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AI cited pages were almost three times more likely to have JSON-LD than non-cited pages. That’s a big gap, and the kind of stat that gets shared in LinkedIn carousels and conference slides as proof that schema is an AI…Read more ›View the full article

A reader writes: We recently hired a new employee, “Jane,” to replace someone who is away for a year. Two weeks after Jane started, she told us that she was pregnant and due about six months later. Our company owner, Ron, was very unhappy. He felt tricked, and annoyed that we then had to find a replacement for our replacement. For my part, it was a bit frustrating, but that’s life. I like her personally, and she’s a fast learner and a good employee. But ever since then, Ron has been very cold to Jane. He’s asked me to keep a record of every time she says she’s tired or takes time off for doctor appointments, and has asked me if she’s making up the hours. We had also talked about eventually transitioning her onto our B2B sales team but now he’s saying that when she’s a mother, she won’t want to go out and schmooze with customers anymore. Also, we interviewed a young woman for the maternity cover position, and he made multiple comments that probably this woman would announce her pregnancy as soon as she started. In the end, I pushed and we hired her, but I’m certain if we’d had two equal candidates, he would have gone with a male candidate or someone who he didn’t think was likely to become pregnant. I’ve felt pressured by Ron to make sure Jane is working every hour she’s meant to, but I feel uncomfortable nickeling and diming her time when I know there are weeks she’s worked extra because we had so much work. Ron also has made comments like “legally, how far do we have to accommodate her if she can’t do her work?” and insinuated that he wouldn’t accept her pregnancy interrupting her work. In other cases, he’s been very insistent that employees under the weather take time to rest. What is the best way to push back on this? I want to make sure that we have a workplace that is welcoming to women and parents. I answer this question over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here. The post my boss is discriminating against my pregnant employee appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

US president rejects Iranian proposal for temporary peace deal ahead of trip to ChinaView the full article

Republicans returning to Washington on Monday are facing questions about a $1 billion Senate security proposal that could help pay for President Donald The President’s ballroom as Democrats say they will try to defeat it. Senate Republicans added the money for White House security to a spending bill that would restore funding for immigration enforcement agencies that Democrats have blocked since February. The steep security proposal was put forward after a man was charged with trying to assassinate The President at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last month. Republicans are using a partisan budget maneuver to push the spending legislation through Congress without any Democratic votes. But in a letter to colleagues Monday morning, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats will fight it in other ways, including by pushing the Senate parliamentarian to strike the ballroom security money from the budget bill and offering amendments forcing Republicans to vote on it. “The Republican-controlled Congress is preparing to answer this moment with a deficit-busting, party-line bill that pours billions more taxpayer dollars into a rogue ICE operation and a billion-dollar ballroom, while doing nothing to end the illegal war in Iran or ease the Republican affordability crisis bearing down on working families,” Schumer wrote in the letter. It’s unclear if the security money will even have enough backing among Republicans. The House has not released its bill yet, but the Senate is expected to start voting on its version of the legislation this week. While most GOP lawmakers have remained quiet on the proposal as they spent their recess out of Washington, some have publicly questioned whether they would support it. “I’m going to look at it very carefully and make sure those things are in the national interest,” said Rep. Rob Wittman, a Virginia Republican who was in the Capitol last week to briefly gavel in a pro forma session of the House. “I want to know the exact nature of the expenditures that would go there for security. So I think it’s a little premature to look at that and say, you know, yes or no to it,” Wittman said. Wittman wants to better understand the details of the Senate proposal and “how it’s part of what the total construction cost is,” he said. The President has said the ballroom’s construction would cost $400 million and use private funds, but he had not proposed a number for security costs. The Senate bill would designate the money for the U.S. Secret Service, including for “security adjustments and upgrades” related to the ballroom project, which The President and other Republicans have been pushing since Cole Tomas Allen was charged with storming the April 25 media dinner at the Washington Hilton with guns and knives. The legislation says the money would support enhancements to the ballroom project, “including above-ground and below-ground security features,” but specifies it may not be used for non-security elements. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle praised Republicans last week for including the money for the “long overdue” project, saying it would “provide the United States Secret Service with the resources they need to fully and completely harden the White House complex, in addition to the many other critical missions for the USSS.” The White House has said in court documents that the East Wing project would be “heavily fortified,” including bomb shelters, military installations and a medical facility underneath the ballroom. The President has said it should include bulletproof glass and be able to repel drone attacks. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued to block construction of the project, but a federal appeals court said last month that it can continue in the meantime. —Mary Clare Jalonick and Kevin Freking, Associated Press View the full article

Wordle, the game originally designed as a gift for the creator’s partner, has been a national obsession for years. Now it’s becoming a television game show. NBC has greenlit a new series centered around the game, which will run in prime time. Today anchor (and self-confessed Wordle megafan) Savannah Guthrie will host. The show will be executive produced by Jimmy Fallon and The New York Times, which owns Wordle. The show is scheduled to premiere in 2027 and casting is underway. If you’re interested in being a contestant on the show, you can apply at wordle.castingcrane.com. (The game will be played in teams of three, so you’ll need to find a couple of buddies or family members to join you.) Note you’ll be asked to include your Wordle stats to show your proficiency at the game. “Wordle is one of the most successful and culturally resonant games of the past decade,” said Sharon Vuong, executive vice president of unscripted programming at NBC in a statement. “This series is a natural extension of NBC’s legacy in the game show space, and . . . we’re excited to bring a smart, joyful and distinctly NBC take to this global phenomenon.” The format of the show will challenge players to solve five-letter word puzzles, much like the daily game, but with an added element of speed. A long time coming The New York Times has been developing Wordle as a game show for several years. Once the paper began working with Fallon, things began to gel, said Caitlin Roper, executive editorial director of film and tv at the Times. “We wanted to honor the specific thrill of Wordle, the way people play and share their scores with each other, but also make something new for TV,” she said. Wordle was created by Josh Wardle in 2021 as a game he and his partner could play together during the pandemic. He later released it on his website and it quickly went viral. The New York Times bought it in January of 2022 for an undisclosed amount in the “low seven figures.” The game has continued to attract players since then, boosting subscriptions to both the Times and New York Times Games. To encourage that, the paper began offering access to over 1,000 past puzzles two years ago—ensuring that player efforts on those did not impact streaks or other statistics, data that regular players are quite protective about. The NYT doesn’t give precise user numbers, but Jonathan Knight, general manager of New York Times Games, says “tens of millions” of people play each week. That has created a dedicated community around the game. Wordle, like the Times’ other games, has a human curator and that creates a constructor/solver relationship. (The Times mandated that change in November of 2022.) There’s a component of one person trying to trick the player—and whether you succeed or fail on any particular day, it makes you want to return. At the same time, there’s a large group of players that share their triumphs and upsets—and chat daily about the puzzles on Times-run forums. The success of Wordle has also helped boost the Times‘ other games, such as Spelling Bee, which launched online in 2018, and Pips, which was made a permanent addition to the company’s collection last year. Wordle’s creator, meanwhile, released his latest game two months ago. Parseword is a much more challenging game. It has a more advanced ruleset and if who don’t have an especially firm grasp on the English language, you could find frustrating. It requires you to analyze clue words, swap them out for synonyms and combine them to find two synonymous words. It’s not a game where random guesses will get you very far, but it has already amassed a dedicated group of players. View the full article

Amin Nasser warns depletion of gasoline and jet fuel inventories is ‘rapidly accelerating’ due to Hormuz closureView the full article

