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Benefits of Staff Support for Your Collaboration and AV Technology

AV Everywhere

For those times when you wished you could have a robot clone of yourself (or at least a third or fourth hand), AVI-SPL Managed Services is here to help create a strong end user support experience while doing the heavy lifting to keep your systems functional.

How can AVI-SPL Managed Services strengthen your operations?

Improved Response Times

When we place our staff on site, whether augmenting your current support staff or providing staff in a remote office that needs it, we’re removing the phone call barrier to support.  The ability to walk into a conference room and demonstrate how to conduct a meeting, and to begin troubleshooting immediately when an issue arises builds your workforce’s trust in their collaboration technology and improves their experience.  We’ll even provide backfill when your employees are out for a day – ensuring you always have a smiling face with expert knowledge available to help. 

Improved Staff Capabilities

As the industry and technology evolve, you need staff who can support your current and future environments.  AVI-SPL has some of the most knowledgeable staff in our industry, and our size and scope make us a top prospect for potential employees.  All AVI-SPL employees, including those at your site, have access to our internal training initiatives, as well as partner and industry training.  We remove the cost and time associated with employee training from your budget, while providing staff who are extremely capable and incentivized to continue learning and improving.

Best Practices of the Industry

AVI-SPL follows documented industry best practices.  This means that your organization will benefit from processes that provide the best operational efficiencies, security, and lifecycle management.  Our ITIL-certified staff are experts in IT as well as collaboration technologies, ensuring clear communication with your IT department and compliance with their standards. We also follow best practices with regard to the training and development of on-site personnel, so that you are assured of support from staff members who follow mutually approved documented processes. Your on-site staff effectively coordinate the response to incidents, collaborate with your teams, answer their questions, and make recommendations to your operations and technology based on their qualified assessments.

Even More Efficiency with Symphony

Beyond just managing your day-to-day collaboration estate, our patented AVI-SPL Symphony remote monitoring and control application can provide operational efficiency and reduce staff costs.  Integrating all your workflows into a single workflow provides easier management, while also automating previously manual procedures.  Our Room Sweeps provide a daily health check of each space, alerting you to issues before they impact an end user.  Beyond daily support, Symphony provides analytics and actionable business intelligence to ensure your current and future systems continue to meet your collaboration goals and unlock business value. 

With over 350 employees on site at client locations daily, AVI-SPL has the operational experience to support small, one-location organizations up through multinational Fortune 50 enterprises.  We have the standardized roles and the flexibility to create a role for your specific needs. so tell us about your support staff challenges and let’s begin strengthening your operations with AVI-SPL Managed Services.

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Coronavirus Highlights Value of Remote Work

AV Everywhere

With the recent news of the coronavirus dominating world headlines, this is a good opportunity to evaluate your company’s emergency plans. We’ve already seen the effects of the virus, also known as COVID-19, on the global markets. On Thurs, Feb. 27, the Dow fell almost 1,200 points, its highest one-day point drop in history. Much of that is being attributed to the effect of the virus on supply and demand. As a result, some of the largest companies in the world are restricting their employees’ business travel while also allocating more resources for virtual work. 

At around the 3:40 mark of this TechCrunch podcast, the speakers discuss Zoom and its ascent in price from the low $70s just a month ago to reaching over $120 in early trading on Friday, Feb. 28. That notable rise is occurring as video conferencing has become not just attractive but necessary. The TechCrunch discussion notes a number of major conferences – including Facebook’s F8 – that have been cancelled out of caution against the coronavirus.

Whether the cause is a virus, natural disaster, or some other disruptive event: How you will handle interruptions and minimize a negative impact to your business?

Uninterrupted Workforce Collaboration

Branch office locations need to function even if a main office is closed, and employees need a reliable, agile collaboration environment to enable them to work from home without missing a step.  AVI-SPL’s digital workplace solutions can ensure your workplace has the collaboration tools to handle any challenge and keep your talent and operations connected even amidst a crisis like the one we’re currently facing. 

