I get asked time and time again why self-service is important when choosing a video conference service. This blog gives my thoughts and why it’s great news that VQ Conference Manager makes self-service possible.

If you want to deliver a video conferencing service to your users and staff, from small to the very large deployments (and by that I’m talking about 10’s of thousands of users), the only way you are going to do this sustainably is by offering self-service. Self-service is the only way you will scale.

What self-service means is users schedule their conferences using tools already familiar to them; tools which already exist on their desktop. Why is this important?

Well, if they are already familiar with the tools, they know how to use them and you don’t have to train them. A great example of this is the Outlook calendar. Everyone knows how to use schedule a meeting using Outlook.

Self-service also means users are able to control their calls; they need to be able to add people to the call, they need to be able to control and edit their PIN numbers, they need to have the confidence to know what everyone in the conference is experiencing.

The alternative is having your users rely on a service delivery team. That doesn’t scale. Your users need to be able to do it for themselves.

And the good news is that VQ Conference Manager delivers all of this.

We have an easy to use web portal which allows users to control their conferences, participants, edit their PINs, change screen layouts and they can have an integration with Outlook, so users can schedule a video conference using familiar tools such as the Outlook calendar.

So what, you ask, would the alternative be if you didn’t have this self-service and your video conference service started to grow?

Well you would have to provide a team to do it for you. This doesn’t scale. I’ve been in video conferencing for a very long time; I go back to what I regard as the “bad old days” when there were always n + 5 participants in a video conference, and that + 5 were the back support team. You needed a support engineer at every location to make sure the video layouts were correct, another to make sure that the video conference equipment, itself worked. The users themselves lacked confidence that the video conference would work without these people in place and this just doesn’t scale. Yes, it works if you are going to have one or 2 important meetings every day, amongst a small select group within your organisation but if your whole organisation is wanting to meet on video, this is impossible to deliver unless they can do it for themselves.

So, the whole point about self-service is giving your users the confidence that the system is going to be there, just like flicking the switch and the light coming on. The video conferencing has got to be exactly the same. Your users have got to have the trust that when they dial into their Space they know how it behaves; it is always behaves in exactly the same way. Then usage on the system will grow and return on investment will improve.

Click here to find out more about why you should choose VQ Conference Manager to deliver your self-service video conferencing service.

In what is becoming a regular travel update, I wanted to tell you about my latest trip: this time to the USA. On paper, the schedule looked gruelling: New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC and Orlando all in a week. But I actually got plenty out of the trip both personally and professionally.

Between customer visits in New York, I had time for some sightseeing (Empire State, Central Park, the 9/11 Memorial) and I appreciated for the first time the ubiquity and convenience of a certain ride-sharing service. I use it at home, of course, but it has only just started in my area and the sheer facility of it across the Pond is on another scale, not just in NYC but all over the US. It’s not an exaggeration to say Uber has revolutionised the taxi business. I think there are analogies here too, with the way VQ and CMS, with their scale and convenience, are enabling video conferencing to become a ubiquitous, self-service facility that people just ‘use’ without having to plan or book.

Then onto Philadelphia to give 2 days of training for one of our key US partners; product development, road map and answering specific customer queries. These sessions are a great opportunity to really understand how VQ Conference Manager is being used in real life situations. We believe that scalability and self-service are key drivers, and these sessions re-iterated for me the sense that we are hitting the mark on these, both now and with our product roadmap. Subsequent customer visits and product demonstrations built on this. It is always very pleasing to see VQ Conference Manager in use and to hear from customers how it is assisting the adoption of video and the associated benefits of this.

As an aside, I was also reminded several times of the adage about UK and US being two cultures separated by a common language as I was corrected on my pronunciation of “schedule”. This is a word one uses a lot during a demonstration of VQ Conference Manager and not putting the hard ‘c’ in it tends to get noticed.

Unfortunately, there was no time to see “The Rocky Steps” or the Liberty Bell as I was on a tight schedule (with hard ‘c’) to get to Washington. And from there to Orlando and the InfoComm 2017 trade show.

Infocomm is a great way to connect with partners and customers, see what is happening in the wider industry, attend the user groups and side meetings and feed this back into our roadmap and product development teams.

So to wrap up, all in all, a hugely rewarding trip. I see the UC industry as a whole, the video conferencing industry and VQ Communications in particular, continue to build momentum and deliver excellent collaboration solutions.