Choosing the ideal business structure for your venture isn’t just a formality; it shapes your liability, tax obligations, and operational dynamics. For instance, if you’re starting solo, a sole proprietorship might suit you. Nevertheless, if you’re planning growth or want liability protection, consider an S Corporation. Comprehending these options is key to aligning with your long-term goals. What structure will best support your ambitions as your business evolves? Key Takeaways Assess your business goals and risk tolerance to determine the most suitable structure, such as sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC, or corporation. Consider liability protection needs; LLCs and corporations provide limited personal liability, while sole proprietorships and partnerships expose personal assets. Evaluate tax implications, as S Corporations and LLCs offer pass-through taxation, whereas C Corporations face double taxation. Factor in administrative complexity; noncorporation structures require less paperwork compared to the extensive compliance needed for corporations. Be prepared to adapt your business structure as growth occurs, transitioning to an LLC or corporation for better risk management and scalability. Understanding Business Structures When considering how to structure your business, it’s essential to understand the various options available, as each offers unique benefits and challenges. A sole proprietorship is the simplest business structure, allowing you to report profits on your personal tax returns, but it exposes your assets to liability. Partnerships involve multiple individuals sharing profits and responsibilities, with personal liability risks except you choose a limited liability partnership (LLP). Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) offer liability protection during allowing pass-through taxation, making them flexible. Finally, corporations provide the highest level of protection but come with stricter regulations and potential double taxation. Each structure influences the components of your business plan, so choose wisely based on your goals and risk tolerance. Sole Proprietorship A sole proprietorship stands out as the simplest form of business structure, making it an appealing option for solo entrepreneurs. It requires no formal setup or registration, allowing you to start with minimal costs. As a pass-through entity, your profits are reported on your personal tax return, simplifying your tax filing process. Nevertheless, be aware that you face unlimited personal liability, meaning your assets are at risk if debts arise. This structure is ideal for low-risk businesses and offers a 20% tax deduction on qualified income. Shifting to an LLC or corporation is easy as your business grows. Pros Cons Simple setup Unlimited personal liability Pass-through taxation Limited funding options Low costs Less credibility than corporations Flexibility Difficulty in business continuity Easy shift to complex structures Potential for higher taxes later Partnership Partnerships involve two or more individuals or entities coming together to share ownership and operational responsibilities of a business. In your business plan, consider the various types of partnerships available, such as general partnerships, limited partnerships (LPs), and limited liability partnerships (LLPs). Each type comes with different liability and management structures. One key aspect is the partnership agreement, which defines roles, responsibilities, and profit-sharing arrangements, helping to prevent disputes among partners. Furthermore, partnerships are pass-through entities for tax purposes, meaning profits and losses appear on individual partners’ tax returns, potentially providing tax benefits. Nonetheless, be mindful that general partners face personal liability for business debts, which can risk personal assets. Limited Liability Company (LLC) A Limited Liability Company (LLC) offers you a unique blend of liability protection and tax flexibility, making it an attractive option for many business owners. With an LLC, your personal assets are safeguarded from business debts, and you can enjoy pass-through taxation, which might allow you to take advantage of a 20% tax deduction. Furthermore, the management structure of an LLC is flexible, accommodating various ownership arrangements as it requires minimal formalities compared to corporations. Liability Protection Benefits When considering how to protect your personal assets, forming a Limited Liability Company (LLC) can be a strategic choice. An LLC offers personal asset protection, meaning you won’t be personally liable for business debts or liabilities. This safeguard helps keep your finances separate from your business, shielding your personal wealth from lawsuits and creditors. Furthermore, unlike sole proprietorships or general partnerships, LLCs maintain this protection even for single-member entities. They require less formal structure than corporations, making it easier to manage within your financial plan for your business plan. With the ability to have unlimited members, an LLC likewise simplifies capital raising and ownership sharing, enhancing your overall business structure while minimizing exposure to risks. Tax Flexibility Options Tax flexibility is one of the standout features of forming a Limited Liability Company (LLC). With an LLC, you can choose how you want to be taxed—either as a sole proprietorship, partnership, or corporation. This flexibility allows you to tailor your tax strategy to fit your business finance planning. Typically, LLCs benefit from pass-through taxation, which means profits are reported on your personal tax return, avoiding the double taxation faced by C corporations. Furthermore, you might qualify for a 20% Qualified Business Income deduction, further reducing your tax burden. If desired, you can elect to be taxed as an S corporation, which can help you avoid self-employment taxes on distributions. Use a business plan template to outline these tax strategies effectively. Management Structure Flexibility Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) offer significant flexibility in their management structures, allowing you to choose between member-managed and manager-managed configurations adapted to your specific business needs. This adaptability is crucial when drafting your business plan format, as it enables you to align your business structure with your operational goals. Management Type Description Member-Managed All members participate in day-to-day decisions. Manager-Managed Designated managers handle daily operations. Unlimited Members Allows diverse input and collaboration. No Formalities Simplifies decision-making processes. Customized Operating Agreement Clearly outlines roles and responsibilities. With LLCs, you maintain limited liability as you actively participate in management, making them ideal for collaborative environments. C Corporation A C Corporation represents a distinct legal entity that separates itself from its owners, offering significant advantages for business owners and investors alike. This business structure provides limited liability protection, ensuring shareholders typically aren’t personally responsible for company debts. Nonetheless, it’s essential to recognize that C Corporations face double taxation; they pay a corporate income tax of 21%, and shareholders likewise pay taxes on dividends. With the ability to have unlimited shareholders and issue various classes of stock, this company description is ideal for attracting venture capital and facilitating growth. C Corporations also maintain perpetual existence, continuing even after owners depart, which is advantageous for long-term business planning. Strict regulatory compliance is necessary, including detailed record-keeping and filing Form 1120. S Corporation An S Corporation offers distinct tax benefits, allowing income to pass through to shareholders and avoiding double taxation, which can be advantageous for small business owners. You’ll likewise enjoy limited liability protection, safeguarding your personal assets from business-related debts. Nevertheless, keep in mind that S Corps have specific ownership limitations, capping shareholders at 100 and requiring them to be U.S. citizens or residents. Tax Benefits Overview How can choosing an S Corporation structure benefit your business from a tax perspective? By opting for an S Corporation, you’ll enjoy pass-through taxation, where corporate income isn’t taxed at the corporate level. Instead, it flows to you and other shareholders, allowing you to report it on your personal tax returns, which can lower your overall tax burden. Furthermore, you can take advantage of a 20% Qualified Business Income deduction, greatly reducing your taxable income. Since S Corporations are limited to 100 shareholders, compliance and tax reporting can be simpler. In addition, avoiding double taxation on dividends makes this structure tax-efficient for small businesses. Incorporating these elements into your business plan outline format helps you articulate the advantages of this choice clearly. Liability Protection Features In the process of considering the structure of your business, comprehending the liability protection features of an S Corporation is vital. This business structure provides fundamental safeguards for your personal assets against business-related claims. Here are three key aspects of its liability protection: Limited Personal Liability: Shareholders are only liable for their investment in the S Corporation, meaning personal assets can’t be seized for business debts. Debt Protection: The corporation’s debts and liabilities aren’t your personal responsibility, which helps protect your finances. Formal Structure: Compliance with regulations, such as holding annual meetings, reinforces the separation between personal and business liabilities. Understanding these features can help you make informed decisions about your business structure during ensuring adequate liability protection. Ownership Limitations Explained When considering the ownership structure of an S Corporation, it’s vital to understand the limitations that come with this designation. An S Corporation is capped at 100 shareholders, all of whom must be U.S. citizens or residents, which restricts broader ownership options. You can only issue one class of stock, meaning all shares have equal rights to profits and distributions, limiting investment flexibility. Furthermore, eligible shareholders include individuals, certain trusts, and estates, but not partnerships or corporations. To maintain S Corporation status, you must meet specific IRS requirements, such as prohibiting non-resident alien shareholders. These ownership limitations are significant parts of a business plan, influencing your business structure and operational dynamics. Comparing Business Structures Which business structure best suits your entrepreneurial goals? Comprehending different options can help you create effective business plan examples. Here’s a quick comparison: Sole Proprietorship: Simple and requires minimal formalities, but exposes personal assets to unlimited liability. Partnership: Shared ownership and management with profits passed through to partners, yet may likewise risk personal assets depending on the type of partnership. Limited Liability Company (LLC): Offers personal asset protection and flexible tax treatment, typically as a pass-through entity, with no restrictions on the number of members. Choosing the right business structure involves evaluating personal liability, tax implications, and administrative complexity, ensuring alignment with your long-term business goals. This decision notably impacts your business’s success and sustainability. Evaluating Personal Liability Evaluating personal liability is a crucial step in determining the most suitable business structure for your entrepreneurial venture. Comprehending how different structures affect your risk exposure is fundamental for your business plan. Business Structure Personal Liability Risk Protection Level Sole Proprietorship Unlimited None Limited Partnership Limited (limited partners) Partial Limited Liability Company (LLC) Limited High In sole proprietorships and general partnerships, you face unlimited personal liability, risking your assets. Conversely, LLCs and corporations provide personal liability protection, limiting your responsibility to your investment. Evaluating personal liability helps you choose a business structure that minimizes risk and improves financial stability, especially in high-risk industries. Tax Implications of Business Structures Comprehending the tax implications of different business structures is essential for making informed decisions about your venture. Here’s a quick overview of key considerations: Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships: These are pass-through entities, meaning profits are taxed at your personal income tax rate, with a potential 20% Qualified Business Income deduction. Limited Liability Companies (LLCs): They likewise benefit from pass-through taxation but can choose to be taxed as S or C corporations, offering flexibility based on your financial situation. C Corporations: They face double taxation, with profits taxed at 21% and dividends taxed again on personal returns. When outlining what needs to be in a business plan, remember to include these tax considerations, especially when seeking business plan services. Administrative Complexity and Compliance When deciding on a business structure, it’s crucial to take into account the administrative intricacies and compliance requirements that come with each option. Noncorporation structures like sole proprietorships and partnerships require less paperwork and have lower setup costs. Conversely, corporations, including S and C corporations, involve more extensive compliance with state and federal regulations, demanding greater record-keeping and formalities. Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) strike a balance but still require an operating agreement. All business structures face annual compliance, with corporations needing to file separate tax returns and maintain corporate minutes. If you’re unsure, consider using business plan writing services or a business strategic plan template to help navigate these intricacies and guarantee you meet all obligations. Long-Term Business Goals When setting long-term business goals, you need to contemplate how your chosen structure can support growth potential and attract investment. For instance, if you’re looking to expand and bring in investors, a C corporation might be the best fit because of its ability to issue multiple classes of stock. Conversely, if flexibility in ownership changes is essential for your plans, an LLC can offer the adaptability you require during the process of safeguarding personal assets. Growth Potential Considerations Evaluating your business structure is crucial for aligning with long-term growth potential. When crafting your business plan, consider these key factors: C Corporation: This structure allows unlimited shareholders and various stock classes, ideal for attracting substantial investments and venture capital. LLC Flexibility: If you plan for rapid expansion, an LLC can easily add new members and adapt its management structure to meet evolving needs. S Corporation Benefits: An S corporation offers pass-through taxation and limits personal liability, making it appealing for small to medium enterprises focused on growth. Understanding these options can provide valuable business plan help, ensuring your chosen business structure supports your long-term goals efficiently. Investment Attraction Strategies How can you effectively attract investment to support your long-term business goals? First, consider structuring your business as a C corporation, which facilitates rapid growth and appeals to venture capitalists by allowing multiple classes of stock and unlimited shareholders. Next, develop a clear business model alongside detailed financial projections to illustrate your business’s viability and scalability. When crafting your business plan, incorporate a business proposal example to improve your presentation. Offering equity incentives, such as stock options, can likewise help attract top talent and investors. Furthermore, maintain transparency in financial reporting and compliance to build trust. Finally, create a compelling pitch deck that outlines your business strategy, market opportunity, and growth potential, making it easier to attract the necessary investment. Changing Structures as Your Business Grows As your business grows, you may find it necessary to reassess and change your business structure to better accommodate increased complexity and liability protection. Here are three key considerations in your business planning and strategy: Changing Structures: You might move from a sole proprietorship or partnership to an LLC or corporation to better manage risk and liability. Tax Implications: Be aware that changing your structure can have tax consequences, especially when converting from an LLC to a corporation, which may involve asset transfer taxes. Future Growth Planning: Choose a structure that allows for flexibility in ownership changes, ensuring it aligns with your long-term business objectives. Seeking professional guidance during this change is crucial to comply with legal requirements and manage financial ramifications effectively. Resources for Entrepreneurs Steering the path of entrepreneurship involves not only selecting the appropriate business structure but also accessing valuable resources that can support your growth and success. For instance, you can explore the “50 Best Small-Business Ideas to Start in 2025” for inspiration. Small-business grants offer free funding opportunities, whereas thorough guides on small business loans help you evaluate financing options. Effective business naming tips are vital for building your brand identity. Finally, grasping various small business financing options, from traditional loans to innovative solutions, is fundamental. Here’s a quick overview: Resource Type Description Grants Free funding opportunities without repayment Financing Options Comparison guides for loans and innovative funding Business Naming Tips Strategies for enhancing brand recognition These resources can help you in how to create a business plan and develop a robust business module sample. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Structure of a Good Business Plan? A good business plan typically includes several key sections. Start with an executive summary, which gives a brief overview of your business idea and goals. Follow this with a market analysis to understand your target audience and competition. Next, outline your marketing strategy for attracting and retaining customers. Include financial projections detailing expected income and expenses. Finally, provide an operational plan that describes your daily operations, such as staffing and production processes. What Are the 4 Types of Business Structure? The four primary types of business structures are sole proprietorship, partnership, limited liability company (LLC), and corporation. A sole proprietorship is owned by one person who faces unlimited liability. In a partnership, two or more individuals share ownership and profits, with taxes reported individually. An LLC offers limited liability protection and pass-through taxation. Corporations, including S corporations and C corporations, provide the highest liability protection, with S corporations avoiding double taxation whereas C corporations do not. Is It Better to Have an LLC or C Corp? Choosing between an LLC and a C Corporation depends on your business goals. An LLC offers personal liability protection, fewer compliance requirements, and pass-through taxation, making it simpler for smaller operations. Conversely, a C Corporation provides limited liability and the ability to raise capital through multiple classes of stock, but it faces double taxation and more administrative duties. Evaluate your growth aspirations and tax implications before deciding which structure suits you best. Should a Small Business Be an S Corp or C Corp? You should consider an S Corporation if you want to avoid double taxation and your business has fewer than 100 shareholders. This structure allows profits to pass through to your personal tax return. If you’re aiming for significant growth or seeking venture capital, a C Corporation might be better, as it offers more flexibility with multiple classes of stock and no limits on shareholders. Both options provide limited liability protection for your personal assets. Conclusion Choosing the right business structure is crucial for your venture’s success. Whether you opt for a sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC, or corporation, each option has distinct implications for liability, taxation, and operational flexibility. Assess your business goals, risk tolerance, and future growth potential to make an informed decision. As your business evolves, be prepared to reassess and possibly change your structure to align with new objectives. This proactive approach will help guarantee your business remains resilient and competitive. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "Ideal Business Structure for Your Business Plan" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Service accounting is a financial management approach particularly designed for service-based businesses, addressing their unique challenges. It involves precise revenue recognition, careful expense tracking, and differentiation between direct and indirect costs. By implementing effective service accounting practices, you can boost cash flow stability and improve project profitability. Comprehending its importance can lead to better decision-making and resource allocation, which are crucial in today’s competitive market. So, what key elements should you focus on to maximize your service accounting effectiveness? Key Takeaways Service accounting addresses financial challenges unique to intangible products, ensuring accurate revenue recognition and cost tracking. It emphasizes the importance of time tracking for billable hours, improving billing accuracy and project profitability. Unique revenue recognition methods are necessary due to the inseparability and perishability of services, impacting financial planning. Effective service accounting supports better resource allocation by monitoring work-in-progress and analyzing variances. Utilization of technology and automated tools enhances efficiency, cash flow management, and overall financial oversight in service-based businesses. Understanding Service Accounting When you consider the financial management of service-based businesses, comprehension of service accounting becomes fundamental. Service accounting addresses the unique financial challenges associated with intangible products, making valuation and inventory management complex. Key components include revenue recognition methods, such as milestone-based and percentage-of-completion approaches, which guarantee that income is recorded accurately. Tracking expenses is imperative, as service businesses must differentiate between direct and indirect costs. Time tracking systems play an important role in accurately monitoring billable hours, which assures proper compensation for services rendered. Furthermore, since services are perishable and can’t be stored, careful financial planning and cash flow monitoring become necessary to maintain steady income streams. Unique Features of Service-Based Businesses Service-based businesses have unique features that set them apart from traditional product-oriented companies. You’ll notice that services are intangible, meaning you can’t hold or store them like physical goods, which complicates value assessment and inventory management. Furthermore, the inseparability of production and consumption means that the service is created and experienced simultaneously, whereas the perishability of services highlights that unsold time or capacity can’t be saved for later, affecting your financial planning. Intangibility of Services Intangibility is a defining characteristic of services that sets them apart from physical products, greatly impacting how businesses operate and account for their offerings. Since services can’t be physically touched or stored, valuing them becomes complex, complicating inventory management. This intangibility poses challenges when measuring quality and customer satisfaction, as these factors can be subjective and vary widely among consumers. Furthermore, the simultaneous production and consumption of services demand that service-based businesses deliver value in real-time. As a result, customer perception and experience become paramount, greatly influencing repeat business and brand loyalty. To address these unique features, customized accounting practices must be employed to accurately reflect the revenue and expenses related to service delivery, ensuring effective financial management in the service industry. Inseparable Production and Consumption Inseparable production and consumption are fundamental characteristics of services that greatly influence how businesses operate. In service-based industries, you deliver and experience services simultaneously, which presents unique challenges in ensuring quality and customer satisfaction. This inseparability establishes a direct link between you, the service provider, and the consumer, making effective communication critical. Unlike tangible products, services can’t be stored or inventoried, meaning you must manage real-time demand and supply effectively to avoid revenue loss. As a result, investing in training and quality assurance is indispensable to maintain consistent service delivery. Variations in performance can directly affect customer perceptions, impacting satisfaction and financial stability, so anticipating customer needs and adjusting service capacity is fundamental to maintaining profitability. Perishability of Services The ability to store services for future use simply doesn’t exist, making perishability a defining feature of the service industry. If a service isn’t consumed when offered, it’s lost forever, impacting your revenue potential. This characteristic requires you to manage supply and demand carefully, as any unsold service capacity can’t be reclaimed, leading to potential financial losses. Effective scheduling and reservation systems are vital to optimize your service delivery and minimize the effects of perishability, ensuring resource utilization is efficient. Furthermore, you may need to implement dynamic pricing strategies to stimulate demand during off-peak times, helping balance cash flow and maximize profitability. Focusing on customer loyalty and repeat business is critical, as missed service opportunities can’t be recaptured. Key Elements of Service Accounting Service accounting plays a fundamental role in the financial health of service-oriented businesses, encompassing several key elements that assure effective management of resources and revenue. First, accurately tracking billable hours and expenses is imperative, especially since many service-based firms rely on time-based billing models. This guarantees you capture all potential income. Next, differentiating between direct costs, which relate to service delivery, and indirect costs, which can affect overall profitability, is crucial for maintaining financial clarity. Project accounting serves as another essential component; it includes budgeting, variance analysis, and monitoring work-in-progress (WIP) to align financial performance with project status. Finally, employing unique revenue recognition methods, like milestone-based and percentage of completion, allows you to reflect income accurately over time. Revenue Recognition Methods In relation to financial reporting in service-based businesses, selecting the right revenue recognition method is essential for accurately reflecting income. Two common approaches are milestone-based recognition and the percentage of completion method. With milestone-based revenue recognition, you recognize income based on the completion of specific project milestones, ensuring your reported income mirrors the progress of service delivery. Conversely, the percentage of completion method allows you to recognize revenue proportionally as work is completed, which is particularly beneficial for long-term contracts and project accounting. Expense Tracking and Management Expense tracking and management play a crucial role in the financial health of service-based businesses, as they differentiate between direct and indirect costs. Comprehending these distinctions helps you visualize your profitability better. Here are some key benefits of effective expense tracking: Cost Reduction: By identifying where your money goes, you can pinpoint areas for potential savings, improving overall efficiency. Informed Decision-Making: With accurate data, you can make timely financial decisions, reducing the risk of cash flow issues. Strategic Planning: Regularly reviewing your tracked expenses allows you to align your budgets with actual performance, facilitating better resource allocation. Implementing a robust bookkeeping system can improve your expense management, ensuring that all costs are monitored in real time. This proactive approach helps you maintain financial stability, allowing your service business to thrive. Importance of Time Tracking Accurate time tracking is essential for any service-based business, as it directly impacts your ability to bill clients correctly and manage projects efficiently. By carefully recording billable hours, you guarantee clients are charged appropriately for the services rendered. Effective time tracking not only improves billing accuracy—studies show it can enhance accuracy by up to 30%—but also increases project profitability. When you gain insights into how much time is spent on various tasks, you’re better positioned to identify inefficiencies and streamline operations. Implementing a time tracking system allows you to monitor employee productivity and workload distribution, leading to improved resource allocation. In addition, regular analysis of time tracking data can guide strategic decisions. This enables you to adjust service offerings or pricing models based on the actual time invested in service delivery, eventually strengthening your business’s financial health and operational efficiency. Project Accounting Essentials Project accounting serves as a vital foundation for managing the financial aspects of individual projects within a business. It focuses on tracking financial performance and costs associated with specific projects, ensuring that budgets are adhered to and profitability is maximized. Here are three key elements of project accounting: Budgeting and Variance Analysis: You must compare planned financial outcomes with actual performance to spot discrepancies and adjust as needed. Time Tracking Systems: Accurate tracking of billable hours is fundamental for allocating costs correctly, which improves overall financial management. Revenue Recognition: Methods like milestone-based or percentage of completion are significant for recording income accurately based on project progress. Regularly reviewing work-in-progress (WIP) helps align budgets with project status, ensuring effective management of financial resources throughout the project’s lifecycle. Best Practices for Effective Service Accounting Effective service accounting is essential for guaranteeing the financial health of service-based businesses. To achieve this, implementing robust bookkeeping systems is important for maintaining accurate financial records and guaranteeing compliance with accounting standards. Utilizing time-tracking tools greatly improves billing accuracy by closely monitoring billable hours, which are crucial for revenue generation. Regularly reviewing work-in-progress (WIP) enables you to align budgets with project statuses, enhancing financial oversight and resource allocation. Adopting accrual-based accounting offers a clearer financial picture by recognizing revenue and expenses when they occur, rather than when cash is exchanged. Moreover, monitoring cash flow is critical to maintain liquidity and stability, especially since cash flows in service businesses can be irregular and unpredictable. Common Challenges in Service Accounting Maneuvering the financial terrain of service-based businesses presents unique challenges that can complicate accounting practices. Here are some key issues you might face: Revenue Recognition: The intangible nature of services makes it tough to recognize revenue. You may need to use methods like milestone-based or percentage of completion for accurate reporting. Irregular Cash Flows: Service businesses often experience unpredictable income streams, which demand diligent cash flow management to maintain liquidity and guarantee financial stability. Perishability and Variability: Services can’t be stored, impacting financial planning, whereas the variability in service delivery complicates expense tracking and budgeting. Each service may incur different costs, requiring customized accounting approaches. These challenges necessitate a solid comprehension of service accounting practices to effectively manage your business’s financial health and secure sustainable growth. The Role of Technology in Service Accounting As service-based businesses navigate the intricacies of accounting, leveraging technology can notably improve operational efficiency and accuracy. Automation tools streamline processes like invoicing, expense tracking, and payroll management, considerably reducing time spent on manual tasks. AI-driven analytics, such as those provided by platforms like Emagia, offer real-time insights into your financial performance, enabling you to make informed decisions quickly. Cloud-based accounting software facilitates remote access to financial data, which boosts collaboration among teams and improves transparency in financial reporting. Moreover, integrating time-tracking tools within accounting systems guarantees accurate billing of billable hours, helping you maximize revenue during client satisfaction. Finally, advanced financial management software supports complex revenue recognition methods, like milestone-based and percentage of completion, which are vital for accurately reporting income in service-based businesses. Embracing these technologies is pivotal for maintaining a competitive edge in the service industry. Benefits of Professional Accounting Services In service-based businesses, the benefits of professional accounting services can greatly improve overall financial management. Here are three key advantages you should consider: Enhanced Financial Accuracy: Professional accountants guarantee careful record-keeping, reducing errors and discrepancies in your financial statements. This accuracy is essential for informed decision-making. Expert Tax Guidance: They provide valuable insights into tax compliance, helping you avoid penalties and optimize your tax liabilities through strategic planning. This support can greatly influence your bottom line. Time for Growth: By outsourcing your accounting needs, you can focus on core operations and business growth, freeing up valuable time to strategize and innovate. Additionally, accurate financial reporting promotes transparency and trust among investors and stakeholders, paving the way for potential investment opportunities. In the end, professional accounting services empower you to make informed decisions that drive growth and sustainability in your business. Frequently Asked Questions What Do You Mean by Service in Accounting? When you talk about service in accounting, you refer to the professional tasks provided to help businesses manage finances. These tasks include bookkeeping, tax preparation, and financial reporting. Unlike physical products, services in accounting focus on expertise and customized solutions for clients. Challenges arise from ensuring consistent quality and accurate revenue recognition. In the end, effective service accounting helps businesses remain compliant, improves financial transparency, and supports informed decision-making for future growth. What Are the 4 Types of Accounting? The four main types of accounting you should know are public accounting, management accounting, government accounting, and internal auditing. Public accounting provides services like tax preparation and audits for clients, whereas management accounting focuses on financial analysis to aid business decisions. Government accounting guarantees compliance with regulations at various governmental levels. Finally, internal auditing assesses a company’s internal controls, enhancing efficiency and identifying risks to improve overall compliance and performance. What Does Full Service Accounting Mean? Full service accounting means you get a wide range of financial services all in one place. This includes bookkeeping, tax preparation, financial reporting, payroll management, and auditing. Can You Provide Accounting Services Without a CPA? Yes, you can provide accounting services without a CPA. Many bookkeeping and accounting tasks, like payroll processing and tax preparation, don’t require a CPA’s certification. Non-CPA accountants can effectively manage these functions, especially for smaller businesses. Nonetheless, it’s essential to guarantee they’ve the necessary experience and knowledge of tax laws. For more complex financial needs, like audits or strategic planning, involving a CPA is typically recommended for the best results. Conclusion In conclusion, service accounting is crucial for managing the unique financial aspects of service-based businesses. By focusing on accurate revenue recognition, diligent expense tracking, and effective resource allocation, you can improve profitability and maintain cash flow stability. Adopting best practices and leveraging technology further supports informed decision-making. In the end, comprehension and implementing service accounting principles can lead to improved operational efficiency and stronger customer loyalty, helping your business thrive in a competitive environment. Image via Google Gemini This article, "What Is Service Accounting and Why Is It Important?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

