I’ve been with Yorktel for 14 years and as you can imagine, I’ve seen a lot of video technology innovation – though you’d miss the evolution if you blinked! If you could see the changes that we see when our customers enable video into their day-to-day operations, you’d be as enthusiastic as they are about it. Yorktel has been in the collaboration business a long time, and we know how to make video work. What I find, however, is a lack of awareness among many enterprises about how video can add business value.
This is a great time to be using video, especially to enhance collaboration and heighten your teams’ productivity. However, technology keeps changing, and I see frustration from customers’ IT leaders when trying to figure out a path forward. One reason is that IT thinks too much about video in legacy terms, whereby it’s capital-intensive, complex and hardware-based – and not being current on today’s offerings, especially around desktop video and cloud-based solutions. A second reason is the challenge of shifting the video tech roadmap from being reactive to strategically proactive. Being reactive only guarantees that a company will never “catch-up” with evolving systems and trends.
To help ease that frustration, I’d like to share three ways in which Yorktel helps enterprises every day. We have a great track record of success with video enablement, and each of the following reflects what I hear straight from customers about how we become an extension of their IT dept. We know all too well how overloaded IT teams are these days, and the difficulty faced for making video a higher priority. After considering the following, I’m hoping you’ll think differently not just about video, but also how Yorktel can make video a viable option for all your meetings.
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We know what’s happening in the market.
One of the biggest concerns I hear is getting assurance that IT is doing the right things around collaboration solutions. These internal teams only know their situation, whereas the Yorktel team sees what the broader market is doing, including the customers’ competitors, as well as our own competitors. My customers look to us for that bigger picture perspective, especially about moving to the cloud. They need to know if it’s reliable, scalable, secure, etc. They’re also concerned about job security – they can’t afford to bet wrong on new technology, but also need to be open to learning how they can add value with cloud-based video.
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How we enable customer success.
This role is not broadly understood, but it’s a key value-add we bring for our customers. In-house IT simply may not have the cycles or specific video skillset to stay current with all the new technologies, and that’s exactly what we do. As we get to know our customers better, and conduct a thorough needs assessment, we can identify what’s right for them based on daily business use cases and objectives.
We do this not just with technology, but also with professional services and other innovative offerings unique to Yorktel. We make life easier for IT, and the everyday users of the technology, and also provide hands-on support, guidance and training to get most from their collaboration solutions.
For Yorktel, training goes beyond simply dumping information during a one-time session. Last year, our Professional Services team launched “Hypercare,” which provides the end user with ongoing, on-site training and resources to ensure adoption. This is important because people tend to absorb just 30 percent of what they hear and see in an hour. We have gone as far as having our team leaders walk the floor at clients’ locations offering ad hoc help, offering office hours when those who need help can stop in, and staging secondary or tertiary training when needed. In addition, our managed services capabilities to support cloud-based video deployments are second to none.
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We know how to make video work.
A widespread issue we see is an unwieldy mix of systems, endpoints, vendors, etc., that simply don’t work together. Many enterprises have invested in video without the appropriate planning, and are left with conferencing rooms that only work with certain devices, the inability to get platforms like Lync/Skype for Business to integrate across different environments, and a low adoption rate among employees.
The root cause is not taking a strategic approach to standardize the use of video across the organization. This doesn’t mean a rip and replace scenario to start fresh – rather, it’s getting the right expertise to assess your situation and develop a plan to get video working properly so everyone can use it. We’re often surprised to learn that in-house IT doesn’t know where to turn for help, so the problem persists – which means collaboration suffers and assets earn zero ROI.
A part of my job is demonstrating how well Yorktel resolves these issues, and once our customers take that first step, you’d be surprised how quickly these problems are overcome and easy, true collaboration becomes second nature. Simply put, Yorktel eliminates complexity from the equation so that every meeting can be on video without hiccups or headaches. Clients believe that every meeting can be on video because the technology disappears into the background and becomes the invisible enabler they’d hoped for when taking the leap to video communications.