Now I’m back from the US, we’re planning our next programme of webinars. Watch out for further details in the next few weeks.

So, I’ve been at VQ for well over 3 months now and I thought I’d give you another update from me.

I hadn’t appreciated when I started, what a truly international business VQ Communications is. Giles spoke about his US trip in his April blog and my passport is seeing quite a bit of use, too. I was in Switzerland last week, visiting partners and customers to provide both training and supporting new Conference Manager deployments. I did a fair bit of travelling whilst there and as an aside, for anyone needing to use it, it’s a great train service from Geneva to Lausanne: comfortable, punctual and clean.

Next week Mike and I will be training a partner in Bulgaria and then I’m off to the US for an intense week of meetings culminating in the InfoComm trade show in Orlando. If you are going to be there, please let me know: I would like to meet as many customers and partners as I can.

But of course, there’s no need for everybody to get on a plane every time we need to meet. Not with the almost-as-good-as-being-there experience offered by modern video conferencing platforms such as CMS. At VQ we have partners and customers all over the world. South America, Australia, USA, Vietnam, India, South Africa come readily to mind but there are many more and we are in regular video contact with many of them. I am always reminded how much easier it is to communicate, (especially where not everyone is using their first language), when you can actually see who you’re talking to.

Then there are the webinars that I run. These are timed to accommodate as many time zones around the world as I can and they do always feel like very international events. You should be receiving the invitation for the next webinar soon, by the way, so please make sure you register. The feedback I receive is positive and it’s a great opportunity to catch up with the latest VQ news.

We are indeed seeing huge demand from all over the world, and we have the tools and capability to service our growing list of international customers and partners from our home base in Chippenham, Wiltshire.

I look forward to welcoming many more worldwide users to the VQ customer base. Exciting times indeed. More from me again after my next trips.

5^th May 2017: Perfect Wave Technologies and VQ Communications sign Master Distributor agreement for the USA.

UK based VQ Communications are a leading supplier of management software for video conferencing and unified communications. Acano Manager 2 is deployed globally and hosts some of the largest Cisco Meeting Server deployments.

Located in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, USA, Perfect Wave Technologies, are a team of skilled experts in the video collaboration market who offer products and services that allow customers to utilize their existing collaborative investments and cohesively integrate new technologies. Perfect Wave’s team of experts knows how to design and implement easy-to-use video conference rooms, and how to provide training and support that help clients make the most of their investment.

“Perfect Wave Technologies is extremely excited at the opportunity to partner with VQ Communications and act as their Master U.S Distributor.” says Rick Green, President of Perfect Wave Technologies. “As a service organization dedicated to enhancing our partners customer service offerings, we believe the VQ solution fills a significant void in the market place by truly optimizing previously purchased Acano solutions as well as new CMS deployments through their management and monitoring software.”

“We are delighted to be working with Perfect Wave” states Mike Horsley, CEO, VQ Communications, “their extensive knowledge of the Cisco Meeting Server and their track record of enabling customers to successfully deploy this technology makes them a fantastic partner.”

I was able to spend the last 10 days in the USA attending Enterprise Connect in Orlando, a day with our new USA Master Distributor in Philadelphia the team and their customers, and a series of client meetings in New York.

Enterprise Connect was the former Voicecon event, and has grown from the IP telephony focus and advertises itself as The Communications & Collaboration event. There were around 200 exhibitors and several thousand visitors – of which 50% seemed to be End Users

The recurring theme from the show was all about Teams and how to enable the users who represent the massive growth in the gig economy and the demand for flexible working. During the Microsoft keynote, we heard a statement that over 60% of the workforce will be remote workers by 2020. One of our customers deployed Acano during 2016 and has seen the service explode – regularly seeing over 1 million minutes a day. That success is about enabling teams to collaborate with the tools they need in a way that replicates, how they want to work. We are especially pleased to be a part of that success story.

It was also good to catch up with industry stalwarts:

We are steadily adding partners around the globe, and see this is key to our growth strategy. The road trip to Philadelphia and New York was all about growing and consolidating our partner base. One of the new partners we are working with previously supported Acano in North America. They add great experience and knowledge, are a great team, and are also fun to be around.

I’ve come back from this trip with a real buzz. For VQ, we’re in the right space, right time and with the right product. As ever, it’s foot on the floor time to keep building on this success.