While those electing cash could receive $12.50 per share, UWM's all-stock alternative remains unchanged from the company's initial agreement for Two Harbors. View the full article

Amazon Business is revitalizing the way small businesses approach procurement by launching Same-Day Delivery of fresh groceries across the U.S. This initiative aims to provide convenience and efficiency to small business owners who are increasingly seeking versatile solutions for their everyday needs. As one of the leading grocers in the U.S., with over $150 billion in gross sales, Amazon is positioned to enhance the grocery shopping experience for companies of all sizes. From small cafes to large corporate offices, businesses can now add thousands of fresh grocery items—including dairy, produce, and baked goods—to their existing Amazon Business orders. In total, this service is available in over 2,300 cities and towns nationwide. “We’re continuously innovating to make business buying simpler, faster, and more cost-effective for our customers,” said Shelley Salomon, VP of Amazon Business. This commitment to convenience comes during a time where businesses are looking to streamline operations and reduce the complexity of their supply chain. The ability to combine grocery orders with everyday business essentials such as office supplies is particularly noteworthy. Business customers can stock their break rooms with fruit, coffee, and snacks, while ordering printer ink and paper—all through a single platform. Such convenience could appeal especially to small business owners who often juggle multiple suppliers and complicated procurement processes. For Business Prime members, the service enhances value even further. Orders over $25 qualify for free Same-Day Delivery in most areas, allowing businesses to stay agile without incurring extra shipping costs. Those without a Prime membership can still benefit from Same-Day Delivery for a fee, streamlining their grocery procurement without being beholden to minimum order sizes. The logistics behind this offering also warrants attention. Amazon leverages an advanced temperature-controlled fulfillment network to ensure the quality of perishables. Each item undergoes a six-point quality check before delivery, which provides confidence and assurance for business owners concerned about the freshness of their groceries. Additionally, items with Amazon’s Freshness Guarantee badge reinforce quality, ensuring that businesses receive what they expect—fresh, high-quality food. However, while the opportunity for small businesses to integrate grocery procurement into their purchasing process is significant, there are some potential challenges to consider. Delivery windows must align with a company’s operating hours to ensure that perishable goods are received and stored properly. Business owners will need to create a system for managing delivery times effectively, especially if those hours are irregular or demand fluctuates seasonally. Moreover, while the integration of groceries into an already expansive Amazon Business catalog simplifies ordering, small business owners must evaluate whether consolidating suppliers may impact pricing or choice. Local grocery suppliers could offer competitive pricing or unique products that might not be available through Amazon, raising a question of whether a single-source provider is always the best option. As the grocery delivery service expands through 2026, Amazon Business aims to better serve smaller organizations alongside larger enterprises. Since its founding in the U.S. in 2015, Amazon Business has grown significantly, serving more than eight million organizations globally. This move further solidifies Amazon’s role as a strategic partner for businesses seeking a reliable supply chain solution, offering everything from office supplies to gourmet snacks for employees and clients. For small businesses looking to simplify their procurement processes and reduce the time spent managing multiple vendors, the integration of fresh groceries into Amazon Business could be a game changer. As quoted by Salomon, the focus remains on making buying “easier” and “more cost-effective,” which is a solid strategy for small business owners striving for efficiency. Small business owners interested in exploring these grocery options can visit the Same-Day Store within Amazon Business. Leveraging this new service could be a smart move for businesses looking to enhance their operations and satisfy their employees and customers with fresh, quality products. For more insights, visit the original press release here. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Amazon Business Launches Same-Day Delivery for Fresh Groceries Nationwide" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Amazon Business is revitalizing the way small businesses approach procurement by launching Same-Day Delivery of fresh groceries across the U.S. This initiative aims to provide convenience and efficiency to small business owners who are increasingly seeking versatile solutions for their everyday needs. As one of the leading grocers in the U.S., with over $150 billion in gross sales, Amazon is positioned to enhance the grocery shopping experience for companies of all sizes. From small cafes to large corporate offices, businesses can now add thousands of fresh grocery items—including dairy, produce, and baked goods—to their existing Amazon Business orders. In total, this service is available in over 2,300 cities and towns nationwide. “We’re continuously innovating to make business buying simpler, faster, and more cost-effective for our customers,” said Shelley Salomon, VP of Amazon Business. This commitment to convenience comes during a time where businesses are looking to streamline operations and reduce the complexity of their supply chain. The ability to combine grocery orders with everyday business essentials such as office supplies is particularly noteworthy. Business customers can stock their break rooms with fruit, coffee, and snacks, while ordering printer ink and paper—all through a single platform. Such convenience could appeal especially to small business owners who often juggle multiple suppliers and complicated procurement processes. For Business Prime members, the service enhances value even further. Orders over $25 qualify for free Same-Day Delivery in most areas, allowing businesses to stay agile without incurring extra shipping costs. Those without a Prime membership can still benefit from Same-Day Delivery for a fee, streamlining their grocery procurement without being beholden to minimum order sizes. The logistics behind this offering also warrants attention. Amazon leverages an advanced temperature-controlled fulfillment network to ensure the quality of perishables. Each item undergoes a six-point quality check before delivery, which provides confidence and assurance for business owners concerned about the freshness of their groceries. Additionally, items with Amazon’s Freshness Guarantee badge reinforce quality, ensuring that businesses receive what they expect—fresh, high-quality food. However, while the opportunity for small businesses to integrate grocery procurement into their purchasing process is significant, there are some potential challenges to consider. Delivery windows must align with a company’s operating hours to ensure that perishable goods are received and stored properly. Business owners will need to create a system for managing delivery times effectively, especially if those hours are irregular or demand fluctuates seasonally. Moreover, while the integration of groceries into an already expansive Amazon Business catalog simplifies ordering, small business owners must evaluate whether consolidating suppliers may impact pricing or choice. Local grocery suppliers could offer competitive pricing or unique products that might not be available through Amazon, raising a question of whether a single-source provider is always the best option. As the grocery delivery service expands through 2026, Amazon Business aims to better serve smaller organizations alongside larger enterprises. Since its founding in the U.S. in 2015, Amazon Business has grown significantly, serving more than eight million organizations globally. This move further solidifies Amazon’s role as a strategic partner for businesses seeking a reliable supply chain solution, offering everything from office supplies to gourmet snacks for employees and clients. For small businesses looking to simplify their procurement processes and reduce the time spent managing multiple vendors, the integration of fresh groceries into Amazon Business could be a game changer. As quoted by Salomon, the focus remains on making buying “easier” and “more cost-effective,” which is a solid strategy for small business owners striving for efficiency. Small business owners interested in exploring these grocery options can visit the Same-Day Store within Amazon Business. Leveraging this new service could be a smart move for businesses looking to enhance their operations and satisfy their employees and customers with fresh, quality products. For more insights, visit the original press release here. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Amazon Business Launches Same-Day Delivery for Fresh Groceries Nationwide" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

