I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but no one is using those fancy new features that you spent millions of dollars to develop. This is, of course, hyperbole, but it opens up a discussion about one of the biggest issues plaguing the videoconferencing industry.
Let me paint you a picture. You are part of the AV buying team for your company, tasked with improving collaboration in this new age of work. You have to solve challenges like bowling alley views, disconnected teams, and the social awkwardness of holding a meeting across a screen. Naturally, you look for products that have the most innovative new features because the old gear just isn't cutting it anymore.
Quick, Shut It Off
Now let me paint you another picture. I'm an employee at a company that just deployed a new fleet of videoconferencing products. I join my meeting and jump right into the conversation. I’m not super familiar with the technology, so I just consider it a success that I was able to get it started without any hiccups.
On the other side of the call, a few of my colleagues join from a different conference room. The camera has some sort of automatic framing that zooms in on them, but they quickly notice the framing is switching around seemingly with no pattern and they worry it's distracting. A teammate from that conference room quickly fumbles through the touchpanel to turn it off. Phew, now the meeting can actually begin.
That story I just told is not just AV lore that I made up to scare you. That recently happened to me—and it’s not the first time. In fact, I can’t count on two hands how many times I have run into this issue since joining a non-AV industry tech company.
For many people, it’s just not worth the risk to try something they don't trust.
I’m not going to share what platform we were using or what hardware was in the room because, frankly, this is a systemic issue. Companies can point the finger at each other and say this would never happen on their products, but the truth is that no one is immune. In a rat race to be the most innovative, I fear that we, as an industry, have lost track of what truly matters.
I have some thoughts on how we got here, but it needs to be broken down into several pieces. One piece is why industry contenders feel impending pressure to keep churning out the latest and greatest. That one's easy: Buyers are asking for it.
As an AV purchasing decision-maker for your company, the best way to evaluate which products are the best is through a spec sheet war, or by testing a few products and their fancy new features against one another in a controlled setting. The problem is that neither of those methods provides an accurate view of what the product experience will be like for an end user.
High Stakes Video
The second piece of this puzzle has to do with why end users have such a low tolerance for hiccups when it comes to videoconferencing. It doesn't matter how innovative the new features are; videoconferencing is a unique setting where the stakes are higher and a normal amount of messing up is simply not acceptable.
Video calls take place within a finite period of time, most commonly 30 minutes, so time is of the essence. To fit everything you need to within that small window, you need everything to go as smoothly as possible. If you lose five minutes because the technology is doing something weird, you just lost 15% of the time to get done what you needed to get done. For many people, it’s just not worth the risk to try something they don't trust.
Plus, your reputation is on the line. Even if you aren’t the one explicitly disrupting the meeting, it’s your responsibility to resolve the distraction if it's coming from your room. If you struggle to resolve it, it can be embarrassing. Suddenly, it starts to feel like you are the one disrupting the meeting, and all eyes are on you to pull it back together.
Finally, your performance, as well as the ability to accomplish things within your role, affect your livelihood—and video calls are one of the key situations in many roles where the magic happens. Most people probably won’t make this connection consciously, but the subconscious is a powerful motivator and guides your feelings and decision making even when you don’t realize it.
A Matter of Trust
Because of how high stakes video calls can feel, it doesn’t take a lot to lose trust in a new feature. One bad experience is enough to turn you off completely, particularly because most people won’t take the time to figure out why that bad experience happened or how to avoid it in the future. Instead, the easiest path forward is to go back to your trusty old ways; they may not offer the most optimized experience, but they get the job done with minimal hassle.
Where does this leave us as an industry? How can we start to solve this systemic issue? Each stakeholder plays a necessary role in the solution: the videoconferencing vendor, the AV buyer, and the end user.
For the end user, your role is to speak up when things don’t work. It takes only a few minutes to provide feedback to your IT team on your experience, but that can make a world of difference if everyone commits to doing this.
Similarly, AV buyers and IT teams need to be actively absorbing that feedback from end users. Rather than focusing on what company does the best marketing, it’s time to focus on what the end user really wants. And I can almost guarantee what they want is not the latest and greatest, but the most reliable and consistent.
[USB-C Conference Room Connectivity]
And for all you videoconferencing vendors, don’t get caught up in the rat race. Invest time and resources into creating the most reliable technology above all else. At the end of the day, your vision for the future doesn’t matter if no one is willing to participate.
