Since the events of 2020, the world has gradually grown more accustomed to the concept of “social distancing”. Everything we do is now edged with a degree of caution, whether it’s waiting for the train, or booking meetings with clients. As the future of the hybrid working world unfurls, this careful approach to interactions represents an important opportunity for channel partners.

Companies of all sizes will be looking for ways to transform their meeting rooms, making them more hygienic, COVID-safe, and contact-free.

So, how do channel partners embrace this new environment?

The key to success will be in providing peace of mind through tools that require less interaction, and support employees in staying safe.

Investing in Fewer Wires and Buttons: Voice Assistants

Even before the pandemic, many business buyers were looking to make meeting rooms into more streamlined spaces. Endless wires and buttons often made setting conversations up into a more complex affair. People wanted a way to connect that was simpler, and more intuitive.

The popularity of tools like Amazon Alexa and Google Home opened the door to voice assistants as the go-to strategy for removing immediate problems with contact. Many employees and teams are already comfortable with using their smart assistants to complete tasks at home. Channel partners that can introduce meeting solutions linked to voice assistants will create a natural step into contactless interaction for their customers.

A Microsoft Teams meeting room, for instance, can use access with Microsoft Cortana so that colleagues can start meetings by simply asking their assistant to bring up a section of their calendar, or connect with a colleague. The use of voice assistants will also demand access to the right microphones and peripheral tools for channel partners.

Companies will need to ensure that their meeting rooms can pick up human voice quickly and easily, from wherever an employee might be standing. This clarity of voice will be crucial not just for human-to-human conversation going forward, but for human-to-machine interactions too.

Bring Your Own Device, and Meeting

Another major component of the touchless meeting room will be the evolution of employees using their own personal devices in the meeting space. BYOD (Bring your own device) was a quickly gaining steam as a fantastic way to engage employees and reduce costs in the business environment before the pandemic hit. Now that companies are returning to work in a post-pandemic environment, employees probably won’t want to stop using the tools they’ve gotten used to.

The onus is on channel partners in this environment to ensure that business leaders have a way of managing the various devices that employees bring into the workplace. UCaaS and meeting solutions that can be rolled out to personal devices through cloud-based apps and interfaces will be crucial. Companies will also be looking for ways to secure their employees using external devices, through mobile device management, and remote troubleshooting facilities.

With the right, secured strategy for BYOD, employees should be able to launch meetings and connect to conference calls from socially distanced spaces within a wider meeting room environment. This reduces the need for employees to huddle around a central conference phone or set up a call with a central touchscreen.

Technology like proximity pairing will make the entry of BYOD technology into the meeting place even more effective. This will allow employees to dial into a meeting as soon as they approach a designated conference space, without using a shared device.

Bring your own meeting will build on the BYOD environment. Channel partners that can allow their customers to join any meeting software through their available hardware at the touch of a button on their smartphone or personal laptop will reduce the spread of germs. BYOM ensures that anyone can use the technology they prefer for their meetings without having to ask a technician to assist with setup.

Advanced Solutions for Safer Spaces

The touchless meeting room of tomorrow will rely heavily on access to intelligent tools that can accomplish more without human interaction. AI in meeting room microphones should be automatically able to detect and enhance human voices, while getting rid of background noise, so that employees can stay a safe distance away from each other. Cameras with computer vision should help to zoom in on all employees in a space, no matter how far apart they are.

Many meeting rooms focused on the contactless future are also experimenting with things like gesture access and controls. For instance, it might be possible for a person in a meeting to give a thumbs up from a distance. Tools like Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex can now take those gestures and translate them into emoji-style reactions on the meeting screen, allowing for better clarity.

Gestures can even be used to help employees swipe through screens without touching anything or move documents around on a shared meeting board. As the workplace continues to transform, and technology evolves, channel partners can even get in on the next level of meeting technology. Integrations with tools from companies like Microsoft and HoloLens could open the door for things like mixed reality and virtual reality meetings.

Extended reality in the meeting room would allow people to essentially share documents and spaces without being close enough to each other to create risk. Businesses like Spatial are pulling AR and VR into a 3D world so that employees can interact with content and each other through gestures, rather than swiping or tapping.

Work from the Problems of the Customer

As always, the key to success in creating the touchless meeting room of tomorrow is working backward from the potential challenges your clients face. Considering the unique needs of each team will make it easier to determine which forms of contactless technology will have the best impact. While some back-end knowledge workers might only need simple voice assistants and AI-enhanced video cameras to meet more effectively, other teams will need more.

Product developers, engineers and creators are more likely to want to invest in tools that can replicate the feeling of working on a project simultaneously with their peers.

 

 



from UC Today https://ift.tt/2QPiO9t