For me, Venmo has always been the app to settle quick debts. Someone puts their card down at dinner, and I Venmo them my share; I covered costs on a trip, and the group Venmos me in return. But Venmo has always seemed like it wanted to be more than that. The app feels like a hybrid between a banking service, a social media platform, and a place to buy and sell crypto. None of that is changing with its new redesign; in fact, it feels like it's leaning into that multi-use experience more than ever. But it is making a big privacy change, at least for new users, that probably should have been there from launch. How Venmo is changing in the coming weeks Venmo is launching a redesigned app over the coming weeks, and the changes aren't subtle: The overhauled UI definitely looks like an app launching in 2026, with large rounded blocks, bolded names and text, and updated imagery throughout. Over time, the company also plans to introduce new sections to the app, which it calls "surfaces." There's "Send," which contains the usual Venmo features like fund sharing and payment scheduling; "Money," which lets you buy and sell crypto and link your account to other services; and "Rewards," which hosts Venmo's cash back program and offers. If you're an existing Venmo user, you'll notice these changes immediately, of course. But perhaps the biggest change of all only impacts new Venmo users—in a good way, mind you. Going forward, users signing up for new Venmo accounts will have their transactions set to private by default. They can change this option, of course, but if they don't adjust their settings, all of the payments they use Venmo for will be hidden from their friends and contacts, rather than populate on the main feed. This is a pretty radical change for Venmo. Throughout Venmo's history, new users' profiles were set to public from the get-go. If you didn't intervene, your transactions would be broadcast to anyone who follows you or the person you paid: That's a good thing if you're Venmo, which wants the extra engagement; or, perhaps, a nosey user who wants to see who's paying who for what. But most of us probably don't want or need the Venmo world knowing our financial business, even if we don't have anything to "hide." As such, this change is a good one. Of course, Venmo doesn't force you to display your transactions publicly. You can change this setting at any time, and make all of your transactions private by default. You can also set individual payments as private, if you have some transactions you want to keep off the timeline. But many (if not most) users aren't going to go out of their way to change the default options after setting up their accounts. As such, I'm willing to bet that a good percentage of the transactions visible on Venmo aren't from people who want to share that information. That wouldn't be a problem had Venmo set their accounts to private from the start. How to set your Venmo account to privateIf you have a new Venmo account, your privacy situation is set. But if you've had your account awhile, you might be set to public if you've never changed it. Luckily, if you want to be private, it's easy: Open the app, then head to your profile. Hit the settings gear in the top right, then choose "Privacy." Here, make sure "Private" is checked off. If you're okay sharing with just friends, you can choose "Friends" as well. But for a totally off-the-grid experience, hit "Private." You can also set individual payments to Private if you don't want to hide all your payments. Once you reach the pay screen, hit "Public" in the same line as "Privacy," then choose "Private" or "Friends." Now, your transactions will still appear in the feed, but will be visible only to you and the other party involved. You can tell from the little lock icon that appears in the payment. View the full article

SEO has always been a fight for the first page of Google. Every toolchain, audit, and content brief assumes that Google’s ranking systems evaluate a relatively fixed set of roughly 20 to 30 candidate pages before final rankings are determined. Google has kept that set small because evaluating more pages is computationally expensive. Google’s VP of Search acknowledged the constraint in federal court. The company’s CEO later confirmed the hardware bottleneck behind it. Google’s research division has now published a technique designed to reduce those costs. If the candidate set widens, the rules of the last decade stop working. Why the ranking window is 20 to 30 results wide Here’s the exchange that matters from Day 24 of United States v. Google in October 2023. DOJ counsel Kenneth Dintzer cross-examining Pandu Nayak, Google vice president of Search, from transcript page 6431: Q: RankBrain looks at the top 20 or 30 documents and may adjust their initial score. Is that right? A: That is correct. Q: And RankBrain is an expensive process to run? A: It’s certainly more expensive than some of our other ranking components. Q: So that’s, in part, one of the reasons why you just wait until you’re down to the final 20 or 30 before you run RankBrain? A: That is correct. Q: RankBrain is too expensive to run on hundreds or thousands of results? A: That is correct. Four consecutive confirmations. The deep-learning component of Google ranking that SEOs have built a decade of theory around is deliberately withheld from the bulk of the index because Google can’t afford to apply it more broadly. The architecture feeding that reranking window is equally revealing. Earlier in the same testimony, at transcript page 6406, Nayak described classical postings-list retrieval to Judge Mehta: “[T]he core of the retrieval mechanism is looking at the words in the query, walking down the list, it’s called the postings list… [Y]ou can’t walk the lists all the way to the end because it will be too long.” The corpus gets culled to “tens of thousands” of pages before ranking begins, and from that pool only the top 20 to 30 results reach the deep-learning layer. That runs against how most SEO commentary describes Google. The industry treats RankBrain, BERT, and other deep learning components as the definition of how Google ranks. Under oath, Nayak described them as expensive optional layers applied to a narrow window that classical retrieval has already culled. Every practice in this industry that treats the top 20 to 30 as the competitive surface assumes it’ll stay that size. The testimony makes clear that the assumption is contingent, not foundational. The number could have been 50 or 500. It landed at 20 to 30 because that’s what Google’s hardware budget would support, and the constraint has held. The constraint that held the number there is now in public view, and Google has published what comes next. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with The wall and the algorithm that climbs it On April 7, Sundar Pichai sat down with John Collison and Elad Gil on the Cheeky Pint podcast and described a set of hard supply constraints that no amount of CapEx will solve in the short term. The operative line: “To be very clear, we are supply-constrained. We are seeing the demand across all the surface areas.” Pichai named five specific bottlenecks: wafer starts at the foundries, memory, power and energy, permitting for data centers, and skilled labor. Of the five, he pressed hardest on memory: “There is no way that the leading memory companies are going to dramatically improve their capacity.” For the 2026 to 2027 horizon, Google can’t buy its way past the memory bottleneck. Higher prices won’t create more capacity. That matters because nearest-neighbor vector search, the mechanism behind modern semantic retrieval, is memory-bound. The wider the set of candidate pages a system can consider, the more memory it needs. The tight coupling between memory supply and retrieval breadth is what sets the cost boundary Nayak testified about. On March 24, two weeks before the Cheeky Pint episode, Google Research published a blog post describing a technique called TurboQuant. The corresponding arXiv paper, “TurboQuant: Online Vector Quantization with Near-optimal Distortion Rate,” was authored by researchers at Google Research, Google DeepMind, and NYU. The headline claims: 4x to 4.5x compression of vector representations with performance “comparable to unquantized models” on the LongBench benchmark. Nearest-neighbor search indexing time reduced to “virtually zero.” Outperforms existing product quantization techniques on recall. The paper covers two applications: KV-cache compression inside Gemini, and nearest-neighbor search in vector databases. Most coverage has focused on the Gemini application. The search-stack application is the nearest-neighbor-search half, and it’s the one relevant to the cost boundary Nayak described. If indexing is virtually free and memory per vector drops by 4x, the economics that held RankBrain at 20 to 30 candidates no longer apply. A system running on the same hardware could plausibly evaluate a candidate set several times larger. TurboQuant hasn’t been confirmed as deployed in Google Search. TechCrunch reported at the time of announcement that it remained a lab breakthrough, and the March 2026 core update carried no public commentary from Google linking it to retrieval efficiency or vector quantization. Google has published the algorithm but hasn’t yet deployed it. Google has been running quantized vector search in production for years through ScaNN. TurboQuant extends that approach rather than introducing it. The question has shifted from whether the cost boundary can be moved to what SEOs do before it moves. What to do before the boundary moves Waiting for SERPs to confirm that retrieval has widened before adjusting is the losing strategy. The competitive surface is shifting. By the time it’s visible in rank-tracking tools, the positioning work of the next cycle is already done. Three practical shifts are worth making now. 1. Measure whether your pages enter candidate sets Rank tracking tools measure position within the set. They say nothing about whether a page was eligible for the set in the first place. In classical Search the distinction matters less because the set is narrow. In AI-mediated retrieval, and in a wider RankBrain-style window once it arrives, the distinction is the entire game. The fastest check is server log analysis. Two classes of retrieval user agents matter. Search index crawlers build the corpus AI systems pull from. Some examples include: OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search). Claude-SearchBot (Claude search). PerplexityBot. Applebot (which also feeds Apple Intelligence). User-driven agents fetch pages on demand when someone asks an AI model about a topic your page covers: ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, and Perplexity-User. These don’t execute JavaScript, so they’re invisible to GA4 and any analytics tool that depends on client-side tags. If the pages you care about aren’t appearing against either list, they aren’t in the candidate sets those systems construct, and ranking work can’t put them there. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. 2. Audit pages for retrieval-friendliness separately from ranking-friendliness Ranking and retrieval reward different properties. The ranking signals you already know include topical authority, link equity, and query-intent match. Retrieval systems look for something else: a clear, self-contained, citable claim that can be extracted and evaluated without reading the whole document. A page written for ranking often buries its main claim under context-setting, caveats, and SEO-driven preamble. In a retrieval-ready page, the claim sits in the first 100 words, attached to an entity or statistic a retrieval system can verify, and surrounded by evidence worth citing. Most sites we audit fail this test even when they rank well. 3. Stop treating the top 20 to 30 pages as a fixed target The window is a hardware constraint that has held for years because no one at Google could afford to widen it. Briefing content against “what ranks in positions 1 to 10 for this query” is briefing against a snapshot of a window that’s narrower than it needs to be because of hardware economics. When the economics change, the window will widen. Content built to compete inside a narrow set will face broader competition once it expands. The margin goes to content that was strong enough to enter a wider candidate set from the start. None of the three requires predicting when TurboQuant or its descendants ship to production. They require acknowledging that retrieval economics is moving and positioning for what lies on the other side of the move, rather than for the current snapshot. See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with 2026 is a year of change for SEO The test is simple. Pull your server logs for the last 30 days. Count the retrieval user agents that have hit the pages you care about. If the answer is zero, or close to it, no amount of ranking work will move that number. The competitive surface is shifting under you. The rest follows. View the full article

A reader writes: This is a completely low-stakes question, spurred on by the town Facebook group. Our province mandated that all job postings need to have a salary included. This is law. There have been two instances where two local restaurants have put out job postings without the salary. Someone pointed this out in the comments and it became a huge issue, where people fought back saying it was unreasonable for the owner who are small town business owners to know this (basic, now three-year-old law) bit. It eventually culminated in two different ways: a giant Reddit post where restaurant apologized and asked for resumes and still didn’t put in the salary in the post that once it was pointed out, caused the post to be locked. The second restaurant made a very long post about how they run their business is how they run their business and they can report them all they want. So I ask you and the readers, what would you do as a bystander to this? On one hand, I think restaurants chronically underpay and take advantage of young workers and it’s not hard to put in the basic $18-$20/hour wage in the job description. Reporting the infractions very easy — just a form with a screen shot. On the other hand, local institutional restaurants are cherished members of the community and clearly have their supporters. Them closing would hurt the community (and the local food scene). Again, no skin in this game. I know both were reported so they will be looked at by the government. I’m willing to cut a small business a little bit of slack on not knowing about a change in the law, but once they’re informed, they get zero slack if they continue not to follow it. “We run our business how we run our business, regardless of what the law requires” should get zero respect or support when their motivation is to continue disadvantaging workers. If they don’t like the law, they can lobby their legislators to change it (a very good reason to keep up with discussions about possible legal changes in their area!). And should they be such cherished members of the community if they’re openly flouting the community’s democratically-passed laws? They’re not even engaging on the issue, like by explaining their opposition to the requirement and how it affects their ability to stay in business — which still wouldn’t get them out of following the law but would be a far more respectful way to engage than the “too bad, we don’t care” stance they took instead. I’m with everyone who reported them. The post local businesses refused to comply with our salary transparency law appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

