Understanding Utilization and Driving Adoption of Your Collaboration Solution

[Kimberly Kelley (kimberly)]

Polycom recently presented a series of four design clinics which you can watch on-demand to benefit from best practice approaches to:

• Designing your collaboration environment
• Ensuring your data network is ready for voice and video
• Implementing winning workflow strategies
• Measuring and driving performance and utilization

In the final webinar, Kevin Kovach, Senior Adoption Consultant, shares his deep knowledge of how to analyze and optimize the ‘people side’ of video and voice collaboration solutions.

Solving the technology conundrum

Organizations invest considerable time, effort and resources in rolling out any new technology. But often this technology falls short of expectations. To increase adoption you need to:

• Help users adopt the technology
• Measure and understand your adoption rates

Helping users adopt video technology

To drive video adoption, you first need to identify any barriers that may be preventing users from adopting it, and resolve them. The most common barriers to video adoption include:

• Awareness: Users must know the solution exists and is available for them to use. This means telling them about the video collaboration solution itself, the rollout and timing, and how it will help them do their work better, as well as setting the expectation that they’ll use it in their daily interactions internally and externally.
• What’s in it for me? Users need to know why video will help them, for example by making communication easier and more effective, making them personally more productive, reducing travel, and improving their group interaction and collaborative relationships. Perhaps most important is providing real examples of how they can integrate video into their daily workflows and processes.
• Avoidance: Solution design, network readiness and effective workflow strategies are all crucial to adoption. In addition, some users may have concerns about video, be shy of it, or have had bad experiences in the past. Ways to overcome this include tailoring the user experience; making video easy and reliable; standardizing on a solution, dial pattern and naming convention; and addressing technical issues prior to rollout, as any perceived issue will inhibit adoption more than anything else.
• How to use it. ‘Training’ can make users think video is complex and difficult to use, whereas it should be as easy as dialing a phone number. So instead, create interactive opportunities to jump-start usage, such as Polycom’s video tutorials on specific aspects of the system; provide in-room instructional graphics; implement an intranet site with FAQs etc.; or give users direct hands-on experience.

Measuring and understanding utilization

Utilization is a key metric in helping you understand which rooms and systems are being used the most, which are used the least, and will assist you identifying what you could be doing to increase utilization in those locations that may be lagging behind.

As video is just one of many ways to communicate, not every system will be used every minute of every day. Expecting 75-80% utilization is unrealistic, but 10-20% is achievable, depending on the use case. Dedicated telepresence rooms, for example, will typically have much higher utilization than desktop or mobile solutions. Different functions or organizations will also use video differently. Some (e.g. Manufacturing) may use it infrequently, whereas others (e.g. Sales, HR, Customer Service) will use it much more often.

• Reporting tools, such as Polycom RealAccess Analytics, can help you track progress and utilization rates for each individual group, department, job function or location, and adjust as necessary.
• You also need to understand the capacity of your systems and flag when they are reaching a threshold, so you can take proactive steps to address this and avoid your users experiencing poor quality calls.
• Third is performance. This is about the user experience as revealed by call detail records. If a user experiences a poor quality call, you need to understand what happened so you can identify and address any underlying issues.

To learn the details of Kevin’s best practices for adoption and utilization, watch the webinar now.