4 Considerations When Choosing a Video & Knowledge Sharing Solution
We’ve been working with companies that are choosing a Video and Knowledge Sharing Solution for their organizations. There are various business reasons they cite for this investment including Sales Enablement, Training and Development, Sales & Marketing Collaboration and Corporate Communications. However, those companies that have been the most satisfied with their process and decision have all focused on one key factor when considering the solution to deploy:
Will this solution provide the best experience for my employees?
We’ve broken down that question in four key components that should provide the basis for a strong, informed evaluation and decision for a Video & Knowledge Sharing Solution.
1. How convenient and enjoyable is it for my users to engage with the solution?
The #1 factor in how successful your efforts are to deploy a Video & Knowledge Sharing Solution is the extent to which your employees make it a part of their daily lives. If your users find the solution convenient to use, even fun, or dare I say, addictive, then the chance is good that you will deliver transformative value to your company. You want user activities like viewing videos, creating videos and sharing videos to be frictionless and easier to perform than using email.
2. How quickly and easily can users discover relevant content?
The solution you choose must be designed to deliver personalized value to your employees. Without effort or delay, content that will help your employees achieve success should be delivered through recommendations and notifications. The organization and indexing of content should foster immediate discovery through intuitive search capabilities. Integration should exist with operational systems to associate relevant content with the daily tasks and objectives of your employees. Examples could include linking relevant sales strategy videos to a rep’s pipeline, troubleshooting videos to a customer service person’s support queue or follow-up certification videos to a new employee’s on-boarding activities.
3. How does the performance of the solution map to the needs of your employees?
Your employees will expect speed, mobility and quality from any Video & Knowledge Sharing Solution you choose. How quickly can they share a video with colleagues? Do they encounter the frustrations and delays of uploading, downloading and streaming that often occur with video? Can your remote employees access the content easily, anytime and anywhere? Can the solution be accessed and used through mobile devices? And what about when your team is offline, on a plane, without connectivity? Can your employees still use the solution and access video content? Your evaluation should include whether the solution provider can support compressed video and caching.
4. How well can the solution connect your employees with the right resource to help with their objectives either inside OR outside the company?
A key component of the solution you are considering is connecting. By connecting to the right resources, your employees will learn, absorb and develop more quickly and effectively. They will achieve objectives when they are able to connect with other employees that can help them solve a problem or strengthen their skills. They will develop stronger and more productive partnerships when they can connect with partners, aligning goals and sharing necessary support and resources. Look for a solution provider that integrates features promoting rich connections and strong collaboration. These may include social sharing and social network integration, personalized recommendations for finding experts and asynchronous collaboration that is tightly built into the content itself to strengthen relevance.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, return on investment of this technology can only be realized if there’s successful user adoption. That’s why it’s so important to focus on factors that most influence the user experience. This approach will mean a fun AND value-added experience, resulting in productivity gains, lowering of expense and high return on investment.