It’s a curious time for those of us who work in UC. “Unified what?” used to be the standard response. Suddenly, we’re each the go-to expert among our family and friends, bridging the miles with video calls for the isolated, facilitating everything from online schooling to family reunions, each doing our bit share what we know and keep the world working.
But when I spoke to Gather CEO, Scott Goodwin, he reminded me that video and collaboration have been gradually making gains and adding value within many vertical markets for some time, and many Gather resellers make innovative use of their white-label collaboration technology in unique ways
Better therapy, and increased sales outcomes
Goodwin mentioned a Service Provider who had used gather to solve the problems for one of their customer’s a large behavioural therapy business. “Increasing confidence in those who fear public speaking, helping people that want to quit smoking — they use a whole load of cognitive behavioural techniques to help their clients overcome personal issues”
Gather’s technology helps therapists maintain relationships with their clients in an age of social distancing, but virtual meetings had been introduced prior to the Corona outbreak as a way for therapists to increase their availability and utility.
“This technology lets therapists practice, face-to-face in their online studios. The Gather collaboration tool not only facilitates the actual client sessions, it provides the therapist with insightful analytics about the session”
“Providing insight on the balance of the conversation, the key topics, and a complete searchable index allows the therapist to identify insights quickly. These sessions are often shared with the client for extra support and reference.”
Learning and development
This same combination of analytics and search capabilities is being used with great effect by sales teams. Sales calls are now becoming video sessions with presentations being delivered remotely, which can be reviewed and analysed easily by management to identify keywords and phrases creating traction with prospects. Sales management can now watch all calls and seek to identify areas of improvements and share these across their organisation. This ability to know what and what hasn’t been said lends itself well to a raft of safeguarding applications and many service providers are seizing on this new opportunity to add further value to their clients.
Another way in which Goodwin has found Gather’s UC application being used for social good is to enhance the transparency and fairness of the job interview.
Fair recruitment
With interviews conducted on Gather, not only does it mean that more stakeholders can participate in the final decision by viewing the recording afterwards, the process itself becomes more accountable, as well as improving the speed of the hiring process. “There is huge evidence now that suggests that cognitive bias plays a huge part in the human recruitment process”, Goodwin explained. “But the analytics capability that is part of our offer means you can measure that the same amount of time was provided to each particular candidate. That the hiring manager was equally engaged with each candidate. You can see that same questioning was provided to each particular candidate as well, and that each response was given fair and equal offering as well.”
This doesn’t only level the playing field for candidates, it means hiring managers are accountable and measured, and the organisation is protected from complaints:
“In the public sector and larger businesses like FTSE 200 companies, that’s really important, that they’ve got an audit trail there”
So once the world returns to ‘normal’, whatever that looks like, and we’re no longer depending on UC tools for every aspect of business and social life, these longer term trends of collaboration for social good will continue to enhance our lives — and continue to make things better.
Tools like Gather have so many potential applications outside the obvious business meeting environment, and the future will surely bring even greater creativity and social impact.