In our 2026 Performance Marketing survey with Harris Poll, we asked more than 300 marketing decision-makers about the trends and investments they predicted for 2026. The biggest takeaway—75% report increased expectations for accountability. And nearly two-thirds say leaders now evaluate them based on pipeline contribution rather than traditional top-of-funnel metrics like lead volume. For years, marketers have argued for a more meaningful seat at the revenue table, one that is measured on business outcomes instead of activity. That shift is happening. Leaders are asking marketing teams to deliver revenue outcomes without giving them the visibility to understand, prove, or optimize how those outcomes happen. THE VISIBILITY GAP Top-of-the-funnel, measurement looks strong. Most marketers report high confidence in tracking engagement, leads, and marketing qualified leads (MQLs). These metrics are well-instrumented, easy to capture, and deeply embedded in existing systems. But as prospects move deeper into the funnel—where teams create pipeline, progress deals, and realize revenue—that confidence erodes. When it comes to measuring pipeline influence, deal progression, and marketing’s contribution to revenue, confidence drops significantly. Only 19% say they are very confident in their ability to measure performance across the full funnel. This creates a fundamental disconnect. Marketing is increasingly accountable for revenue, yet it lacks consistent visibility into the very stages where revenue is determined. The issue shows up most clearly in the middle of the funnel where early engagement transitions into real opportunity, interest becomes intent, and marketing’s influence should be most visible. Marketers can see when a prospect downloads a piece of content, clicks on an ad, or when a deal closes. But how engagement turns into pipeline, what accelerates a deal, what causes it to stall—remains frustratingly opaque. This black box in the mid-funnel forces marketers to rely on inference rather than insight. They are left connecting dots that their systems were never designed to link, making it difficult to determine which efforts are driving pipeline and which are generating noise. WHY MEASUREMENT BREAKS DOWN IN A MODERN BUYING ENVIRONMENT It would be easy to frame this as a reporting issue, but the reality is more complex. Structural issues drive the breakdown in visibility, rooted in the way marketing data, processes, and measurement models have evolved independently of how modern buying works. Data remains deeply fragmented. Core systems like marketing automation platforms, CRM tools, and analytics solutions often operate in silos, each capturing a different slice of the customer journey without fully connecting to the others. Without a unified view, teams can’t track how individual touchpoints accumulate into meaningful pipeline outcomes. Even when teams have the data, the models used to interpret it fall short. Traditional attribution approaches, whether single-touch or simplified multi-touch, were designed for a far more linear buying process. They struggle to account for multiple stakeholders engaging across multiple channels over extended periods. When leaders prioritize what is easiest to measure rather than what is most meaningful, these models often produce a distorted view of performance that underrepresents marketing’s true impact. At the same time, organizational misalignment continues to undermine conversion. Many marketers point to breakdowns in sales follow-up, inconsistent definitions of qualified leads, and a lack of shared processes as key reasons why strong engagement fails to translate into pipeline. Even high-quality leads can stall if they are not acted on quickly or with the right context, creating friction at the exact point where momentum matters most. Layer on top of that the complexity of modern buying behavior, and the challenge becomes clearer. B2B buyers no longer follow a predictable linear path. They research anonymously, engage across digital and offline channels, and make decisions as part of a group rather than as individuals. Buyers do much of this activity outside trackable systems, further widening the gap between what marketers can see and what influences outcomes. The result is a measurement environment that captures activity but struggles to explain impact. Marketers can generate engagement at scale, yet many report that high-performing campaigns at the top of the funnel frequently fail to translate into meaningful pipeline contribution. This creates a dangerous dynamic, where teams optimize for metrics that are visible rather than those that are valuable. FROM ATTRIBUTION TO PIPELINE MOVEMENT If the goal is to align marketing with revenue, then measurement must evolve to reflect how revenue is generated. Instead of asking which touchpoint generated a lead, more organizations are starting to ask a more important question: What moved the opportunity forward? This represents a fundamental change in how performance is defined. It moves the focus away from attribution as a retrospective exercise and toward pipeline movement as a forward-looking one. It requires tighter alignment between marketing and sales, ensuring teams not only generate engagement but also effectively convert it. Without it, even the most sophisticated measurement framework will fall short. Because if leaders evaluate marketing on revenue outcomes, they need the infrastructure to understand and influence those outcomes with confidence. The future of performance marketing won’t depend on who generates the most leads or even the most engagement. It will be defined by who can see, measure, and optimize how pipeline moves. Until then, marketing teams will continue to operate in a state of partial visibility, held accountable for results they cannot fully explain. And that is not a performance problem. It is a measurement one. Keith Turco is CEO of Madison Logic. View the full article

The venture, supported by Blackstone affiliate Brio Homebuilder Solutions, aims to help build more than 50,000 homes annually so they can be sold to the public, the investment giant said in a statement Monday. View the full article

Are you planning your PPC channel budgets by comparing Google Ads, Meta Ads, GA4, and your CRM/CMS data? Since those data don’t align, what do you report on? And how do you make sure you’re optimizing for real impact? If you think you need better tracking, cleaner UTMs, and maybe a more sophisticated analytics setup, you’re not alone. But more often than not, the issue is something else entirely. Let’s call it the attribution trap. The main problem is that an entire generation of marketers has been taught to be data-driven. If configured correctly, analytics tools are supposed to tell you what’s working. Just follow the data. But attribution can quickly become misleading. Without the right framework, marketers end up allocating budgets based on incomplete insights, often with damaging business consequences. Let’s step back for a moment: Attribution allocates conversion credit to channels. That’s useful. However, attribution can’t tell you which of those conversions your channels actually caused. Does this sound overly academic? It isn’t. Understanding this distinction is key to fixing the measurement problem. So let’s look at why attribution fails, how to triangulate your existing data, and whether incrementality testing is the right next step for your client. Why ads, analytics, and CRM numbers never match Before fixing anything, you need to understand that aligning ad networks, GA4, and your CRM simply isn’t possible. These systems were built for different purposes, use different methodologies, and measure different moments in the customer journey. Your customer journey as a framework Say someone clicked a Meta Ads ad, got retargeted on YouTube, then searched for your client’s brand on Google before converting — all within seven days. Using the default attribution windows, both Meta and Google Ads will report one conversion. GA4 and your CRM will only show one, most likely crediting Google Ads paid search. Did Meta Ads invent that “duplicate” conversion? No. Meta Ads has no visibility into Google Ads interactions. How could it know the conversion was supposedly a duplicate? Conversely, GA4 and your CRM will almost certainly ignore Meta Ads. Should you follow those “insights” and reallocate Meta Ads budget to Google Ads branded search? Probably not. Structural differences as diagnosis enhancers Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there: Attribution date: Ad platforms attribute conversions to the day the click occurred, while GA4 and CRMs typically report on the day the conversion happened. If your customer journey is long, that creates additional discrepancies. Cross-device behavior: A user who clicks a Google Ads ad on mobile, returns on desktop through SEO, and converts will generate a conversion across ad, analytics, and CRM tools. So far, so good. But Google Ads and your CRM will disagree on the source because your CRM won’t have “merged” the mobile and desktop visitors into one user. Privacy restrictions: Ad blockers, browser-level tracking prevention, and cookie consent banners often mean a large share of conversions isn’t measured. Sometimes ad networks fill that gap with modeled conversions, but your CRM still won’t see the actual source. The latter two issues are fixable through better configuration, especially server-side tagging, offline conversion imports, and consistent UTMs. But the structural divergence remains, so you can’t expect 100% correlation between those tools. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with Your single source of truth: The attribution trap Once teams accept that the numbers differ, the next move is often choosing a single source of truth — oftentimes GA4 or the CRM — and sticking with it. That’s where the attribution trap closes. Every tool follows an attribution model. And whatever the model — first-click, last-click, linear, time decay, or data-driven — it’s fundamentally limited. Every attribution model has blind spots Last-click. The easiest model to understand. Also the easiest to game. It rewards the final touchpoint, typically branded search, and systematically undervalues demand generation. First-click. The opposite. It rewards discovery and ignores the touchpoints that moved someone from interested to converted. Linear and time-decay. They feel more balanced, right? True. But they’re also largely arbitrary. Why should equal credit go to every touchpoint? Why should recency determine value? Customer journeys don’t follow strict rules. Data-driven. This model is often presented as the most sophisticated option. Trust the ad network or analytics platform to identify the attribution model that best reflects reality. In practice, it’s still a black box. If it were truly that reliable, platforms would provide more visibility into how it works. What happens depending on your source of truth Hopefully, you now have a better grasp of the deeper issue. Attribution answers this question: Given that a conversion happened, which touchpoints should get credit? By narrowing your decision-making process to a single tool, you can’t escape the blind spots of whichever attribution model it follows. If you rely solely on your CRM, you’ll be driven by last-click attribution, meaning you’ll mostly focus on branded search. A few years later, you may realize demand has dried up despite strong results according to your single source of truth. On the opposite end of the spectrum, relying only on ad platform data means reporting inflated results. Think 2x, 3x, or even 4x more revenue than what the finance team actually reports. You end up increasing marketing budgets while finance tells you to stop — rightfully so. Again, GA4 sounds like the grown-up in the room. Not quite. That’s because it only measures the on-site portion of the customer journey. What about awareness campaigns designed to generate views or ad recall? They don’t necessarily generate website visits. Once you realize all these tools have fundamental flaws and blind spots, someone will inevitably suggest incrementality. In other words: Did this campaign cause conversions that otherwise wouldn’t have happened? Let’s look at that for a moment. Incrementality tests: The perfect solution? Incrementality measures the results generated because of your campaign — conversions that wouldn’t have existed without the ad. Think of two parallel universes: the gap between the world where the ad ran and the world where it didn’t is your incremental impact. Everything else is activity you would’ve captured anyway. Attribution vs. incrementality This matters more than it might seem. A significant share of reported campaign conversions — especially in retargeting and branded search — comes from people who would’ve converted regardless. They were already in-market, already familiar with your brand, and already close to a decision. Showing them an ad and then claiming credit for the conversion is what attribution does. Incrementality testing measures how much of that credit is real. For budget decisions, that distinction is everything. A retargeting campaign reporting strong ROAS through attribution might deliver almost no incremental value. Cut it, and conversions barely move. Keep it, and you’re paying for the illusion of performance in that “single source of truth.” How to test for incrementality Incrementality testing requires experiments with two groups: one that sees the ad and one that doesn’t. Then you measure the difference in outcomes. Here are the most common approaches: Geo holdout. Divide your market into comparable geographic regions, run campaigns in some while going dark in others, and measure the difference in conversions. It’s practical, reliable, and relatively easy to set up. Audience holdout. Platforms like Google and Meta let you create a holdout group — a percentage of your target audience intentionally excluded from seeing ads. From there, the process mirrors geo holdout testing. One major caveat: It relies on ad platform data. That means you should only compare incrementality across campaigns within the same ad network. Otherwise, it’s pointless. Time-based testing. Pause a campaign for a defined period and measure what happens to overall conversion volume. If performance holds, the campaign likely wasn’t incremental. This approach is high-risk: seasonality, competitors, and external events can blur the results. And if the campaign was incremental, you’ve just hurt performance during the test period. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Is incrementality right for you? If you’re running larger budgets — think roughly €1 million per month or more — you’re probably already familiar with these concepts. So let’s assume you’re operating at a smaller scale. In that case, incrementality often isn’t actionable. Reliable tests require meaningful differences between test and control groups, which means large amounts of data. And generating that data requires significant spend. That said, you can still use shortcuts for likely problem areas, especially branded search. Check the auction insights report to see whether competitors are heavily bidding on your brand. If they are, you probably need branded search campaigns to capture the demand you created. If they aren’t, you can likely pause those campaigns, let SEO capture the demand, and save some ad spend. That said, you can still use shortcuts for likely problem areas, especially branded search. Check the auction insights report to see whether competitors are heavily bidding on your brand. If they are, you probably need branded search campaigns to capture the demand you created. If they aren’t, you can likely pause those campaigns, let SEO capture the demand, and save some ad spend. Triangulation: The actionable decision-making process So if attribution is fundamentally flawed and incrementality is mostly reserved for top-tier advertisers, what’s left? Triangulation. Use the tools you already have while staying aware of their inherent flaws. And educate clients or leadership teams so they don’t blindly follow a “single source of truth.” Here’s what it looks like in practice. Start with your CRM/CMS Those systems record actual deals and revenue. Treat every other number as an attempt to explain them. When Google Ads and Meta Ads report a combined $50K in revenue, while Shopify shows “only” $35,000, Shopify reflects reality. Better yet, it’s the only system that can reliably tell you whether a conversion came from a new or existing customer. Ad platforms don’t make that distinction reliably. That lets you measure nCAC (new customer acquisition cost), anchoring budget decisions around customers who otherwise wouldn’t have found you. Then superimpose your customer journey onto ad platform results. That $15K gap represents the ad platforms’ interpretation of their contribution. Your job is to understand each campaign in the context of the customer journey and identify where deduplication is needed. For example, if you run both Demand Gen and Meta retargeting campaigns, there’s almost certainly overlap. So will be the results. That’s when time-based incrementality tests, if available, can help determine which channel performs better. Improve on triangulation Attribution windows: Long customer journeys make performance harder to interpret. Try segmenting campaigns around specific stages of the customer journey and adjust attribution windows and micro-conversions accordingly. Smaller attribution windows are often better at driving the right outcomes when configured properly. Track ratios: The gaps between ad platform conversions and CRM/CMS data should remain relatively stable. Build a simple report that tracks those relationships over time. If the ratios hold, your measurement framework is stable. If they break, investigate — there may be an incrementality insight hiding there. Triangulation won’t give you a single clean number. But it will give you a defensible, consistent framework for making decisions. That’s far more valuable than false precision. See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with Welcome to the real world The teams that waste the most time on measurement are the ones trying to force three systems to produce the same number, or searching for the attribution model that finally feels fair. The teams that make the best decisions accept that reality is more complex than a single source of truth and build the data skills needed to reflect that complexity. So make sure your decision-making process is as close to reality as possible — and embrace the question marks. View the full article

