Satya Yeramsetti is the founder and CEO of Telebu, India’s first UCaaS company. It’s been over 17 years since he started his entrepreneurial journey. In these 17 years, he has founded multiple companies, scaled them, sold them, and dared to walk away from a few who lost track of their objective. He is a self-described dreamer and storyteller. Also, he is a serial entrepreneur, visionary, and a man on a mission.
If a business wants to be innovative, advanced, modern, and, ultimately, practical, if some of its goals apart from profitability are globalisation, becoming a top-notch company in the sector and growth; incorporating the advancements in technology to its advantage is a must. Apart from performing other essential functions, a business needs to build and maintain quality relationships with customers, investors, suppliers, partners, and, last but not least, with its internal teams. Here’s where video conferencing plays a key role, making it a necessary tool for every business, especially during the pandemic when all collaboration takes place online in many companies. From casual shout-outs and daily standups to multi-stakeholder weekly meetings, numerous remote employees worldwide use video conferencing tools every day.
According to a recent survey by Lifesize, 78% of professionals use video for team meetings and standups; and 55% believe that video conferencing can make work environments more collaborative. A social validation on how video conferencing tools are slowly becoming a staple for businesses across various sectors.
Video Conferencing: An Important Tool for the Times to Come
Video conferencing offers several benefits to businesses: it reduces travel expenses, saves time, boosts productivity during work from home and promotes collaboration. Let’s study its impact in detail:
- Huddle or Team Meetings
Until technological disruption was not a thing, virtual team meetings used to be a nuisance. With the onset of 4G, cloud meeting solutions and AI-based offerings, these meetings are now accessible, painless and productive. Video conferencing platforms offer features like Password Enabled Meetings, Private Rooms, Recordings, Meeting Transcriptions, Schedule Meeting Options & more. Furthermore, one can set reminders, chat, drive higher participation, screen share, file share, stream on low bandwidth and even opt for an audio-only mode. Today, video conferencing platforms push new boundaries by integrating AI/ML into the mix, making meetings more immersive. In conclusion, video conferencing have genuinely transformed the way we host our meetings.
- Broadcast & Engage
Video Conferencing is slowly turning into a live stream extravaganza. The emerging video conferencing platforms allow one to easily broadcast virtual meet-ups to their social media channels -Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc. As a result, companies reach and engage with a large number of their audience from widespread geographies.
Further, virtual events are being hosted by large organisations frequently, making the whole process of networking, branding, and exchanging ideas a regular Saturday affair. These events help businesses generate & qualify leads, build new connections and capture mindshare.
- Sales Pitches
Video conferencing has broken barriers, pushed the boundaries & catalysed global selling. Never before was it possible for a small business owner to sell its products or services to customers based in the US or Europe from the comforts of his/her home? Was it? It wasn’t.
- Education, Learning & Training
In addition to other influential impacts, video conferencing has transformed the world of learning and training. Digital training is efficient, competent and convenient. It allows organisations to train their employees based halfway across the globe systematically, anytime while making it easy for them to transfer knowledge, collaborate, listen, teach, and seep in their values on a global scale.
- Customer Experience
Video conferencing is redefining customer experience. It is helping organisations put their best foot forward, be accessible to their customers in real-time and most importantly, humanise brand-customer relationships. Moreover, video conferencing is adding a whole new dimension to customer support. With video support initiatives, organisations can guide users to solutions faster and efficiently.
- Customer On-boarding
Video conferencing has played a vital role in shortening the buyer’s journey. With the help of live walkthroughs on video, webinars & virtual events, sales have become a lot easier.
- Integrating Global Teams
Video conferencing has helped unlock the global talent community for start-ups, SMEs & enterprises alike. Today, an increasing number of companies across the globe have a global workforce.
Beyond Business as Usual
Video conferencing tools have fuelled collaboration in meetings in many exciting ways. For example, one can record sessions for later viewing. Also, instead of holding a conversation via email, which can get interrupted, a short video conversation can help talk through the issue in real-time. These conversations are conducive to collaboration and generally much more productive. Further, video conferencing software allows employees to have much greater flexibility, which leads to higher job satisfaction and employee retention.
Additionally, as many businesses construct their work environments around modern technologies like video conferencing, it is helping them reduce overhead costs, sparing more money for capital, expansion, marketing, or whatever else the company needs to grow. The benefits of video conferencing tools are many, making them an attractive option, whatever a business size.
What Next for Video Conferencing Platforms?
The global web conferencing market size can grow at a CAGR of 8.0% during 2021-2026 – reaching USD 6341.5 million by 2026 from USD 3678.4 million in 2019, as per the estimates made in Valuates Reports. Video conferencing continues to evolve and keep changing the way we work. Definitely! Collaboration in mixed-reality is the future of work.
The pandemic has shown us just how valuable video conferencing can be, not just for successfully running business operations while working remotely but also for boosting the productivity and efficiency of teams. Today, an increasing number of companies are hiring talents from all across the globe, all because video conferencing makes it possible. The technology might be in concept phases for now, but as companies adopt these tools, the way we work will change forever.
Conclusion
Video conferencing tools have become an integral part of day-to-day business operations. It plays a significant role in any business and will continue to gain relevance as pandemic pushes us to move faster towards that new norm of collaboration remotely.
It would be interesting to see where “Video Conferencing” heads in the years ahead.