One bad customer experience can cost you that customer for life. Hospitality, travel, retail, healthcare, and financial services are especially prone to losing customers who have a negative experience. It does not take much for a customer to decide that you and your company are not worth his time, effort, or money.

Customers like to feel loved, and they are turned off very quickly when they sense that you do not care about the pain they are feeling. Even if you cannot help them because the situation is beyond your control, acknowledge that you understand both the situation and their frustration.

 No customer wants the person serving her to be distracted or preoccupied. Ever go to the local mall and try to get help from a teenager focused more on texting her friends than helping you find what youÂ’re looking for? On the other hand, being too focused can be a bad thing. Have you ever asked an innocent question out of curiosity and then found yourself stuck for an eternity while a customer support person hunts endlessly for an answer? This person is likely so focused on getting the answer that he does not realize that you really do not care that much about it and would rather not wait for an answer to an inessential question. Be sure your people understand the degree of focus required for the job.

Even if the employee has the right skill set and experience, his odds of being successful and remaining on the job are low if his core behaviors and tendencies do not line up with those needed for success in that particular role. This is especially true for customer-facing roles in which your frontline employees act as extensions of your brand and heavily influence the customer experience.  

Industry estimates peg the costs of acquiring new customers as being about five times more than the costs incurred to satisfy existing customers. IT Service Management and change control are keys to this process.

Customer retention and satisfaction also drive profits. According to some experts*, a 2 percent increase in customer retention can have the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10 percent. And a 5 percent reduction in customer defection rate can increase profits by up to 25 to 125 percent, depending on the industry.

Additionally, existing customers are the ones who are most likely to be future purchasers. TheyÂ’ve already shown they want and like your products or services and are willing to pay for them. And in many cases, customer profitability tends to increase over the life of a retained customer.

So whatÂ’s the key to retaining customers? Keeping customers happy has always been a cornerstone of good business practice. But with today's economic conditions, delivering good service to ensure satisfaction has become critical to any companyÂ’s success.

Blumenthal's investigation adds to the legal headaches for Google caused by the revelation that its Street View cars were collecting wireless "payload" data in addition to geolocation data from unsecured wireless hot spots. Ever since Google revealed the extent of its data gathering a month ago in response to inquiries from German regulators, lawyers and politicians have been lining up to express their outrage.

"Consumers have a right and a need to know what personal information--which could include e-mails, Web browsing, and passwords--Google may have collected, how, and why," Blumenthal said in a statement posted on his Web site. "Google must come clean, explaining how and why it intercepted and saved private information broadcast over personal and business wireless networks."

• Management of information growth. Proactively monitoring and managing what content is being stored based on business value and record keeping obligations;
• Mitigation of risk. Reducing risk and ensuring conformance with different regulatory, legal and business policies; and
• Management of access to content. Driving competitive advantage and improving business operations through both access control and better re-use of information. Policy is at the heart of each of these challenges and key to an information governance strategy.
• Information governance is most effective when policies can be carried forward consistently with enabling technologies. Foundational technologies at the core of a good information governance strategy include classification, security and access control, retention policy management, search, archiving and content management.

• Risk management must be given greater authority
• Senior executives must lead risk management from the top
• Management needs to review the level of risk expertise in their organisation, particularly at the
  highest levels
• Managers should pay more attention to the data that populate risk models, and must combine
  this output with human judgment
• Stress testing and scenario planning can arm executives with an appropriate response to events
  Incentive systems must be constructed so that they reward long-term stability, not short-term
  profit
• Risk factors should be consolidated across all the business operations
• Managers should ensure that they do not rely too heavily on data from external providers
• A careful balance must be struck between the centralisation and decentralisation of risk
• Risk management systems should be adaptive rather than static

• Big jumps in incidence of password sniffing, financial fraud, and malware infection.
• Organizations often are fraudulently represented as the sender of a phishing message.
• Average losses due to security incidents are down again this year (from $289,000 per company to $234,244 per company), though they are still above 2006 figures.
• Twenty-five percent of companies felt that over 60 percent of their financial losses were due to non-malicious actions by insiders.
• Most companies are satisfied, though not overjoyed, with all security technologies.
• Most companies t their investment in end-user security awareness training was inadequate, but most felt their investments in other components of their security program were adequate.
• When asked what actions were taken following a security incident, 22 percent stated that they notified individuals whose personal information was breached and 17 percent stated that they provided new security services to users or customers.
• When asked what security solutions ranked highest on their wishlists, many named tools that would improve their visibility - better log management, security information and event management, security data visualization, security dashboards and the like.
• Companies generally said that regulatory compliance efforts have had a positive effect on their organization's security programs.
  

