How and Why Polycom Integration Services Deliver So Much More than Ease of Use

[Kimberly Kelley (kimberly)]

Not long ago, you might have measured your video conferencing solution’s success by its savings in travel costs. While these still apply, many leading organizations are recognizing even greater benefits by fully embedding video within their business processes.

 

Polycom Integration and App Development Services can help you drive increased ROI, revenues and/or cost reductions by integrating video with infrastructure and applications including:

• Strategic unified communications (UC) platforms like Microsoft Skype for Business
• Horizontal business applications like HR (e.g. IBM BrassRing) or CRM (e.g. Salesforce.com)
• Tailored business applications - from video-enabled web portals and call centers to self-service kiosks and support for mobile workers
• Packaged conferencing applications that help you streamline scheduling, conference control, in-meeting    and post-meeting activities

Seamless video integration with Unified Communications Solutions

If you’ve invested in Microsoft Lync / Skype for Business and a video conferencing solution, it is likely you will want to integrate both solutions into a unified environment combining instant messaging, presence, voice and video, to enable seamless collaboration for all your users.

Rather than communications silos, Polycom can help you create a single platform extending across the enterprise. Some of the major benefits of this include enabling users to join video meetings from their native environment, improving the meeting experience by being able to share content real-time and increasing overall ROI across the board.

Embedding video into your business processes

Once you have created your unified environment, you can take this a step further to fully integrate video into your business processes, using Polycom’s open APIs.

Embedding video within an existing application helps to streamline the business process, and makes using video easier. When video collaboration is a part of a user’s everyday work it helps them better achieve their objectives and in turn increase productivity. This then helps to drive video utilization within the business, creating other opportunities to reduce costs and increase revenues.

For example, Polycom has integrated video into IBM BrassRing to streamline talent acquisition. Our HR teams regularly use video for face-to-face interviews, and arranging these used to involve a three-step process. With video embedded into BrassRing, interviews can be arranged directly from the HR system – including creating the video meeting and emailing the participants – all with a single transaction.

Creating new business opportunities

There are many ways video can help an organization embrace different ways of working and create new revenue streams. One example is video-enabling call centers and websites. Polycom can create this type of portal whether or not your call center has native video capability (e.g. if it can only receive text or instant messages), an approach with benefits across industries such as:

• Finance – to reduce headcount and costs while retaining personal customer service, by promoting and filtering web access to face-to-face video calls with specialist call center agents.
• Pharmaceutical and Healthcare – to allow patients or their families to speak directly to a specialist clinician about how to administer treatments or medications.
• Legal – to enable people looking for advice on real estate transactions, divorce, patents, litigation etc. to have face-to-face conversations with the best qualified lawyers.
• Technology – to allow support center staff to see the subject being described, accelerating speed of resolution and increasing customer satisfaction while reducing the headcount needed to service the customer base.

More examples of tailored integration solutions include:

• Video-enabled self-service kiosks
• Support for mobile and remote workers
• Card or mobile device-enabled room systems
• Internal call center video enablement
• Partner solutions and one-off projects

Improving the conference experience

Polycom’s packaged applications help improve key aspects of the video collaboration experience and make them easier to use. Quick to deploy, these apps focus on solving user issues, increasing productivity and satisfaction, and reducing or removing the need for IT administrative support tasks.

• Scheduling solutions include global address book syncing, one-touch scheduling from mobile devices, and plug-in applications for major UC partners such as Microsoft and IBM.
• Conference control puts the owner in full control of a call, from their phone, tablet or desktop browser.
• In-meeting experience applications include easy one touch dialing to join a Lync scheduled meeting.

Packaged solutions can also be customized to meet particular needs.

To learn more about the benefits of video integration for your use case(s):

Download our whitepaper ‘Business Benefits of One Size Fits One’ today.