Every successful business listens to what their customers request and seeks to anticipate their changing requirements. In 2020, iotum realised quickly that vendors needed flexible solutions for their customers around the world, as they strove to transition a diverse range of business services to distributed operation — adding voice and video calling tactically, could make all the difference.
President and CEO, Jason Martin, explained that providing sensitive services like education and healthcare, two of their areas of expertise, requires thoughtful video integration. Customer-focused services don’t want to send their users to a different app or website to start a video call, they want it right there embedded in their trusted portal.
Video right where it is needed
Jason Martin
“We realised the way to make our service more broadly available was to spend time on our API and SDK, enabling people to take the best of our offerings,” said Martin. “That way they can bring their own very specific solutions for remote work, education, healthcare, retail and gaming. We help them transform into natively video-enabled businesses, through detailed collaborative support.”
While iotum worked with these sectors in pre-COVID days, often their needs — particularly for video — have since altered considerably. “We may have served a healthcare body who used our functionality to have policy meetings, but now they’re using video to power clinical sessions. The combination of our HIPAA compliance with deep integration into online health record systems means we could offer medical-grade solutions for online consultations.”
Convenience, speed, and success of these offerings give Martin optimism. There will be a lasting role for video in the post-COVID world, with hybrid models combining the best of online and face-to-face modalities.
“There are still businesses out there thinking, ‘when this is all over we’ll go back to the way things were.’ They’re missing both the immediate potential to help people and the opportunity to advance new services. Different ways of thinking about customers, opportunities their competitors are working on right now”
Humanising the hybrid future
These use cases include telemedicine, which will doubtless have a continued role in triaging, hard-to-reach locations, and contagion avoidance. And retail, where presently the online vs in-store experiences are quite separated: video could bridge that gap in new ways.
“Imagine online supermarket shopping”, said Martin. “You have a person in the aisle hunting for favourite items with streaming video, showing what fresh produce is available, so you can pick out the one you want.” It’s a powerful idea, for those who will need to shield and isolate for the longer term, or simply want a more live and immediate online experience.
“Video adds richer interaction between the customer and the people who manage things online, it humanises everything and makes it a bit more civilised,” said Martin.
“The detachment of the online experience has contributed to quite a schism in the way people perceive community. This has broader implications for society. Where will we go from here?”
“We might still be in our bubbles in many cases, but we’re humans, and we crave human contact. Video is a good way to convey personality, including aspects of communication and intent you don’t get in text or audio.”
Whatever the new normal looks like, our need for safe human interaction combined with the expectation of video functionality, we can look out for more tactical deployments of video. A diverse range of touchpoints will enrich how we provide services, and hopefully the way we understand one another too.
from UC Today https://ift.tt/3thoDv7
0 Comments