit using phones altogether when conducting business. There is just one option left since modern alternatives cannot be entirely rejected: a combination of the two.

It’s time to move on because landline technology is obsolete in compared to contemporary alternatives and can no longer significantly increase business productivity. There are no exceptions; if you want to manage a prosperous modern firm, you must always be reachable. Since everything is instantaneous and there is always someone else offering the same goods or services with the promise of being cheaper or of higher quality, customers are no longer the trustworthy, dependable group they once were. They are now much more erratic than they were before. Does conducting research actually violate morality? In other words, your clients will go somewhere else if they can’t get in touch with you. The worst conceivable way to begin your connection is when a new prospective client tries to contact you but is unable to do so. If you are not constantly reachable by phone for any reason, the connection between you, your suppliers, and your customers may break, which could lead to the failure of your firm.

Meetings

Meetings are now different in kind. Everyone can recall the days when the boss would assemble everyone in one location around a desk and whiteboard while someone took minutes. Typically, this included a time-consuming process that was repeated repeatedly. It seems sense that since these types of gatherings have a negative past, they are more likely to occur under difficult conditions or when there is a particular motive for them. With the proper technology in place, businesses may embrace a new solution that eliminates the time and effort needed to schedule meetings. Many organisations today may struggle to find a day and time that works for their huge staff.

In the article that follows, we’ll take a closer look at a few of the numerous modern communication techniques that are currently in use and examine how, when used effectively, they can completely transform your business’s communication capabilities and propel you into a much more prosperous future with carefully chosen technology at the core of your company’s success.

Quality IT Support

4TC take time to understand the daily challenges that your business faces. We then provide cost-effective tech solutions to these issues that will help you save time, protect vital data, and enable you and your staff to be more effective with your time management. Utilising your IT to its full potential is essential to guarantee that you and your business can thrive and grow into the future. If you would like to find out more on how 4TC Services can provide affordable tech management to your business, drop us an email or call us now for a full demonstration.

Lack of cybersecurity training is leaving businesses at risk

/in /by

Employees are constantly bombarded with phishing

Businesses are putting themselves at risk of all kinds of cyber-attacks due to poor practices when it comes to educating and training the workforce.

A new report from Yubico, found less than half (42%) of UK businesses it surveyed held mandatory, frequent, cybersecurity training. 

There are many things employees could be taught, which would improve the cybersecurity posture of organizations, the report further suggested. For example, roughly half (47%) often write down, or share their passwords  which is one of the most common mistakes when it comes to safeguarding a password. 

Resetting the password 

Elsewhere, the report found that many workers (33%) allow other people to use their work-issued device, while more than half (58%) use personal devices for work. 

A similar percentage (49%) do vice-versa, as well, by using a work-issued device for personal use, which is another cybersecurity red flag. Finally, half (48%) have been exposed to a cyberattack such as phishing, without reporting the incident to their IT and cybersecurity teams. 

Even when an employee gets exposed to a cyberattack, their organization does very little to amend the issue. “Very few” companies implemented phishing-resistant cybersecurity methods in response to being targeted, a third (28%) simply had their passwords reset, and just a quarter (28%) were made to attend cybersecurity training. 

“Cyber attacks, and how to prevent them, should be top of mind for every organization. However, our research reveals a remarkable disparity between the risks of cyber-attacks and businesses’ attitudes toward them,” commented Niall McConachie, regional director (UK & Ireland) at Yubico.

For McConachie, businesses should deploy multi-factor authentication (MFA) as soon as possible, and consider FIDO2 security keys. The latter “have been proven to be the most effective phishing-resistant option for business-wide cybersecurity”, he says. 

“By removing the reliance on passwords, MFA and strong 2FA are more user-friendly and can be used for both personal and professional data security. This is especially important as cyber-attacks are not limited to companies but can directly target customers and employees too.”

One of the most used-used passwords – “123456” – is still in use today, despite being known by virtually every cybercriminal out there, the report concluded.