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google officially drops support for FAQ rich results...View the full article

Long before this week’s trip to China, President Donald The President was already predicting on social media that his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, would “give me a big, fat hug when I get there.” But Beijing’s deep economic ties to Iran, as well as trade tensions over tariff threats stretching back to The President’s first term, could crimp the good feelings when The President flies to Beijing this week — even though the Republican president has for years effusively praised Xi, making it clear he sees China’s leader as a competitor strong enough to warrant his respect and admiration. The President lately isn’t very fond of long plane rides or extended stretches away from the White House or his properties in Florida and New Jersey. He arrives in Beijing on Wednesday night and the next morning will take part in a welcome ceremony and meet one-on-one with Xi before the two leaders tour the Temple of Heaven — a religious complex dating to the 15th century symbolizing the relationship between Earth and heaven. The President will attend a state banquet on Thursday evening and then have a tea and working lunch with Xi on Friday before leaving, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Sunday. She said they will discuss creating a new Board of Trade to keep their countries talking on economic issues, as well talking up key industries like energy, aerospace and agriculture. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said Monday that Beijing is willing to work with the U.S., based on equality and mutual respect to expand cooperation, manage differences, and add stability to a turbulent world. The diplomacy between the leaders “plays an irreplaceable strategic guiding role” in the bilateral relation, he said. There will be plenty of ceremonial splendor, but the grandeur is not expected to rival The President’s first visit to China in 2017, which Beijing dubbed a “state visit-plus.” “Even before this whole conflagration with Iran, they weren’t going to go state visit-plus like last time, just because things are tense,” said Jonathan Czin, a former director for China at the National Security Council during the Biden administration. Xi’s ‘better understanding’ of The President On The President’s first-term trip, China rolled out the red carpet for his arrival, with a band playing military music and children waving flags and chanting “Welcome.” Xi offered a tour of the Forbidden City. The President and first lady Melania The President even had a private dinner there. The President was the first foreign leader since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949 to experience what was once reserved for emperors. The following morning brought another welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People and featured a military parade. There also was a state banquet in The President’s honor with video highlights from the Chinese leader’s previous visit to Florida and a clip of The President’s granddaughter Arabella singing in Chinese. Ali Wyne, senior U.S.-China research and advocacy adviser for the Washington nonprofit the Crisis Group, said the “Chinese delegation will likely do its utmost to ensure that The President leaves Beijing believing that he has just concluded the most extraordinary state visit of his two presidencies.” But, he said, the “pomp and circumstance would serve a different role now than they did when he first visited Beijing” because “Xi has a much better understanding of The President, and the administration’s own national security strategy and national defense strategy recognize China as a near-peer.” Expectations for what gets accomplished could be lower this time, said Czin, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. He predicted that the Chinese may not offer major breakthroughs on trade or anything else because they are “working backward from our midterm elections” with the theory that the closer they get to Election Day “the more leverage they are going to have.” The GOP is focused on retaining control of Congress, even as polling shows most Americans are unhappy with The President’s economic policies and believe that the United States went too far in Iran. Still, the White House argues that The President’s previous firm hand with Beijing on tariffs — which the Supreme Court subsequently struck down — means the U.S. will remain in a strong position. “President The President cares about results, not symbols,” Kelly said. “But even still, the president has a great relationship with President Xi, and the upcoming summit in Beijing will be both symbolically and substantively significant.” The President and Xi may see a lot of each other this year The President could meet with China’s leader four times in eight months. After his visit to Beijing, The President plans to host Xi at the White House. The President might also attend the November Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Shenzhen, China. And Xi could come to the Group of 20 summit the following month at The President’s resort in Doral, Florida. Czin noted that Xi also is not very fond of travel, meaning not all of the planned encounters may happen. He said China’s leader also does not “do personal connections” like the kind The President relishes, noting Xi led a Chinese military purge in January that included replacing officials with long-standing personal ties to his family. Wyne, though, said Xi also “appreciates that he is unlikely to deal with another U.S. president who admires him as greatly and embraces as narrow a view of strategic competition.” That means Xi may “attempt to pocket as many economic and security concessions from The President as possible,” Wyne said. The President has long praised Xi The President told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board in 2024 that Xi “was actually a really good … I don’t want to say ‘friend.’ I don’t want to act foolish. ‘He was my friend.’ But I got along with him great.” The President even suggested at the time that military force might not be required to ensure that Chinese troops do not encroach on Taiwan, simply because China’s leader “respects me,” despite The President more recently discussing potentially selling arms to Taiwan. The President has continued to praise the bilateral relationship since returning to the White House, even after his Beijing visit, originally scheduled for March, was postponed due to the early stages of the Iran war. He unsuccessfully prodded China to get involved in reopening the Strait of Hormuz after Iranian forces choked it off and disrupted global economies. But China did use its leverage as the largest purchaser of Iranian oil to encourage Iran to agree to what has been a fragile ceasefire. The White House says it expects The President to apply pressure on China with regards to Iran. Beijing has strong economic ties to Tehran, and the war could hurt its economy, which was already projected to grow more slowly. If China can help establish lasting peace, though, that might boost its standing in negotiations on trade issues with the The President administration. Trade issues a sticking point During his 2017 visit, The President announced $250 billion in nonbinding trade deals, some of which never materialized. A round of trade deals announced in 2020 and worth $200 billion mostly never came to fruition before The President’s first term ended. More recently, The President’s announcement last year of steep global tariffs prompted China to cut off purchases of U.S. soybeans and clamp down on exports of rare earth minerals needed by American factories. Tensions have eased somewhat since the U.S. reached a trade truce last fall that has limited tariffs on both sides. The White House says there have been more recent discussions about extending the trade truce, and that both sides support doing so. The President “doesn’t travel anywhere without bringing deliverables home to our country,” according to Kelly. “Americans can expect the president to deliver more good deals for the United States while in China,” she said. Associated Press writer E. Eduardo Castillo contributed from Beijing —Will Weissert, Associated Press View the full article

