We have conducted numerous hours with clients, researchers, and value added resellers trying to figure out what the top advantages of video conferencing mean to business. SimpleSignal has managed to distill this down to 5 core benefits of video conferencing:
1. Reduced Travel Costs
In the current day's globalized economy, travel is often a necessity for leveraging new market prospects. Journeying to distant locales to become involved in face to face interaction with customers, partners, and colleagues is a time-honored business ritual, and nothing can ever replace the immediacy and impact of live interactions. But a significant percentage of routine or regular business trips with all of their attendant expense can be dumped by communicating over video. With massive improvements in quality, availability, and ease of use, and with the power to interact and share content in high definition, today’s video conferencing is as close to “being there” as one can get without making the trip. Travel reduction is the simplest cost to calculate when determining ROI of a video conferencing investment. Essentially, video ROI works out the amount of trips taken yearly, multiplied by the cost (transport from and to the airport, flight, per diem costs, income of time lost in traveling) versus the investment in the video conferencing solution (kit, service, training, network). The majority of setups will see a single outlay of yearly travel expenses far outweighing the entire video conferencing investment, easily justifying the implementation.
2. Increased Productiveness across Dissipated Workforces and Teams
Broke up work forces and project teams present many challenges, none more misunderstood than lost, slow, or nonexistent communication between individuals living in different locations. Most groups interact using telephone, email, instant messaging (IM), or workflow applications. However , with 80 p.c of communication consisting of non-verbal visual cues, the ability of groups to understand, process, and collaborate over distance using these techniques is at best halting, and at worst,severely impeded. Wherever video is added to a meeting, partakers are much more likely to remain centered, because they are able to be seen as well as heard. Expressions of satisfaction, concern, puzzlement, understanding and so on , can simply be seen and addressed, speeding and informing the group better than numerous e-mails, voicemails, and IMs. The result: decisions are made faster, projects completed earlier, and productivity increased across the organisation.
3. Improved Hiring and Retention of Top Talent
Hiring processes can be particularly lengthy and costly, especially when candidates are found in other cities or when multiple folk are involved in the interview process. Organizations with video conferencing systems in their offices can reduce expenses and time by bringing candidates into the nearest facility and permitting interviews to be conducted both in person and over video. Video interviews can also be recorded, enabling people unable to be a part of the live interviewing procedure to see and appraise the candidate over video. Video communication impacts worker retention just as positively. Examples include improved cooperation by permitting remote employees to become closer faster with other team members; helping employees keep work/life balance by offsetting travel so that they can spend more time with their families; permitting employees to work partly or full time from home, to alleviate the impact of commuting; or simply joining in real-time face to face interactions that are richer and more fulfilling than any alternative short of a live in-person meeting.
4. Sustained Competitive Advantage
Video communication offers multiple trails for making and maintaining competitive advantage. Teams communicating over video share data more widely, resulting in quicker and better educated choices that reduce the time to market for new services and products. Support groups leverage video to form more personal, one-to-one relations with their clients, encouraging a faithfulness far beyond the capabilities of a conventional call center agent. Producing affiliations use video conferencing and content sharing to verify product quality, make revisions, and guarantee precision throughout the supply chain, while their competition continue to rely on next-day delivery of services. Video enables sales managers to obviously and right away appreciate the. Status of the pipeline, beyond the rows on a spreadsheet. PR and human resources departments can pitch the organization?s use of video as confirmation of corporate efforts to protect the environment, helping to guarantee they end up on the short list of preferred vendors for environmentally friendliness in competitive governmental or commercial bids.
5. Support for Environmental Initiatives
Video conferencing is a manifest “green” technology, permitting associations to offset power usage by seriously reducing the need to travel. (See the Polycom ROI Calculator as an example.) By communicating over video, associations can also substantially cut back their carbon print and help ensure a foundation for regulatory compliance. With tools that provide a powerful way to enable meetings and other video content to be streamed live or on demand around the world, staff, consumers, partners, and scholars can use video to communicate, engage and interact with others across distance at any point, from wherever they are.
Claudia Freestone is a writer about cloud based communication systems. She is an evangelist talking and writing about business voip phone systems and video conferencing. Her special special area is sip trunking into varied on grounds PBX systems for http://www.simplesignal.com.