Business Collaboration Trends that can Change How We Do Business
As a business, it is always pertinent and necessary to make a collaboration effort with other businesses, whether big or small. And especially in this time of year, where with the pandemic businesses find themselves having to do more than ever to stay afloat and keep the ship not sinking, like you know, pulling experts in with unique and cross-functional perspectives so they can solve complex problems that always rapidly change as time goes.
And that’s not mentioning the current workforce we have now, more flexible and fluid in their culture and working environment than ever before, with businesses hiring remote freelancers outside of their area, not to mention their full time staff, which results in quicker feedback and projects finished on time and on budget.
But to do all this of course, requires new collaborative technologies and tools, which continues to grow and updated as of the time of this writing! So why don’t we take a quick look at four of these tools, hm?
Virtual/Augmented Reality
First thing you think about when it comes to virtual/augmented reality is probably when you play games, like chatting with virtual people in VRChat, or slashing beats in Beat Saber, or just playing Skyrim for the nth time. But, as with many things, virtual/augmented reality has its own mundane, business uses. How usable? About $16.1 billion worth by 2025 much of uses, according to Goldman Sachs.
Virtual reality is useful for when you want your meeting experiences to be more immersive, using things such as RealSense and AltspaceVR, and augmented reality is useful for businesses as people can still see their surroundings but now with additional new information, like this image for example:
That right there is usages of augmented reality in watch shops, where customers can now see and preview how the watch looks in their wrists, and this is only one of the many examples, as this business is expected to quickly be adapted in other industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and many others! Isn’t the future oh so exciting?
Data Collaboration
According to IBM, enterprise data is expected to grow at a rate of 50x year over year through 2020. Capturing and recording massive amounts of data used to be a challenge. Now, the problem isn’t recording the data, but analysing it and finding useful patterns and conclusions, without having a dedicated team of data scientists at your disposal.
The overwhelming majority of new data is created by consumers. This data is created when consumers communicate through social media channels, move through a marketing funnel, or make purchases online. Businesses are accumulating an ever-expanding amount of consumer data, and their old data tools are no longer up for the job. Why? Because they’re not designed to collect data from more broader sources like social media.
This is why data collaboration is an imperative, because it allows companies to blend multiple sources of data to help teams reach meaningful conclusions, and they allow companies to track how their team members are collaborating. Tracking workflow and outcomes allows companies to figure out which processes are effective and which ones aren’t, which means evaluating results and the data to make businesses more efficient!
New visual collaboration tools
It’s been proven that humans are visual learners and studies have shown that visual information is retained longer than written or spoken information. So, it makes sense that visual collaboration tools are increasing business productivity.
Now, of course, we’ve already known Slack or LinkedIn as a good example, but we’re going to go somewhere a little more software-y and less internet-y. For example, Instapage Collaboration Solution enhances business productivity more by allowing all stakeholders to communicate through a single visual collaboration tool. Users don’t have to send screenshots of their work or communicate via multiple software applications like Google Docs and Slack. All team members and stakeholders can collaborate in a single place, or how about this one from Oblong Industries, Mezzanine? Which is a gesture-controlled user interface which allows users to move visuals from one screen to another, and many more such tools that allows for better collaborative experiences!
Collaboration with artificial intelligence bots
A survey from Digital Pulse found that one of the biggest frustrations consumers have with online services is the inability to get immediate answers to simple questions with 40% of consumers citing this problem:
Meaning, they’ll leave your site for a competitor because they can’t get answers immediately. And so, that’s where artificial intelligence bots come in.
They provide you interactivity with your prospective customers, and quickly help them with information that they need. Both Facebook and Microsoft made major investments in artificial intelligence bots in 2016, and you can expect under industries to follow. This is why businesses are using bots: to quicken the pace of communication. If you missed a meeting, you could ask a bot for a summary instead of sending your co-worker an email, which enhances collaboration and saves you time and money. Isn’t artificial intelligence just so grand?
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Written by: Callasyah Erwinanda (Copywriter of Apiary Coworking Space)