A change made possible through technology that’s convenient and easy enough to use; and to use often.

There are loads of people for whom visual, two-way communications is a way of life.  Some have been doing it for so long that they cringe at the thought of an audio conference call and who die a little bit inside when they have to dial a phone.

But for every one person who has adopted video as a way to communicate – who has changed the way that they interact with family and colleagues – there are fifty who haven’t. And of those fifty, forty-five of them have tried videoconferencing and just didn’t “get into it.”   It was either too much of a pain to set up, or it didn’t work right, or there was something about the experience that struck them the wrong way (excessive delay, bad audio, bad camera angles, etc. – we’ve all heard this stuff before).

We know the common thread among those who haven’t adopted a videoconferencing lifestyle.   We have an idea about what’s common among those who have: That it takes several good video call experiences for most people to really get it.   That’s the key, right? Repeated good experiences.

I agree. But there’s more to it.  There is a secret buried here that nobody in the videoconferencing world has figured out.

The secret is this:  Those who “get” the value of visual communications have undergone a transformation in how they communicate.

The crux of the problem is that most people do not like change.  Since transformation means “dramatic change,” and “metamorphosis,” resistance to transformation is natural for most.  Overcoming that resistance is what that “repeated good experiences” is about.  Overcoming that resistance is at the heart of transformation, and by extension, at the heart of adoption of visual communications.

For those who care about driving adoption and usage of videoconferencing – vendors, as well as the customers who shell out Big Bucks and want a decent return on their investment – they need to care about how to make transformations happen.

Transformation of clients.

Transformation of staff.

Transformation of co-workers and business partners.

And if, for some reason, you don’t think that those are Big Hairy Audacious Goals, just remember that People Don’t Like Change.  Changing how your company and your clients do business – THIS is what I’m talking about.  THIS is the challenge of driving usage and adoption of videoconferencing.  This is hard to do, and is exactly why it is not done very well.

We’re Screwed. Right?

Transformation is hard, but not impossible.  There are good examples of businesses and occupations that are all about transformation:.

• Personal trainers
• Healthcare organizations
• Educational institutions
• Religious institutions
• Business coaches and consultants

How can we learn from these guys?

Not surprisingly (to anyone who has read much of my writing) the answer lies in the book, The Experience Economy.

The last section of the book points out that the “Experience Economy” is not the end-of-the-line in the Progression of Economic Value (from a commodity-based economy to a goods-based to a service-based to an experience-based economy).  In the same way that  customizing a customer service changes it into a customer experience, a customized and repeated customer experience becomes a customer transformation.

Without getting too deep into how that works, I will just say that taking a videoconferencing experience (that is, a videoconferencing service that is customized and carefully staged to create a great customer experience), customizing it and repeating it is the way to make that transformation happen. It is the way to turn videoconferencing from a mere curiosity into a new and indispensable way to do business.

For vendors:  Figure out how to deliver a consistently good customer experience (create a consistent theme for the experience, analyze the experience from the Four Experience Realms standpoint, extend the user experience beyond the end of the videoconference via social media, feedback, community-building, etc., understand customer sacrifice and customer surprise in addition to customer satisfaction, and so on).  Then mass-customize the experience for your customers and get repeated, good experiences of video communication under their belt.

For organizations that use videoconferencing: Do the same thing as the vendors.  Your customers are predominantly your internal users.  Cater to them. Give them what they want and need (remembering that, frequently, what they DON’T know that they need – but you do). Create an internal community of those that use videoconferencing through social media – whether internal to the organization, or external.

And for everyone: Realize that “work is theatre, and every business a stage.”  This is the tag line of, The Experience Economy, and with its cameras, video monitors, mics and speakers, videoconferencing much more resembles theatre than it does anything else.

Treat it that way.  You’ll be glad that you did.

BYOD means that conference room collaboration tools – with videoconferencing being the most visible (pun intended) – will increasingly be used for “right sized” meetings.  Much less frequently will we see a single person occupying a conference room for a videoconference.  This is a good thing.  Conference rooms, and the technology which connects them together, will be needed as long as people work in teams and groups.  Moreover, we who supply and manage these rooms can now focus more on the needs of groups rather than the needs of groups AND individuals at the same time.

Taking a concept from Pine & Gilmore’s, The Experience Economy, I offer a different (and, in my opinion, BETTER) model for what goes on in the conference room:

Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage.

Using this analogy, the conference room is a stage – or, a performance space – and the work that goes on there is theatre.

In the theatre, the performance space is made of:

If it’s human connection you seek \
The phone is a mere pip-squeak \
You just can’t replace \
Eye contact, face-to-face \
But visual communications bridges the gap. Give it a peek!

Greenline Emeritus Consulting makes video conferencing accessible to small business.

There once was an office out there /
Forced by Corporate to use awful software /
Their turn-over high /
New hires would cry /
But training videos [from Greenline] made it easy as pie.”

Greenline Emeritus Consulting makes GREAT software training videos!