Source: Lack of cybersecurity training is leaving businesses at risk

AI chatbots making it harder to spot phishing emails, say experts

/in /by

Poor spelling and grammar that can help identify fraudulent attacks being rectified by artificial intelligence

Chatbots are taking away a key line of defence against fraudulent phishing emails by removing glaring grammatical and spelling errors, according to experts.

The warning comes as policing organisation Europol issues an international advisory about the potential criminal use of ChatGPT and other “large language models”.

Phishing emails are a well-known weapon of cybercriminals and fool recipients into clicking on a link that downloads malicious software or tricks them into handing over personal details such as passwords or pin numbers.

Half of all adults in England and Wales reported receiving a phishing email last year, according to the Office for National Statistics, while UK businesses have identified phishing attempts as the most common form of cyber-threat.

However, a basic flaw in some phishing attempts – poor spelling and grammar – is being rectified by artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, which can correct the errors that trip spam filters or alert human readers.

“Every hacker can now use AI that deals with all misspellings and poor grammar,” says Corey Thomas, chief executive of the US cybersecurity firm Rapid7. “The idea that you can rely on looking for bad grammar or spelling in order to spot a phishing attack is no longer the case. We used to say that you could identify phishing attacks because the emails look a certain way. That no longer works.”

Data suggests that ChatGPT, the leader in the market that became a sensation after its launch last year, is being used for cybercrime, with the rise of “large language models” (LLM) getting one of its first substantial commercial applications in the crafting of malicious communications.

Data from cybersecurity experts at the UK firm Darktrace suggests that phishing emails are increasingly being written by bots, letting criminals overcome poor English and send longer messages that are less likely to be caught by spam filters.

Since ChatGPT went mainstream last year, the overall volume of malicious email scams that try to trick users into clicking a link has dropped, replaced by more linguistically complex emails, according to Darktrace’s monitoring. That suggests that a meaningful number of scammers drafting phishing and other malicious emails have gained some ability to draft longer, more complex prose, says Max Heinemeyer, the company’s chief product officer – most likely an LLM like ChatGPT or similar.

“Even if somebody said, ‘don’t worry about ChatGPT, it’s going to be commercialised’, well, the genie is out of the bottle,” Heinemeyer said. “What we think is having an immediate impact on the threat landscape is that this type of technology is being used for better and more scalable social engineering: AI allows you to craft very believable ‘spear-phishing’ emails and other written communication with very little effort, especially compared to what you have to do before.”

“Spear-phishing”, the name for emails that attempt to coax a specific target into giving up passwords or other sensitive information, can be difficult for attackers to convincingly craft, Heinemeyer said, but LLMs such as ChatGPT make it easy. “I can just crawl your social media and put it to GPT, and it creates a super-believable tailored email. Even if I’m not super knowledgable of the English language, I can craft something that’s indistinguishable from human.”

In Europol’s advisory report the organisation highlighted a similar set of potential problems caused by the rise of AI chatbots including fraud and social engineering, disinformation and cybercrime. The systems are also useful for walking would-be criminals through the actual steps required to harm others, it said. “The possibility to use the model to provide specific steps by asking contextual questions means it is significantly easier for malicious actors to better understand and subsequently carry out various types of crime.”

This month a report by Check Point, a US-Israeli cybersecurity firm, said it had used the latest iteration of ChatGPT to produce a credible-seeming phishing email. It circumvented the chatbot’s safety procedures by telling the tool that it needed a template of a phishing email for an employee awareness programme.

Google has also joined the chatbot race, launching its Bard product in the UK and US last week. Asked by the Guardian to draft an email to persuade someone to click on a malicious-seeming link, Bard complied willingly if lacking subtlety: “I am writing to you today to share a link to an article that I think you will find interesting.”

Contacted by the Guardian, Google pointed to its “prohibited use” policy for AI, which says users must not use its AI models to create content for “deceptive or fraudulent activities, scams, phishing, or malware”.

OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, has been contacted for comment. The company’s terms of use state that users “may not (i) use the services in a way that infringes, misappropriates or violates any person’s rights”.

Source: AI chatbots making it harder to spot phishing emails, say experts