Improving customer support is vital for any business aiming to boost satisfaction and loyalty. By focusing on ten proven strategies, you can create a more effective support system. These strategies range from establishing a clear service vision to leveraging technology and collecting customer feedback. Each component plays an important role in optimizing the customer experience. Comprehending how to implement these strategies can greatly impact your organization’s success. What steps will you take to raise your customer support? Key Takeaways Empower customer service teams with ongoing training and development to enhance their skills and improve issue resolution speed. Implement AI-driven solutions to handle routine queries, allowing agents to focus on complex customer issues for faster support. Map the customer journey to identify key touchpoints and reduce friction, leading to a smoother overall experience. Collect and act on customer feedback regularly to drive continuous improvement and ensure service aligns with customer needs. Establish SMART goals for customer support teams to create clear objectives and enhance accountability in performance measurement. Understand Your Customer Service Vision Comprehending your customer service vision is vital for creating a cohesive strategy that improves the customer experience. A clear vision aligns your organizational goals with customer satisfaction, ensuring consistency in service delivery. This consistency is important for building customer trust and loyalty. So, how can you improve customer service? Start by defining what great guest service looks like for your organization. This will guide your team in delivering exceptional experiences across all touchpoints. Regularly revisiting and updating your customer service vision helps keep it relevant to evolving expectations, enhancing overall effectiveness. Companies that prioritize a strong service vision often see higher customer satisfaction scores, with many consumers willing to pay more for better experiences. Build a Customer-Centric Culture To build a customer-centric culture, you need to empower your team members and promote open communication. When employees feel they can make decisions during customer interactions, it leads to quicker issue resolution and stronger loyalty. Furthermore, encouraging regular feedback discussions helps everyone understand customer needs, promoting continuous improvement throughout your organization. Empower Team Members Building a customer-centric culture begins with empowering team members, as granting them the autonomy to make decisions can greatly improve the overall customer experience. When employees have the freedom to resolve issues quickly, it boosts customer service care and builds loyalty. Implementing effective customer handling tips and offering continuous professional development can lead to a more experienced support team, increasing retention rates by 34%. Encouraging collaboration nurtures a sense of connection, boosting productivity by 20%. Furthermore, regularly soliciting feedback from team members not only empowers them but also uncovers actionable insights that can refine how to provide good client service. In the end, this empowerment leads to a more engaged workforce, translating to higher service quality and customer satisfaction. Foster Open Communication Empowering team members lays the groundwork for nurturing open communication, a vital aspect of a customer-centric culture. When you cultivate an environment where employees freely share insights and feedback, it leads to improved problem-solving and innovative customer service strategies. Research shows that a transparent communication atmosphere boosts employee engagement by 47%, directly correlating with improved customer service delivery. Regularly soliciting customer feedback through surveys makes customers feel valued, enriching their overall experience. Establishing accessible channels for inquiries encourages dialogue, as 88% of customers expect prompt responses. In the end, building a culture of open communication guarantees every employee understands their role in the customer experience, promoting a shared commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences. Map and Optimize the Customer Journey When you map and optimize the customer experience, you’re fundamentally visualizing the various interactions customers have with your brand, which helps you pinpoint key touchpoints that may need improvement. A well-structured customer experience map reveals areas requiring improvement, leading to a potential 20% increase in customer satisfaction scores. To achieve this, regularly update your maps to reflect evolving customer behaviors and preferences, addressing any bottlenecks effectively. Engaging in both solicited and unsolicited customer data collection during the mapping process can uncover pain points that might otherwise go unnoticed. This data-driven approach enables you to make informed decisions that drive strategic improvements in service delivery. Utilizing experience mapping not just optimizes touchpoints but also reduces friction in the customer experience, creating a seamless interaction that keeps customers coming back. Empower Your Customer Service Team A well-mapped customer experience highlights the importance of effective customer service, where your team plays a pivotal role in maintaining satisfaction and loyalty. Empowering your customer service representatives by granting them decision-making authority can greatly improve issue resolution speed. Studies show that organizations with empowered staff see customer satisfaction scores rise by up to 25%. Providing ongoing professional development equips your team with vital skills to address complex customer needs effectively, improving service quality. When agents feel supported and trusted, employee engagement increases, boosting productivity by 20% and reducing turnover rates. Implementing collaborative tools encourages a supportive environment, improving communication and teamwork, which are critical for delivering exceptional customer experiences. In addition, investing in your customer service teams correlates with employee satisfaction and customer loyalty, as happy employees can lead to a 12% increase in customer retention. Empowering your team is vital for achieving these positive outcomes. Leverage Technology for Better Customer Service To improve your customer service, leveraging technology is vital. Integrating AI-driven solutions, like chatbots, can streamline your support processes by handling routine inquiries around the clock, freeing your human agents for more complex issues. Furthermore, modern CRM systems provide valuable insights that help personalize interactions, ensuring a more efficient and effective customer experience. AI Integration Benefits Integrating AI into customer support not just improves efficiency but also transforms how IBM interacts with their customers. By handling up to 80% of routine queries, AI allows your human agents to concentrate on more complex issues. Implementing AI-driven chatbots means you can provide 24/7 service, greatly improving response times and cutting customer wait times by up to 70%. Furthermore, AI tools analyze data to identify patterns in inquiries, enabling you to proactively address common issues and improve service quality. Personalized interactions fueled by AI can boost customer satisfaction scores by as much as 20%. In the end, these advancements lead to a more effective support system, resulting in greater customer loyalty and retention. Streamlined Support Processes With the advancements in AI and technology, businesses now have strong tools at their disposal to streamline support processes and improve customer service. Implementing AI-driven chatbots can efficiently handle a high volume of customer queries 24/7, markedly improving response times whilst allowing human agents to focus on complex issues. Modern CRM systems integrate customer data across all channels, enhancing personalized interactions and streamlining support processes for greater efficiency. By automating routine tasks, companies reduce average handling time, leading to quicker resolutions and improved customer satisfaction. Furthermore, leveraging data analytics tools helps identify trends in customer interactions, enabling proactive adjustments to support processes. Finally, integrating omnichannel support ensures consistent experiences across various platforms, increasing overall engagement and satisfaction. Implement Omnichannel Support Implementing omnichannel support is essential for meeting the diverse needs of your customers, especially since over 50% of them engage through multiple channels during their purchasing experience. By allowing customers to interact with your brand through phone, email, live chat, and social media, you provide a seamless experience customized to their preferences. This consistent communication across touchpoints improves customer engagement considerably. An effective omnichannel strategy can improve response times by up to 50%, streamlining communication and ensuring inquiries are addressed swiftly, regardless of the platform used. Brands that execute this approach often see a 10% increase in customer retention rates, as flexibility and continuity in interactions are highly valued. Moreover, a unified communication platform reduces customer effort by 40%, enabling them to switch between channels without repeating themselves or losing context. Collect and Act on Customer Feedback Collecting and acting on customer feedback is crucial for improving your support services and overall customer experience. Utilizing post-interaction surveys is an effective way to gain timely insights, as 85% of customers are willing to share their thoughts when asked. Implement systems to track satisfaction scores, like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS), to pinpoint areas needing improvement. Engaging with dissatisfied customers through follow-up communications shows your commitment to addressing their concerns, which can help restore their loyalty. Regularly analyzing feedback allows you to understand customer pain points better, driving strategic decisions that improve service delivery. Furthermore, providing accessible feedback channels, such as online surveys and suggestion forms, guarantees that all customer voices are heard, informing your continuous improvement initiatives. Set and Track SMART Goals Setting and tracking SMART goals is vital for effective customer support. By defining specific objectives, you can create clear targets that your team can aim for. During regularly measuring progress helps you stay on track. Adjusting strategies as needed guarantees that you’re continuously improving and aligning with customer needs, in the end enhancing performance and satisfaction. Define Specific Objectives Defining specific objectives is crucial for any customer support team aiming to improve their performance. Setting SMART goals guarantees your objectives are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, providing a clear framework for your team’s focus. Time-bound goals, in particular, motivate your team by establishing deadlines, promoting accountability, and driving urgency. Regularly evaluating progress against these goals allows you to pinpoint areas needing improvement, enabling timely adjustments to strategies that boost overall performance. Furthermore, incorporating customer feedback into your goal-setting process keeps your objectives aligned with their needs, driving continuous improvement in service delivery. Aligning your team’s objectives with SMART criteria improves job satisfaction, as members can see clear paths toward success and contributing effectively. Measure Progress Regularly To effectively measure progress in customer support, it’s vital to implement a structured approach that revolves around SMART goals. These goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound—help guarantee your customer support objectives are clearly defined and attainable. Regularly tracking your progress against these goals allows you to assess the effectiveness of your strategies and make necessary adjustments in real-time. Utilize metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) within the SMART framework to gather quantifiable data on your performance. Establishing time-bound goals creates urgency and accountability within your team, encouraging a focused effort to achieve customer support objectives. Adjust Strategies Accordingly Adjusting your strategies accordingly is essential for maintaining an effective customer support operation. Setting SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound—helps you focus your efforts and measure progress. Regularly tracking these goals allows you to adapt your strategies based on performance data, keeping your initiatives aligned with evolving customer needs. For instance, you might aim to increase your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) by 10% within the next quarter through targeted training. Here’s a quick overview of SMART goals: SMART Goal Element Description Specific Clear and precise aim Measurable Trackable progress Achievable Realistic and attainable Conducting assessments against these goals helps identify improvement areas, ensuring high-quality customer support. Measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is vital for comprehending how well your customer support strategies are working, as it provides concrete data to evaluate performance. Key metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) help you assess how customers perceive your support. Tracking Customer Effort Score (CES) is likewise important; it reveals how easy or difficult your customers find interactions with your support team, highlighting potential friction points. Regularly measuring these KPIs allows you to establish benchmarks and monitor improvements over time, aligning your efforts with customer satisfaction goals. Analyzing trends in these indicators can inform strategic decisions, such as where to allocate resources or which areas might require additional training. Consistent KPI monitoring encourages a culture of accountability within your customer support teams, motivating them to aim for excellence and ensuring that your service delivery continuously meets or exceeds customer expectations. Invest in Continuous Improvement Investing in continuous improvement is a strategic approach that can greatly enhance the effectiveness of your customer support efforts. Regular training and development programs help keep your customer service representatives updated on best practices, enhancing their skills and boosting overall service quality. By promoting a culture of continuous learning, your team can adapt to evolving customer needs, markedly increasing customer satisfaction. Collecting customer feedback through surveys and monitoring interactions allows you to identify trends and areas for improvement, driving actionable insights. Establishing a feedback loop where changes based on customer input are communicated back shows your responsiveness and commitment to service excellence. Moreover, ongoing assessment of key performance indicators (KPIs) related to customer service provides measurable benchmarks for evaluating your improvement initiatives and their impact on customer satisfaction. This method guarantees you’re consistently refining your strategies for better outcomes. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the Strategies to Improve Customer Service? To improve customer service, start by implementing a feedback system, like post-interaction surveys, to gather insights. Empower your representatives with decision-making authority for quicker resolutions and higher satisfaction. Use omnichannel support to provide a consistent experience across various platforms. Regularly train your team to elevate skills and cultivate a customer-centric culture. Finally, set and track SMART goals to measure success and align actions with customer satisfaction objectives, driving continuous improvement. What Are the 4 P’s That Improve Customer Service? To improve customer service, focus on the four P’s: People, Processes, Products, and Personalization. Hire representatives with empathy and a customer-centric mindset. Streamline processes to guarantee quick resolutions for inquiries. Equip your team with extensive product knowledge to build trust and exceed expectations. Finally, personalize interactions based on individual needs, nurturing relationships that encourage repeat business. What Are the 5 R’s of Customer Service? The 5 R’s of customer service are Recognize, Respond, Resolve, Reassure, and Retain. First, you recognize customers’ needs and emotions, which helps them feel valued. Next, you respond quickly to their inquiries, as promptness is vital for satisfaction. Then, you resolve their issues efficiently, demonstrating your commitment. After that, you reassure them with effective communication, and finally, you retain them by building long-term relationships through targeted strategies that encourage repeat business. What Is the 10 to 10 Rule in Customer Service? The 10 to 10 Rule in customer service suggests you respond to urgent inquiries within 10 minutes and non-urgent matters within 10 hours. This approach highlights the importance of prompt communication, as many customers expect quick responses. By adhering to this rule, you can improve customer loyalty and satisfaction, reducing the likelihood of customers switching brands because of poor service. Timely responses correlate with positive experiences and increased customer retention rates. Conclusion Improving customer support involves implementing effective strategies that prioritize customer needs and streamline processes. By establishing a clear service vision, optimizing the customer experience, and empowering your team, you can improve overall satisfaction. Leveraging technology and consistently collecting feedback helps you stay responsive to customer expectations. Setting SMART goals and measuring key performance indicators guarantees continuous improvement. By adopting these proven strategies, you can create a more efficient support system that nurtures loyalty and drives business success. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "10 Proven Strategies to Improve Customer Support" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Improving customer support is vital for any business aiming to boost satisfaction and loyalty. By focusing on ten proven strategies, you can create a more effective support system. These strategies range from establishing a clear service vision to leveraging technology and collecting customer feedback. Each component plays an important role in optimizing the customer experience. Comprehending how to implement these strategies can greatly impact your organization’s success. What steps will you take to raise your customer support? Key Takeaways Empower customer service teams with ongoing training and development to enhance their skills and improve issue resolution speed. Implement AI-driven solutions to handle routine queries, allowing agents to focus on complex customer issues for faster support. Map the customer journey to identify key touchpoints and reduce friction, leading to a smoother overall experience. Collect and act on customer feedback regularly to drive continuous improvement and ensure service aligns with customer needs. Establish SMART goals for customer support teams to create clear objectives and enhance accountability in performance measurement. Understand Your Customer Service Vision Comprehending your customer service vision is vital for creating a cohesive strategy that improves the customer experience. A clear vision aligns your organizational goals with customer satisfaction, ensuring consistency in service delivery. This consistency is important for building customer trust and loyalty. So, how can you improve customer service? Start by defining what great guest service looks like for your organization. This will guide your team in delivering exceptional experiences across all touchpoints. Regularly revisiting and updating your customer service vision helps keep it relevant to evolving expectations, enhancing overall effectiveness. Companies that prioritize a strong service vision often see higher customer satisfaction scores, with many consumers willing to pay more for better experiences. Build a Customer-Centric Culture To build a customer-centric culture, you need to empower your team members and promote open communication. When employees feel they can make decisions during customer interactions, it leads to quicker issue resolution and stronger loyalty. Furthermore, encouraging regular feedback discussions helps everyone understand customer needs, promoting continuous improvement throughout your organization. Empower Team Members Building a customer-centric culture begins with empowering team members, as granting them the autonomy to make decisions can greatly improve the overall customer experience. When employees have the freedom to resolve issues quickly, it boosts customer service care and builds loyalty. Implementing effective customer handling tips and offering continuous professional development can lead to a more experienced support team, increasing retention rates by 34%. Encouraging collaboration nurtures a sense of connection, boosting productivity by 20%. Furthermore, regularly soliciting feedback from team members not only empowers them but also uncovers actionable insights that can refine how to provide good client service. In the end, this empowerment leads to a more engaged workforce, translating to higher service quality and customer satisfaction. Foster Open Communication Empowering team members lays the groundwork for nurturing open communication, a vital aspect of a customer-centric culture. When you cultivate an environment where employees freely share insights and feedback, it leads to improved problem-solving and innovative customer service strategies. Research shows that a transparent communication atmosphere boosts employee engagement by 47%, directly correlating with improved customer service delivery. Regularly soliciting customer feedback through surveys makes customers feel valued, enriching their overall experience. Establishing accessible channels for inquiries encourages dialogue, as 88% of customers expect prompt responses. In the end, building a culture of open communication guarantees every employee understands their role in the customer experience, promoting a shared commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences. Map and Optimize the Customer Journey When you map and optimize the customer experience, you’re fundamentally visualizing the various interactions customers have with your brand, which helps you pinpoint key touchpoints that may need improvement. A well-structured customer experience map reveals areas requiring improvement, leading to a potential 20% increase in customer satisfaction scores. To achieve this, regularly update your maps to reflect evolving customer behaviors and preferences, addressing any bottlenecks effectively. Engaging in both solicited and unsolicited customer data collection during the mapping process can uncover pain points that might otherwise go unnoticed. This data-driven approach enables you to make informed decisions that drive strategic improvements in service delivery. Utilizing experience mapping not just optimizes touchpoints but also reduces friction in the customer experience, creating a seamless interaction that keeps customers coming back. Empower Your Customer Service Team A well-mapped customer experience highlights the importance of effective customer service, where your team plays a pivotal role in maintaining satisfaction and loyalty. Empowering your customer service representatives by granting them decision-making authority can greatly improve issue resolution speed. Studies show that organizations with empowered staff see customer satisfaction scores rise by up to 25%. Providing ongoing professional development equips your team with vital skills to address complex customer needs effectively, improving service quality. When agents feel supported and trusted, employee engagement increases, boosting productivity by 20% and reducing turnover rates. Implementing collaborative tools encourages a supportive environment, improving communication and teamwork, which are critical for delivering exceptional customer experiences. In addition, investing in your customer service teams correlates with employee satisfaction and customer loyalty, as happy employees can lead to a 12% increase in customer retention. Empowering your team is vital for achieving these positive outcomes. Leverage Technology for Better Customer Service To improve your customer service, leveraging technology is vital. Integrating AI-driven solutions, like chatbots, can streamline your support processes by handling routine inquiries around the clock, freeing your human agents for more complex issues. Furthermore, modern CRM systems provide valuable insights that help personalize interactions, ensuring a more efficient and effective customer experience. AI Integration Benefits Integrating AI into customer support not just improves efficiency but also transforms how IBM interacts with their customers. By handling up to 80% of routine queries, AI allows your human agents to concentrate on more complex issues. Implementing AI-driven chatbots means you can provide 24/7 service, greatly improving response times and cutting customer wait times by up to 70%. Furthermore, AI tools analyze data to identify patterns in inquiries, enabling you to proactively address common issues and improve service quality. Personalized interactions fueled by AI can boost customer satisfaction scores by as much as 20%. In the end, these advancements lead to a more effective support system, resulting in greater customer loyalty and retention. Streamlined Support Processes With the advancements in AI and technology, businesses now have strong tools at their disposal to streamline support processes and improve customer service. Implementing AI-driven chatbots can efficiently handle a high volume of customer queries 24/7, markedly improving response times whilst allowing human agents to focus on complex issues. Modern CRM systems integrate customer data across all channels, enhancing personalized interactions and streamlining support processes for greater efficiency. By automating routine tasks, companies reduce average handling time, leading to quicker resolutions and improved customer satisfaction. Furthermore, leveraging data analytics tools helps identify trends in customer interactions, enabling proactive adjustments to support processes. Finally, integrating omnichannel support ensures consistent experiences across various platforms, increasing overall engagement and satisfaction. Implement Omnichannel Support Implementing omnichannel support is essential for meeting the diverse needs of your customers, especially since over 50% of them engage through multiple channels during their purchasing experience. By allowing customers to interact with your brand through phone, email, live chat, and social media, you provide a seamless experience customized to their preferences. This consistent communication across touchpoints improves customer engagement considerably. An effective omnichannel strategy can improve response times by up to 50%, streamlining communication and ensuring inquiries are addressed swiftly, regardless of the platform used. Brands that execute this approach often see a 10% increase in customer retention rates, as flexibility and continuity in interactions are highly valued. Moreover, a unified communication platform reduces customer effort by 40%, enabling them to switch between channels without repeating themselves or losing context. Collect and Act on Customer Feedback Collecting and acting on customer feedback is crucial for improving your support services and overall customer experience. Utilizing post-interaction surveys is an effective way to gain timely insights, as 85% of customers are willing to share their thoughts when asked. Implement systems to track satisfaction scores, like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS), to pinpoint areas needing improvement. Engaging with dissatisfied customers through follow-up communications shows your commitment to addressing their concerns, which can help restore their loyalty. Regularly analyzing feedback allows you to understand customer pain points better, driving strategic decisions that improve service delivery. Furthermore, providing accessible feedback channels, such as online surveys and suggestion forms, guarantees that all customer voices are heard, informing your continuous improvement initiatives. Set and Track SMART Goals Setting and tracking SMART goals is vital for effective customer support. By defining specific objectives, you can create clear targets that your team can aim for. During regularly measuring progress helps you stay on track. Adjusting strategies as needed guarantees that you’re continuously improving and aligning with customer needs, in the end enhancing performance and satisfaction. Define Specific Objectives Defining specific objectives is crucial for any customer support team aiming to improve their performance. Setting SMART goals guarantees your objectives are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, providing a clear framework for your team’s focus. Time-bound goals, in particular, motivate your team by establishing deadlines, promoting accountability, and driving urgency. Regularly evaluating progress against these goals allows you to pinpoint areas needing improvement, enabling timely adjustments to strategies that boost overall performance. Furthermore, incorporating customer feedback into your goal-setting process keeps your objectives aligned with their needs, driving continuous improvement in service delivery. Aligning your team’s objectives with SMART criteria improves job satisfaction, as members can see clear paths toward success and contributing effectively. Measure Progress Regularly To effectively measure progress in customer support, it’s vital to implement a structured approach that revolves around SMART goals. These goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound—help guarantee your customer support objectives are clearly defined and attainable. Regularly tracking your progress against these goals allows you to assess the effectiveness of your strategies and make necessary adjustments in real-time. Utilize metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) within the SMART framework to gather quantifiable data on your performance. Establishing time-bound goals creates urgency and accountability within your team, encouraging a focused effort to achieve customer support objectives. Adjust Strategies Accordingly Adjusting your strategies accordingly is essential for maintaining an effective customer support operation. Setting SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound—helps you focus your efforts and measure progress. Regularly tracking these goals allows you to adapt your strategies based on performance data, keeping your initiatives aligned with evolving customer needs. For instance, you might aim to increase your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) by 10% within the next quarter through targeted training. Here’s a quick overview of SMART goals: SMART Goal Element Description Specific Clear and precise aim Measurable Trackable progress Achievable Realistic and attainable Conducting assessments against these goals helps identify improvement areas, ensuring high-quality customer support. Measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is vital for comprehending how well your customer support strategies are working, as it provides concrete data to evaluate performance. Key metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) help you assess how customers perceive your support. Tracking Customer Effort Score (CES) is likewise important; it reveals how easy or difficult your customers find interactions with your support team, highlighting potential friction points. Regularly measuring these KPIs allows you to establish benchmarks and monitor improvements over time, aligning your efforts with customer satisfaction goals. Analyzing trends in these indicators can inform strategic decisions, such as where to allocate resources or which areas might require additional training. Consistent KPI monitoring encourages a culture of accountability within your customer support teams, motivating them to aim for excellence and ensuring that your service delivery continuously meets or exceeds customer expectations. Invest in Continuous Improvement Investing in continuous improvement is a strategic approach that can greatly enhance the effectiveness of your customer support efforts. Regular training and development programs help keep your customer service representatives updated on best practices, enhancing their skills and boosting overall service quality. By promoting a culture of continuous learning, your team can adapt to evolving customer needs, markedly increasing customer satisfaction. Collecting customer feedback through surveys and monitoring interactions allows you to identify trends and areas for improvement, driving actionable insights. Establishing a feedback loop where changes based on customer input are communicated back shows your responsiveness and commitment to service excellence. Moreover, ongoing assessment of key performance indicators (KPIs) related to customer service provides measurable benchmarks for evaluating your improvement initiatives and their impact on customer satisfaction. This method guarantees you’re consistently refining your strategies for better outcomes. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the Strategies to Improve Customer Service? To improve customer service, start by implementing a feedback system, like post-interaction surveys, to gather insights. Empower your representatives with decision-making authority for quicker resolutions and higher satisfaction. Use omnichannel support to provide a consistent experience across various platforms. Regularly train your team to elevate skills and cultivate a customer-centric culture. Finally, set and track SMART goals to measure success and align actions with customer satisfaction objectives, driving continuous improvement. What Are the 4 P’s That Improve Customer Service? To improve customer service, focus on the four P’s: People, Processes, Products, and Personalization. Hire representatives with empathy and a customer-centric mindset. Streamline processes to guarantee quick resolutions for inquiries. Equip your team with extensive product knowledge to build trust and exceed expectations. Finally, personalize interactions based on individual needs, nurturing relationships that encourage repeat business. What Are the 5 R’s of Customer Service? The 5 R’s of customer service are Recognize, Respond, Resolve, Reassure, and Retain. First, you recognize customers’ needs and emotions, which helps them feel valued. Next, you respond quickly to their inquiries, as promptness is vital for satisfaction. Then, you resolve their issues efficiently, demonstrating your commitment. After that, you reassure them with effective communication, and finally, you retain them by building long-term relationships through targeted strategies that encourage repeat business. What Is the 10 to 10 Rule in Customer Service? The 10 to 10 Rule in customer service suggests you respond to urgent inquiries within 10 minutes and non-urgent matters within 10 hours. This approach highlights the importance of prompt communication, as many customers expect quick responses. By adhering to this rule, you can improve customer loyalty and satisfaction, reducing the likelihood of customers switching brands because of poor service. Timely responses correlate with positive experiences and increased customer retention rates. Conclusion Improving customer support involves implementing effective strategies that prioritize customer needs and streamline processes. By establishing a clear service vision, optimizing the customer experience, and empowering your team, you can improve overall satisfaction. Leveraging technology and consistently collecting feedback helps you stay responsive to customer expectations. Setting SMART goals and measuring key performance indicators guarantees continuous improvement. By adopting these proven strategies, you can create a more efficient support system that nurtures loyalty and drives business success. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "10 Proven Strategies to Improve Customer Support" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

