Telepresence cuts costs, ups productivity

By Steven Taylor

The globalization of business has led to increased collaboration between individuals within the same company, their partners, suppliers and customers across the country and around the globe. With the growing demand to cut costs while increasing productivity, telepresence is proving to be a valuable solution meeting the needs for efficient global communication.

Today, more than 60 per cent of communication is non-verbal and existing technologies do not replace the benefits of face-to-face contact. Successful businesses know the importance of face-to-face meetings, and are looking for ways to save money without sacrificing important client relationship building opportunities. In the same way, this demand is also a potential opportunity for the hotel community hurt by the budget reductions in business travel.

Imagine the luxury of a successful business meeting without leaving your city by virtually transporting yourself using telepresence technologies at an optimized hotel or conference facility. Telepresence offers the ability to eliminate loss of productivity waiting in busy airports or spending unnecessary time away from family. Often travel, especially to remote areas, is a deterrent to potential employees looking to juggle family, quality of life and a busy career. Not only have users begun to enjoy the convenience of this available futuristic technology, businesses are seeing it affect their bottom line. Companies have already reaped the financial benefits and saved as much as nine percent on company-wide travel costs in their first year of using telepresence technologies. The need for access to these facilities will grow as telepresence becomes further integrated into business practices.

What exactly is telepresence?

Telepresence is an immersive conferencing experience. It allows its users to view other participants using “life-size” ultra high-definition video images, CD-quality, spatial audio, interactive technologies and a specially-designed environment to give the user the feeling of actually being in the same room as the participants in remote locations. Images on large 65-inch plasma displays at high resolution allow eye contact and the ability to discern body language. The experience is enhanced with the use of conferencing and document sharing software. Unlike traditional video conferencing, the ease of use for participants in a telepresence session allows them to experience the meeting and not get frustrated by the technology.

Telepresence technologies can be incorporated into existing conference spaces without requiring additional construction. Hotels and conference facilities are well positioned to quickly respond to companies seeking this technology but unable to sustain a permanent on-site facility. Outside of the equipment requirements, telepresence is supported by a network that can provide proper, real-time transport needed to maintain quality and maximize the benefits of the experience.

Telepresence is transforming how business communicates

Telepresence conferencing provides a new level of enhanced productivity and competitive advantages to conference facility users. Users enjoy greater access to resources needed to perform business functions and provide more effective ways to interact with those resources. For example, knowledge transfer and training is more effective with a fully engaged staff. Telepresence’s growing popularity is due to its ability to fulfill many current business needs:

o    Communicate globally – The need to be more responsive, to communicate and collaborate more efficiently on a global basis without adding travel time.

o    Grow faster – The need to increase revenue growth with more in-person customer contact, speed product development and reduce sales cycle time. The need to streamline costs through best-practice sharing, improve knowledge transfer and provide access to subject matter experts.

o    Mend at-risk relationships – The need to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty through frequent, high touch interactions.

o    Go green – The desire to support green initiatives (reduce fuel usage and emissions) by offering a truly viable alternative to travel for business meetings.

o    Stay in the game – The need to address business continuity concerns and enable immediate high-impact communications.

Making sure a telepresence facility is on a fully supported network is crucial to ensure a quality experience to discerning business customers around the world. Leading services would also include inter-company calling capabilities; scheduling tools that leverage common enterprise calendaring applications; network and call monitoring; technical support and troubleshooting as well as training.

Steven Taylor is the vice president of sales at AT&T Global Services Canada.  AT&T is a leading industry provider of telepresence technology.  The AT&T Telepresence Solution provides AT&T-owned Cisco TelePresence equipment, installation, full monitoring and management of the application, remote help desk service and on-site equipment maintenance and repair and works over AT&T Virtual Private Network transport. Multiple three-screen and one-screen site options are available.