Benny’s Original Rutabaga Korporation is an enormous, multi-national corporation.   They pride themselves on being forward-looking where it comes to technology,and early and eager adopters of collaboration technology.  They bought into videoconferencing before it was cool – before B.O.R.K. was the huge enterprise  it is today.  But their longevity and tech-savviness didn’t help them avoid a common pitfall in technology management today:

Videoconferencing is treated as a mongrel that nobody wants.  

Because it is equal parts I.T., A/V, business communications, conference services, continuing education, and collaborative technology, running the videoconferencing organism (all of the associated equipment – infrastructure and endpoints – PLUS the organizational structure which operates and maintains it) does not fit nicely into common business management models, structures, or practices.

It tends to be managed like a red-headed stepchild.  It should be managed more like a Disney World Experience.

— Let’s get specific, here —

B.O.R.K.’s I.T. department owns servers, workstations, networks, and telecommunications.  They’re also the owner of the videoconferencing service.  They manage budgets, usage, maintenance, service level agreements and strategic direction.  CIOs the world round know how to run an I.T. organization; and though there may be more than one management model for I.T.,  it is an “organism” which is pretty well understood.  B.O.R.K.’s CIO has been around the block and knows what she’s doing.

But B.O.R.K.’s I.T. department is just not well equipped to own videoconferencing.  At best, they have one or two subject matter experts – experts in the technology or operations, or both – but they do not have any authority to dictate how the service is used, nor are they involved in assisting those who use it to truly understand and wield its intrinsic power for human communications.

Why is this such an issue? Why is videoconferencing so different from the other services that IT owns?

It’s because videoconferencing is not just a phone with moving pictures. It is an experiential medium for human interaction.

— Why I.T.? Why not I.T.? —

For B.O.R.K and so many other enterprise-sized organizations, I.T. is the default owner simply because videoconferencing looks like computers, web cams, and networks.  I.T. understands the parts (though audiovisual technology often baffles them) and so can maintain the equipment but is ill-equipped – and doesn’t have the authority – to develop the right company culture around its use.  Put a bit more metaphorically, IT cannot get the car out of first gear.

Visual telecommunications is a mosaic, a beautiful creation; more than the sum of its technological parts.

— Why Conference Services. Why not? —

B.O.R.K. is large enough to have a conference center and a conference services department, which for a while owned videoconferencing.  After all, it tends to be the biggest user of it, so why not?

It does seems like a good idea at first blush, but videoconferencing today goes WAY beyond the conference room.  The proliferation of small, powerful, Internet-connected devices and the Bring Your Own Device (B.Y.O.D.) trend in business means that video is everywhere:  trains, planes and automobiles.  ’Pads, ‘Pods, computers and smart phones.  This diversity-of-devices takes video far beyond the mission and purpose of Conference Services.  When visual communications was limited to conference rooms, a good argument could be made for the conference service to own it. But, to be honest, most conference center managers are stuck in an old paradigm which simply does not grasp the significance of connecting people together in one virtual meeting. But no matter. Conference Services is not the right owner, anyway.

— Who, then? —

The problem with traditional, service-oriented models for videoconference management is that videoconferencing is an experience, and needs to be managed as one.  I wrote about this in “What do you expect of your videoconferencing investment.”   Because we try to squeeze this organism into an unenlightened and outmoded “operations” model — that of a service — it never finds the right owner.

Were we to stage experiences rather than offer services we would find that the organism is best owned by the Customer Experience department; or, lacking one, it should be owned by Marketing.

— Why Disney? —

Disney knows that their customers are coming to experience something special and are willing to pay extra for it.  For Disney, business is a stage and work is putting on a show.   This is the core of staging an experience.  If B.O.R.K. is ever to break out of its mediocre, outdated model for videoconference organism management, they should model themselves after the Magic Kingdom.

— That’s Ridiculous —

I am not saying that a videoconferencing experience should be based on fantasy and a contrived story line.  But I am saying that if B.O.R.K. understands how to analyze its videoconferencing organism as a highly valuable experience for business communication it would begin to shape the videoconferencing experience into one which, when repeated consistently, transforms the way they do business. Does that sound outlandish? Is that a highly inflated view of what visual communications can be for a business?

We already know that this is a highly experiential medium, but we usually compare it to a telephone.

We already know that there’s a difference between delivering a service to the customers and staging an experience for them.

We already know that a good experience is highly valued, and good service is merely a commodity – blithely offered by a thousand different providers.

What we aren’t sure of is whether or not staging videoconferencing experiences is worth the effort.

I don’t know about you, but I go out of my way to visit Disney.  The effort they put into the theme park experience makes it well worth the effort. And it transforms my outlook on life.

Ñ

Victoria Rock, President & CEO, Victoria Court Reporting Services

Katherine Puffer, Managing Director, VH Valuations

Jerry Freund, President & Owner, Mid American Printing, Chicago

 I attended a seminar he was hosting at the annual TTVN (State of Texas video conference network) convention.  Theo was speaking to the attendees about data compression used in video conferencing.  His knowledge of the subject matter and his teaching ability made it easy for novices and experts alike to understand the concept.  His use of visual aids was also very helpful.

Ken Nelson MSIT, CISSP, Chief Engineer/Operations Manager, KAMU-TV/FM, Texas A&M University