We have conducted numerous hours with customers, researchers, and price 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 present day's globalized economy, travel is frequently a precondition for leveraging new market possibilities. Journeying to distant locales to engage in face-to-face interactions with shoppers, partners, and co-workers is an ancient business ritual, and nothing will ever replace the immediacy and impact of live interactions. But a large percentage of routine or regular business journeys with all their attendant cost can be thrown out by communicating over video. With vast enhancements in quality, availability, and simplicity of use, and with the facility to interact and share content in Hi-D, today’s video conferencing is as near to “being there” as one can get without actually making the trip. Travel reduction is the easiest expense to work out when determining ROI of a video conferencing investment. Basically, video ROI calculates the quantity of trips taken annually, multiplied by the price tag (transport to and from the airfield, flight, per diem expenses, salary of time lost in traveling) vs the investment in the video conferencing solution (equipment, service, coaching, network). The bulk of organizations will see a single outlay of annual travel costs far outweighing the whole video conferencing investment, simply justifying the fulfilment.
2. Increased Productiveness across Dissipated Workforces and Teams
Dispersed work forces and project groups present many challenges, none more misunderstood than lost, slow, or simply nonexistent communication between people resident in different locations. Most teams interact using phone, e-mail, instant messaging (IM), or workflow applications. Nonetheless with 80 percent of communication composed from non-verbal visible cues, the capability of teams to grasp, process, and co-operate over distance using these methods is halting, and at worst,severely impeded. Wherever video is added to a meeting, participators are more likely to stay focused, because they will be able to be seen as well as heard. Expressions of satisfaction, concern, confusion, understanding and such like can easily be seen and addressed, speeding and informing the group more successfully than myriad emails, voicemails, and IMs. The result: decisions get made quicker, projects finished sooner, and productiveness increased across the organization.
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 information more widely, resulting in quicker and better informed decisions that cut the time to market for new services and goods. Support groups leverage video to create more personal, one-to-one relations with their clients, encouraging a loyalty way beyond the capabilities of a standard call center agent. Producing organisations use video conferencing and content sharing to confirm 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 company executives to obviously and straight away appreciate the. Status of the pipeline, beyond the rows on a spreadsheet. Public relations and human resources departments can plug the organization?s use of video as proof of corporate efforts to defend 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 an obvious “green” technology, allowing setups to lessen energy consumption by dramatically reducing the necessity to travel. (See the Polycom ROI Calculator as an example.) By communicating over video, setups can also significantly reduce their carbon emissions footprint and help guarantee a basis for regulatory compliance. With tools that supply a forceful way to enable conferences and other video satisfied to be streamed live or on demand around the globe, workers, buyers, partners, and students can use video to speak, engage and engage with others across distance at any time, from wherever they are.
Claudia Freestone is a writer about cloud based communication systems. She's an evangelist speaking and writing about business voip telephone systems and video conferencing. Her special special area is sip trunking into various on premise PBX systems for http://www.simplesignal.com.