This week's Out-of-Touch guide explains the online mogging competition that is Omoggle and examines who was behind a hack that brought learning to a screeching halt nationwide. We also look at a viral AI music trend, and discuss how technology we use every day might kill us all. Mogging get organized on OmoggleThe Omoggle website is blowing up. As you can read in my glossary of Gen A and Gen Z slang, "mogging" is the act of being more attractive than someone else, usually in an intentional or aggressive way: If you're a young gentleman having a conversation with a woman, and a more handsome young man stands next to you and takes over, you have officially been mogged. Omoggle gamifies that conflict of attractiveness. It's a player-vs.-player contest where a user uploads a picture of their face and pits it against another user. An AI then analyzes the competitors' features to determine who has been mogged and who has done the mogging. It may be named after defunct chat site Omegle, but Omoggle is more like Hot or Not. Except it's more disturbing because the winner of the attractive-off isn't determined by other users' votes, but by an AI that was programmed to reinforce incel ideas. Over the last 10 years or so, incels and manosphere types have developed and spread a massive, ad-hoc, shared delusion about what women find attractive. Despite being a self-selected group of men who don't relate well to women, incels believe they understand what women find attractive better than women themselves. All women, the theory goes, are looking for a specific set of facial features—a thick jaw, high cheekbones, etc.—and if you don't have them, you have no chance, so why try? Omoggle is really part of incels' ongoing effort to convince themselves that the reason women won't talk to them is because the geometry of their Canthal Tilt is off, not because they're creepy weirdos. School computers went down across the country last week A website going down temporarily is probably a minor inconvenience to us older people, but when Canvas went down this week, right in the middle of finals, it was a full-life disruption for many in Generations Z and A. Canvas is the learning management system that controls just about every college and high school in the country's schedules, homework, grades, and more, so hackers taking it out pretty much shut down academia. The hacker group responsible, called ShinyHunters, threatened to release user information if an unspecified ransom wasn't paid, but fortunately, the site seems to have beaten the hackers back, and Canvas is functioning again—but for how long? Shinyhunters: the new generation of hackersShinyhunters, the group that pulled off the Canvas hack, took its name from the Pokémon franchise. Shiny Pokémon are rare, and according to security experts, Shinyhunters seem to focus on rare data. The group is thought to be part of a large affiliation of younger hackers called "The Com" who are mostly from the U.S. and the UK. While other groups within The Com collaborate with Russian ransomware groups, Shinyhunters don't. They're about data leak extortion, i.e.: "We'll release all this data if you don't pay us" instead of the usual ransomware's message of "we locked your systems and will free them when you pay us." Shinyhunters have been especially active lately, having targeted Ticketmaster, Wattpad, Pixlr, Bonobos, BigBasket, Mathway, Unacademy, MeetMindful, and more. Viral videos of the week: text songsArtificial intelligence's takeover of all human endeavors continues. The latest evidence: the popularity of "text songs" videos on TikTok. The concept is simple: You enter text conversations as lyrics into song generation engines like Suno or Udio, make it into a song and video, and make people laugh. While there are lots of different musical styles represented in these videos, gospel tends to work best; maybe it's the contrast of the mundanity of the text messages with the dramatic nature of the music. Here are a few examples: Bonus: Because I sometimes have funny conversations with my teenage child, I made my own. If you'd like to listen to a computer sing to you all day, check out the SongText hashtag where you can find almost 30,000 more examples. Reddit discusses technological nightmaresAI sure is fun, isn't it? Unrelated: Young people spend a lot of time thinking about how the technology we've already developed will likely kill us in the near future. It's not necessarily that there's more anxiety now than when you were young, but there are more options. Realistically, you only had to worry about nukes falling, but, judging by this Reddit thread, young people are worried about hundreds of different kinds of technological nightmares that might happen in the next few years or tomorrow afternoon, including: Being arrested by your own car Undetectable deep fakes being used to scam you Killer drone swarms Direct energy/microwave weapons Left chirality bacteria and viruses I could literally go on all day, but I won't. You can read the thread yourself if you lack things to worry about. View the full article

AI announcements tell you what Google shipped. Changing user search behavior tells you where your audience is going. Are you watching the right signal? The post Google’s AI Announcements Are Events, The New Search User Is The Trend appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

​​ Here’s a basic example of what the code can look like: ​​You can see that, unlike the words on a page, schema is a form of structured data. Its standardized format means there’s no chance of Google misinterpreting it.…Read more ›View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. At $484.99, the Insta360 Go Ultra Vlogger Bundle has dropped from its usual $574 price, and according to price trackers, this is the lowest it has been so far. The whole idea behind the Go Ultra is convenience. The camera itself is tiny enough to wear on a shirt, as a magnetic pendant, or as a hat clip without constantly reminding you it’s there. Then, when you want something that feels more like a traditional action camera, it docks into the included Action Pod, which has a larger screen and an extra battery, notes this PCMag review. Insta360 Go Ultra Vlogger Bundle Magnetic wearable action camera $484.99 at Amazon $574.00 Save $89.01 Get Deal Get Deal $484.99 at Amazon $574.00 Save $89.01 The camera shoots stabilized 4K video at 60fps, and the larger 1/1.28-inch sensor helps noticeably indoors or during evening shoots, where smaller action cameras often turn footage muddy fast. Stabilization is also one of the better parts of the experience. Walking footage stays smooth without requiring much effort, so it works well for bike rides, city walks, festivals, or travel clips where carrying a gimbal would feel excessive. And if framing starts becoming a problem, you can just dock it into the Action Pod and use its 2.5-inch flip-up touchscreen, which makes it much easier to see yourself while recording. Video tops out at eight-bit color, so creators who spend a lot of time color-grading footage may find it more limiting than larger action cameras from DJI or GoPro. There’s also no built-in storage, meaning you’ll need to pick up a microSD card separately before you can start shooting. Battery life changes quite a bit depending on how you use the system, too—the standalone camera lasts roughly 30 to 36 minutes at 4K60 before heat starts becoming a factor, while the Action Pod pushes total usage much closer to two hours. And as for its audio quality, it's decent for casual clips and quick vlogs, but wind noise and distance can still affect recordings, unless you rely on the included mic transmitter or external audio gear. Still, the bundle is generous—along with the camera and Action Pod, you get a magnetic pendant, quick-release mounts, a mini tripod remote kit, a magnetic clip, and a Mic Air transmitter for better audio options. For creators who constantly move between casual recording and more deliberate filming, the setup feels more versatile than most compact action cameras. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods Pro 3 Noise Cancelling Heart Rate Wireless Earbuds — $199.99 (List Price $249.00) Apple Watch Series 11 [GPS 46mm] Smartwatch with Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band - M/L. Sleep Score, Fitness Tracker, Health Monitoring, Always-On Display, Water Resistant — $329.00 (List Price $429.00) Fitbit Versa 4 Fitness Smartwatch (Black) — $149.95 (List Price $199.95) Apple iPad 11" A16 128GB Wi-Fi Tablet (Silver, 2025) — $299.00 (List Price $349.00) Anker 20,000mAh Portable Power Bank With Built-in USB-C Cable — $49.99 (List Price $69.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article