Improving the Customer Experience: Can highly “produced” video collaboration be more productive?

[Marty Sexton (MobileGuy)]

Improving the customer experience can mean many different things to people. “Experience” is often used as a vague term to describe what a person does, how they do it, why they do it and their feelings during the action. The video collaboration industry invests a great deal of time, money, and energy continually improving the collaborative experience with the goals of customer acceptance and use of video in their daily workflow. But, can improving the experience really lead to better adoption and a happier, more productive user?

----------

No matter what the industry – financial services, education, government - organizations are continuously working to improve user satisfaction, productivity and accuracy. Companies spend a lot of time and resources analyzing the number of clicks to complete a sale, the time it takes to close a deal, the seconds between an incident and a response. What do all of these improvements have in common? Improving experience.

Improving the customer experience can mean many different things to people. Experience is often used as a vague term to describe what a person does, how they do it, why they do it and their feelings during the action. The video collaboration industry invests a great deal of time, money, and energy continually improving the collaborative experience with the goals of customer acceptance and use of video in their daily workflow. But, can improving the experience really lead to better adoption and a happier, more productive user? Consider these statistics from Design Management Institute:

• Approximately 11 million meetingsoccur in the U.S. alone each and every day.
• Up to 50 percentof the workers time is taken up with meeting participation.
• If each meeting could remove just 15 secondsof complex user operation then that would equate to over 45,833 hours per day or 1,909 ‘man-hour’ days

The design of everyday things impacts us all. If the design is good, we don’t really notice. But what if the adopted technology is difficult to use? What if it’s unreliable? Video collaboration can occasionally feel unnatural. In many conferences, people enter and leave at different times. People go to the whiteboard to design the latest widget, they grab lunch or a soda, which can make for a challenging proposition pointing the camera for the far site. Often times, the camera is left in the default position of wide, which makes most users postage stamp size in the video window. If someone dares to pick up the remote control and try to move it to the whiteboard, they may end up moving the camera in the wrong direction, zooming into the plant (or worse) and embarrassing themselves in front of their peers or the boss. So, most people will not bother or they’ll be forced to have an assistant in the room at all times. This is both inefficient and unnecessary.

A great experience can improve user adoption, as well as reduce training needs and IT support costs.

Today, we introduced the Polycom EagleEye Producer, an innovative camera peripheral that turns a regular video call into an engaging, collaborative session. The technology built into Polycom EagleEye Producer continually searches the room for people’s faces and then accurately frames participants. Users can naturally enter or depart the room and have the camera appropriately frame them in the video widow without ever touching the remote. Watch the Polycom EagleEye Producer video:

 

Polycom EagleEye Producer gives users the freedom to move to the whiteboard to illustrate the latest design concepts without experiencing trouble with the remote or the concern that the far site is not seeing the board properly.

 

Beyond the in-room benefits, Polycom EagleEye Producer has equal value to the business. Polycom EagleEye Producer works in conjunction with the Polycom RealPresence Group Series and Polycom RealPresence Resource Manager to provide usage data for calculating the number of participants in the meeting. This information is important to the business because they can use the information to plan MCU resource needs, account for people resource impact, and real estate utilization. Key usage data can greatly improve the agility of the business and allow them to have a greater understanding of the needs for video collaboration.

Polycom EagleEye Producer promises to deliver an improved experience to the end user with little or no training and valuable data to the business. By automating the camera operation in the meetings, users are left with a more natural and productive session.

Additional Resources:

• Request a demonstration
• Press Release: Industry-First Audio and Visual Innovations from Polycom Advance Collaboration And Usher in the Work...
• Read the blog post about the latest RealPresence Platform enhancements: Video Quality: It's All About the Plumbing
• Watch the video about Polycom NoiseBlock technology