By deploying a solution such as Microsoft Teams or Cisco Webex Teams, your workforce can continue to communicate regardless of distance or time zone.  These platforms also provide video conferencing to enhance the collaboration experience.  Popular cloud-based solutions like Zoom and Pexip can be easily integrated with these collaboration platforms.

A Better User Experience of Collaboration Technology

Some offices may have to close because of an event like the coronavirus.  But that circumstance only underscores the need to support those offices that are still open for business. AVI-SPL Symphony enables you to keep your operations functioning and your workforce productive – even when some of them can’t be at the office.

You can remotely monitor and control all collaboration technology from any of your locations. By leveraging Symphony, either as a managed service or Symphony as a Service, organizations can manage their meeting scheduling and launching. They can also monitor their meeting health status while it’s in progress by monitoring connection status and giving staff the information they need to provide in-meeting support without being in the room. You will know what rooms and devices are ready for use and can make fixes before the participants are impacted.

Be Prepared – And Reap the Benefits at the Same Time

Digital workplace collaboration can’t just be part of a contingency plan in the face of rare – we hope — emergencies. This is the way we work today, and it’s a big reason why companies can so easily expand into locations and markets and attract the talent that drives their success.

How can you ensure that your investment in collaboration is having the desired impact? The key is having the data. AVI-SPL Symphony provides tactical and strategic business intelligence through analytics as customized insight through Build Your Own Reports. You can then make informed decisions about room construction/repurposing, technology refreshes, and addressing issues like technology adoption.

Not only will you gain more insight into your environment, but AVI-SPL digital workplace solution deployments will help your organization save time and money.  In 2018, Forrester Consulting’s “Total Economic Impact of AVI-SPL’s Digital Workplace Solutions” found a meeting productivity increase worth $11.9M over three years for a large enterprise organization, and savings of 122,500 hours per year due to meetings that start on time.  In an uncertain economic environment, these savings will help your organization maintain its agility to meet the ever-changing climate.   

While we all hope that no emergencies ever impact our offices, events like the coronavirus bring into sharp relief the value of collaboration technology. Build your digital workplace, and your company will have more than a set of just-in-case tools; it will be equipped to compete in today’s business environment by empowering your people to share the ideas and create the value that leads to growth.

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See the Real-World Impact of AVI-SPL Symphony

AVI-SPL

We know that AVI-SPL Symphony improves your collaboration experience. Now we’re excited to share real-world statistics from one of our clients to demonstrate how large that improvement can be.

The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) relies heavily on distance education and online collaboration to overcome the challenges in delivering education across such a vast region. Our RMIT case study explained the positive impact that Symphony had on the user experience and the support staff.

Since that study, an audit of the Institute’s 2019 data found:Issues RMIT resolved with AVI-SPL Symphony

  • 580 auto-detected faults
  • 761 proactively resolved critical tickets
  • 30% fewer client-led tickets

These led to the following savings:

  • 380 teaching hours
  • 1,160 classes and events
  • 750 tech hoursTeaching and tech support hours RMIT saved with AVI-SPL Symphony

Overall, Symphony has helped nearly 32,000 students and faculty avoided a negative impact.  This impact avoidance increases end user confidence and adoption of the technology provided – thus increasing ROI of the environment. 

These results provide evidence of the improved user experience that attracts and keeps talented students and faculty engaged with each other and enhances the ability to reliably collaborate across locations. By ensuring that its collaboration technology is available and ready for use, RMIT has experienced overall adoption increases and collaboration satisfaction.

 

To view our Partner blog, click here

Why You Need Actionable Business Intelligence to Develop Your Workplace Strategy

actionable business intelligence

When you’re developing a workplace technology strategy these days, you have a million aspects to consider:

  • Is the technology accessible to the entire workforce across generational, geographic, and cultural boundaries?
  • Is it easy to use, intuitive, and sophisticated – but not intimidating?
  • Does it provide instant, usable data (not just a flood for the sake of data)?

