Since 2000, the amount of time that we’ve spent in meetings has been gradually increasing.
When used correctly, these meeting moments can be valuable. Regular conversations and brainstorming sessions ensure that the people in a team are working cohesively together. Unfortunately, the meeting experience isn’t always as streamlined as it should be. Whether it’s an issue with poor connections, a problem with complex set-up processes, or simple audio and video errors, meetings are prone to chaos.
The good news is that leading brands like Cisco have an idea of how we can transform those meetings once and for all. According to Cisco, the key to better meetings isn’t just intelligence or better technology; it’s “cognition.” In other words, Cisco believes that the world needs technology that understands the purpose and context of every interaction we have.
Embracing Cognitive Collaboration
Cisco feels that cognitive collaboration has the power to eliminate the hassle responsible for wasting economic and “people-based” potential in the workplace. It’s all about integrating intelligence, enterprise information, and data insights into the daily interactions and processes that make a business run smoothly. Starting with meetings and working up to contact centre communications, cognitive collaboration uses the power of the cloud and immersive information to change the way that people communicate.
Cognitive collaboration isn’t just a new technology or platform; it’s a strategy designed to transform the way that people work every day. That means that if you plan on becoming a cognitively collaborative business, you’re going to need to prove the value of this evolution to your leaders and shareholders. After all, cognitive collaboration requires a substantial digital transformation, focused on fostering deeper relationships between teams.
What Does Cognitive Collaboration Do to Improve Workflow?
Any business investing in digital transformation strategies like cognitive collaboration needs evidence that their investments are going to pay off. Cognitive collaboration doesn’t immediately deliver direct revenue increases, but it does put the right environments in place to improve your chances of success in the long term. For instance, some of the potential benefits of cognitive collaboration include:
Deeper relationships between team members:
With cognitive collaboration tools in place, people can access information about the people that they meet with each day. For instance, “People Insights,” a new Cisco solution, delivers information from a person in a meeting to the other individual. This gives every member of a team the information they need to relate better to their peers. Not only does this context lead to better initial conversations, but it also makes it easier for people to connect to their coworkers – even in a dispersed environment where people might be working remotely.
When the people in your team feel more closely connected, they’re also more engaged by their work. People who have friends at work are more likely to have greater focus and higher levels of productivity. They’re also less likely to abandon your business to seek out other opportunities, which reduces the risk of turnover.
Enhanced customer interactions
Cognitive collaboration doesn’t just make the interactions between team members better either. This solution also drives more meaningful conversations between employees and customers too. Going forward, Cisco plans to extend tools like People Insights into the contact centre environment, offering agents powerful information about prospects and customers.
In a contact centre environment, cognitive collaboration could use virtual assistants to help agents access information about a customer before they answer a call. This allows the agent to deliver a personalised experience that’s tailored to the needs of that client. With contextual information to guide them, employees can provide faster solutions to problems by tracking down the correct subject matter experts to assist them with an issue. Alternatively, you could even put intelligent routing in place to send the customer to the right agent first time around.
Additionally, tools like People Insights will be able to identify VIP customers that need extra attention from your team members, or potential advocates for your future promotional efforts.
A More Simplified Workflow
Cognitive collaboration also makes it easier for team members to perform at their best in the workplace, whether they’re connecting with other members of their team, serving customers, or just completing projects. With virtual assistants in place to help them find the right information, team members can spend less time struggling to succeed each day.
Cognitive collaboration removes the points of friction that are common in the day-to-day work environment. For instance, digital assistants can help staff members to easily engage in collaborative tasks like joining a meeting, recording a call, or even just remembering to take part in a conversation. According to Cisco, around 30% of people spend up to 5 hours each work just researching people, information, and companies so that they can be more efficient in a meeting. Cognitive collaboration can remove that wasted time.
Cognition Makes the Workplace More Efficient
There’s more to cognitive collaboration than just giving people more information before they engage in a conversation with their team members. Instead, Cisco is providing today’s employees the tools and intelligence that they need to access more meaningful interactions in the workplace. This leads to better workflow productivity, stronger customer experiences, enhanced process efficiencies, and even more engaged employees.
Though Cisco’s approach to cognitive collaboration starts with meetings between members of your team and external contractors, there’s more to it than just sessions. The cognitive collaboration strategy can also help businesses to take better care of their external customers too. According to Cisco, around 60% of contact centres use more than 7 systems to interact with customers. What’s more 47% say that it takes just as long to collect the data that they need as it does to analyse it.
Cisco’s strategy for cognitive collaboration removes the disconnected and siloed experiences that have previously prevented companies from having meaningful interactions. With cognitive collaboration, businesses can instead focus on building significant moments where both employees and customers feel more informed and supported.
Since “experience” is at the heart of the differentiation roadmap today, cognitive collaboration could be the key to really giving your business the competitive advantage it needs to thrive.