How did this DAT file get through McAfeeÂ’s Quality Assurance process?

• Process – Some specific steps of the existing Quality Assurance processes were not followed:  Standard Peer Review of the driver was not done, and the Risk Assessment of the driver in question was inadequate. Had it been adequate it would have triggered additional Quality Assurance steps.
• Product Testing – there was inadequate coverage of Product and Operating System combinations in the test systems used. Specifically, XP SP3 with VSE 8.7 was not included in the test configuration at the time of release.

What is McAfee going to do to ensure this does not repeat?

• Strict enforcement of rules and processes regarding DAT creation and Quality Assurance.
• Addition of the missing Operating Systems and Product configurations.
• Leveraging of cloud based technologies for false remediation.
• A revision of Risk Assessment criteria is underway.

What is McAfee going to do to prevent this from happening again?

• Nearly all of McAfee's 7,000 employees have been working around the clock to help customers get back to business as usual and to make sure this never happens again.
• McAfee is implementing additional QA protocols for any releases that directly impact critical system files. McAfee is rolling out additional capabilities in Artemis that will provide another level of protection against false positives by leveraging an expansive whitelist of critical system files and their associated cryptographic hashes.

Acccording to Computerworld a spokesman for Network Solutions said they have received reports that some Network Solutions customers are seeing malicious code added to their websites.

• SOX - The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires strict internal controls and independent auditing of financial information as a proactive defense against fraud. 
• HIPAA - The Health Information Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 requires tight controls over handling of and access to medical information to protect patient privacy. 
• GLBA - The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 requires financial institutions to create, document and continuously audit security procedures to protect the nonpublic personal information of their clients, including precautions to prevent unauthorized electronic access.
• FISMA -– The Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 is meant to bolster computer and network security within the federal government and affiliated parties (such as government contractors) by mandating yearly audits. 
• Basel II - The Capital Requirements Directive/Basel II Accord established an international standard that banking regulators can use when creating regulations about how much capital banks need to put aside to guard against the types of financial and operational risks banks face.
• UK Data Protection Act of 1998 - The eight principles of the Data Protection Act state that all data must be processed fairly and lawfully; obtained and used only for specified and lawful purposes; adequate, relevant and not excessive; accurate, and where necessary, kept up to date; kept for no longer than necessary; processed in accordance with individuals rights as defined in the Act; kept secure; and transferred only to countries that offer adequate data protection.

Seventy-nine percent of surveyed CIOs are feeling optimistic about their companies' prospects for growth, and 40 percent are planning for new projects. But that positive streak does not necessarily translate into big growth in full-time hiring in the second quarter, according to a recent hiring and skills report.
 
Only 9 percent of 1,400 CIOs polled for the Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report are planning new hires this quarter. And with 4 percent expecting to cut jobs, the net gain in hiring is 5 percent, the outplacement company reported in early March.

Teleworking is not just an arrangement; it is a way of life. It requires changes in behavioral patterns that go beyond the usual. It also requires a lot of creativity to stay in touch with people inside and outside the organization. Most teleworkers have two lifelines to their organization -remote VPN access (for access to e-mail, calendar, and Intranet documents) and a telephone (for real-time communication). With no technical on-site support, a failure of even one of these lifelines leads to serious problems. Experienced teleworkers therefore prepare for the worst case scenario while all systems are working.