You have a variety of methods available to figure out this strategy: Survey your population and hope you asked the right questions and that it gets completed accurately; stake out your conference rooms and record what goes on for a month; find a consultant who may or may not be versed in your particular needs.AVI-SPL Symphony Analytics screenshot

Business technology investments are too important to just throw up your hands and settle for a solution that may not meet the needs of your team.  We’ve designed AVI-SPL Symphony to provide the type of data that you need, the actionable business intelligence that will make a real difference in how you design, deploy, and manage your collaboration environment.

Actionable business intelligence – what Symphony provides – enables evidence-based decision making that translates into effective communication, collaboration, and unlocks real business value.  It’s not a single report or a bunch of statistics: It’s a daily observance of what works, what doesn’t, and what engages your workforce. This long-term data allows you to track the changes in employee behavior with experimental equipment, see which manufacturer’s equipment is preferred (and which causes the most trouble), and determine the load that collaboration is placing on your larger network.

Employee preferences depend a lot on your workforce composition – age, gender, and location, among other factors.  Often, the preferences in one locality don’t extend to others, leaving you with the possibility of supporting multiple types of equipment or standardizing on technology that leaves some users out.  With Symphony’s analytics you can find those few items everyone agrees on and utilize them as the basis for building a collaboration solution that meets end user preferences and provides you with standards for the corporate environment.

Root cause analysis is invaluable for a variety of different applications for both your IT team and your AV team.  Are jitter or poor performance caused by network issues or bad design choices?  Is the network functioning, but your AV or UCC are configured incorrectly?  Is your network great, but suboptimal equipment choices in your AV are causing a poor user experience?  Without finding the real cause of any issue or set of issues, countless hours and dollars can be spent without improving the quality.  Actionable business intelligence ensures that you can narrow in on the root cause of an issue, spending less time and resources spinning your wheels.

Symphony isn’t just a tool in your toolbox – it is a complete solution to the challenge of excellent user experiences with collaboration technologies.  Actionable business intelligence gleaned from the deployment of Symphony on your networks will enable you to spend less time and effort while still receiving a better end user experience. 

Contact us for a demo today. You can also demo these features at ISE 2020 at AVI-SPL booth 11-C155.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Create Your Ideal Workplace With AVI-SPL

AV Everywhere

In this video, you’ll see why AVI-SPL is the company you can trust to deliver a workplace strategy that meets positive business outcomes that are measurable. We do it through AV and collaboration technology solutions and services we integrate into your environment. The result is a better user experience, which means better engagement with the projects that lead to your success.

Watch the video below:

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Find Your Path to Workplace Transformation in the AVI-SPL Concept Catalog

AV Everywhere

If you’ve been wondering, “What are the steps I should be taking to improve my organization’s collaboration experience,” AVI-SPL’s Concept Catalog has the guidance you need to confidently approach a challenging workplace transformation project. In this new edition, we give you our advice for:

  • Setting your project scope and expectations
  • Creating your digital workplace committee
  • Defining your business goals
  • Mapping your technology solutions to the desired user experience
  • Identifying measurable objectives

You’ll find two case studies that show how organizations like yours are benefiting from workplace transformation guided by AVI-SPL. You can also read those case studies on our website: RMIT University and Business Development Bank of Canada. In the RMIT case study, discover how their students, faculty, and IT leadership saw the benefits of our Symphony user experience management application as soon as it went live. 

Our new catalog includes an overview of Symphony, which gives you a single-pane view of your AV and UC estate and delivers the analytics you need to wisely invest in collaboration rooms and solutions. 

We couldn’t put this issue together without our manufacturer partners, and our advertising section showcases the latest solutions from companies like Biamp, Cisco, Crestron, Harman, and many others. Their products are designed to enhance your workplace experience, so look them over at your leisure. If you find something that interests you or if you have any questions, connect with us at contact@avispl.com.

Read the AVI-SPL Concept Catalog >

To view our Partner blog, click here