• Storage expansion - IT departments are already stretching their budgets for storage, and the demand is only going to grow. The volume of data an average business collects and stores actually doubles every 18-24 months.
• System complexity - a survey of Canadian IT workers show that many DBAs already devote up to 80 percent of their time to routine systems maintenance. Add to that the work that needs to get done on strategic projects, and you may be looking at major overtime charges.
• Hardware sprawl - More systems usually mean more complexity and maintenance and more servers definitely mean more power and cooling costs. For most companies, data center hardware accounts for the bulk of the power and cooling bill. In some cases, power costs can even exceed the cost of IT equipment!
• Reliability and scalability - most enterprise information is contained within IT systems, it is absolutely critical that those systems be available whenever your employees or your customers need them. Now you're talking about 24x7 availability, meaning that your systems have to scale along with your workloads. But scaling out by adding servers raises hardware and maintenance costs, and the wrong storage configuration can cause major delays in delivering key information.
• Compliance - Organizations face large fines if they are found to be out of compliance, and bad press and security breaches can dissolve shareholde confidence, destroy customer trust and send stock prices plummeting almost overnight.

Janco has solutions for these IT Infrastructure issues

The Department of Homeland Security's top cybersecurity official said that the department may eventually extend its Einstein technology, which is designed to detect and prevent electronic attacks, to networks operated by the private sector. The technology was created for federal networks.

Is this the camel's nose in the tent?

To improve management of ongoing projects,  as of Feb. 15 every IT project in the department, and about 250 IT projects overall, are being managed through the Program Management Accountability System introduced in July. The system requires IT projects to deliver new functionality within six months and to meet project milestones. The VA also is using an online IT dashboard to identify and track troubled projects.

The Veterans Affairs Department has terminated its Enrollment System Redesign, Pharmacy Reengineering and 10 other failing information technology projects for a projected savings of $54 million this fiscal year, officials announced today.

The goal is to put IT projects on the accountability system as soon as possible, it took several months to identify and terminate contracts associated with the canceled projects.

The enrollment systems project was budgeted at $24 million, and the pharmacy project at $23 million, for fiscal 2010.

Other canceled VA IT projects included the Barcode Expansion, Delivery Service, Rights Management Server and VA-Defense Department Laboratory Data Sharing and Interoperability terminology support.

The 12 canceled IT projects were among 44 IT projects halted by VA officials in July 2009. Chief Information Officer Roger Baker today released the list of the 12 terminated projects and 32 restarted projects.

Most CIO's continue to look for ways to reduce costs.  Many no longer are willing to pay a premium for vendors to fix any problems in key software and hardware within four hours instead of a 24-hours. Sometimes things stay broken until IT staffers can figure out the fixes themselves.

Steps that CIOs are taking include:

• Reducing systems maintained on a 7/24 level - Instead of eliminating maintenance contracts, reduce the frequency of turnaround time -- from, say, four hours to 24 hours or even longer.
• Reducing weekend and late-night service levels.
• Reducing contracted fees paid to vendors -- many are more willing than in the past to wheel and deal, rather than lose a contract completely.
• Communicating with users that they can expect decreased maintenance, particularly with regard to timing and service levels.

However it is critical  to not impact core infrastructure systems or those that are customer centric.

President Obama's first official State of the Union address is a few weeks old, but its message to American companies that operate subsidiaries in Asia has some questioning what direction the United States will go with technology workers, tax incentives and H-1B visas. With an economy slowly grinding its way out of recession and a populist air of protecting jobs for American workers, Obama is giving Asian and American business leaders and companies something to chew on.

In the address, Obama attempted to restate his agenda on jobs and jobs growth; some have construed these remarks as "protectionist."

"To encourage these and other businesses to stay within our borders, it is time to finally slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that create jobs right here in the United States of America," Obama said.

What was the reaction in Asia? Well, they are not worried about the tax part.

"The whole issue about taxing companies which were shipping jobs overseas and taking away tax breaks actually does not relate to the work that is done out of India or other locations," vice president of trade organization NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies), said in The Economic Times Jan. 28. "That is really about U.S. subsidiaries which have set up plants overseas."

Job cuts across all industries have reached a five-month high at 71,482, according to a Chicago-based outplacement firm . Retail, telecommunications and pharmaceutical companies are leading the pack in layoffs. The telecommunications sector announced 14,010 in January. Roughly 13,000 layoffs were announced by Verizon last week as the largest mobile provider continues to transition its business away from legacy landlines and move toward mobile- and Internet-only based business for consumers and enterprises.

Retailers announced plans to shed 16,737 seasonal and full-time employees; Pharma plans to eliminate 8,170 jobs which is the biggest number that sector has seen since last March when it lost 17,796.