Collaboration solutions is key to ensuring Business Continuity During the COVID-19 pandemic: Ankur Goel, Poly

The power of rapid communication and efficient collaboration is paramount in these unprecedented times and tools such as video & audio conferencing, headsets and other collaboration technologies are playing a vital role in ensuring some sort of 'normalcy' across sectors - be it government, education, healthcare or IT/ITeS companies for ensuring business continuity.

Poly makes it easy to integrate seamlessly with the platform and services of your choice. Here, Ankur Goel, Managing Director for Poly India, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How are different sectors adopting collaboration solutions in the current situation to ensure business continuity?

Ankur Goel: The Covid-19 pandemic is presenting business and economic challenges we have never faced before. Due to social distancing norms and office closures, businesses across sectors have had to quickly pivot their business models to enable employees to work remotely and ensure business continuity.

Thanks to advances in technologies, especially collaboration technology, many sectors were able to make a smooth transition to remote working. From hospitals, schools to government agencies, collaboration technology is being used in various waysto ensure business continuity.

Education sector: Traditional teaching methods are being revamped to keep up with the closure of schools and classrooms are moving to wherever there is internet and webcam access. Educational institutions across the country are using collaboration technologies like video conferencing and content sharing tools to deliver students with an interactive learning experience. Speakerphones like Poly’s Calisto are being used for voice clarity and students are using headsets to focus on the lecture and block out any distractions.

Healthcare sector: Hospitals and health insurers are using telehealth services like video conferencing and encouraging patients with suspected coronavirus symptoms to try a virtual service first, rather than coming into the doctor where they might infect others and then accordingly treating patients. Over the last two months, many leading hospitals in India have launched their teleconsultation service with doctors in response to the growing public health concerns caused by the spread of the Covid-19 virus. With recent advancements in technology that allow for high-definition video to be streamed over the Internet with little fuss, doctors are now better equipped to properly diagnose patients by observing them through high-resolution screens, be able to pick up on all the small nuances such as facial expressions thanks to improved video conferencing quality.

At the same time, they can easily share documents such as X-rays and diagnoses reports. In addition, medical professionalsacross the world are turning to collaboration technologies likevideo conferencing and content sharing tools to connect and ideate on learnings, thereby making the treatment processes more effective.

Government agencies: To function efficiently and coordinate efforts to mitigate COVID-19 down to a grass root level, it is important that administrators, i.e., ministers, government employees, and bureaucrats communicate and collaborate on a regular basis. It is extremely challenging especially in a country like India which is so vast and diverse.

Ever since the Covid-19 outbreak, our esteemed Prime Minister,Narendra Modi has been regularly using video conferencing to connect with Chief Ministers and government bureaucrats across the nation. Collaboration technology is helping them in making timely and efficient decisions. Video conferencing technology is playing an important role in the current pandemic to help the government bridge the urban-rural divide and in educating rural citizens on the do’s and don’ts of safe practices to combat the virus.

For instance, the National Informatics Center (NIC) is one of the most prestigious customers of Poly, and our technology has been extensively used by NIC to connect different government departments and agents to communicate and collaborate on how to mitigate and manage the pandemic.

Covid-19 has changed the way we interact. Due to social distancing norms, we are suddenly more reliant on services that allow us to work-from-home. According to industry reports, since the outbreak, the work-from-home workforce has more than doubled. In these challenging times when remote working is the new norm, it is extremely crucial that organisations equip their employees with the right tools and technologies to help them work efficiently and ensure that business continuity is not hampered.

Some of the best practices for remote working include:

Interactive online meetings - Create online meeting environments that promote collaboration by allowing all participants to share and review documents, screens and work on ideas as a team in real-time. There’s no more waiting for emails to arrive to start getting work done and no doubt as to which version of a document should be edited.

Meetings that can be set up quickly and empower such collaboration via video also means that ideas can be worked on whenever creativity is sparked.  And that means faster decision making, as teams can review, discuss and consider multiple aspects at the same time, resulting in more interactive and productive virtual meetings.

Provide devices that help employees stay productive while working from home – invest in headsets which have Active Noise Cancelling (ANC) technology features to block out background noise so thatemployees can stay focused and immerse themselves in a meeting. Good quality headsets will also ensure that the users’ voices can be heard with perfect clarity, making sure their contributions come across loud and clear to other participants, without any background noise.

Ensure technology provided integrates effectively with different platforms – technology compatibility shouldn’t be an issue when employees are looking to communicate with customers, partners or anyone outside of the business. Not everyone will be using the same video conferencing set up, so companies should make sure the chosen platform integrates with the full range of unified communications and collaboration technologies. Best-of-breed conference phones will incorporate multiple audio and video applications, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Amazon Chime and more, all through the same.

Image quality - As much as 80% of communication consists of non-verbal and visual cues, such as body language and facial expressions, so don’t compromise on video quality in virtual meetings.  A low-quality camera will make images appear grainy to other attendees and they will look particularly bad on larger screens. Devices such as Poly Studio X30 which is a radically simple video bar for huddle rooms/home offices can be used for crisp and clear audio and video quality.

Some of the challenges that organisations/employees in India may face include –

Mindset change – typically, most employees in India are not accustomed to remote/flexible working. Companies and managers are used to employees being ‘physically present’ in office. However, in these challenging times, we have to make a mindset shift and understand that with the right technology tools, work can be done efficiently.

In India, we have a regulatory environment that is different from the rest of the world i.e. disallowing PSTN-IP integration, OSP licensing of work sites for contact centres etc. this makes it very challenging for employees to work remotely.  Relaxing these rules will go a long way in ensuring that employees can work remotely.

Broadband and 4G penetration – there is still a huge discrepancy when it comes to broadband access and 4G penetration in India – especially in non-metro cities. This causes a huge hindrance to remote workers. Broadband outages will hamper productivity of remote employees. Organisations must empower their employees with the right internet connectivity.

Not used to video conferencing – many businesses are still under the false belief that video conferencing is not as efficient as face-to-face meetings. From industry studies, we’ve seen that as much as 80% of communication consists of non-verbal and visual cues, such as body language and facial expressions. By embracing video conferencing with clients and employees instead of audio calls, we can make our interactions and meetings much more efficient.

DQ: How is Poly is serving customers during this period? What are your growth plans/strategy for India?

Ankur Goel: Customers are relying on our solutions now more than ever. Poly’s video conferencing devices are being used by world leaders to discuss how they can mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and leading hospitals and medical institutions are using our conferencing technologies to interact with their peers and provide consultation. Therefore, we are ensuing that we serve our customer effortlessly.

At Poly our sales team is engaging in the daily prioritization of shipments – for instance, when customers are identified as medical first responders, they are given top priority. Our product and operations teams have been driving the logistics of moving Poly products from our manufacturing points to our customers, including securing hard-to-find supply.

The strategy for Poly is to grow in the video market while focusing on expanding our partnerships with the Video as a Service (VaaS) partners. The transition to VaaS from on-prem video solutions has opened up a large new customer base that Poly now serves with the new PolyOS-based video product line.  

These new solutions have the ability to run VaaS applications natively, significantly reducing the complexity for IT organizations and end-users. Poly has already announced partnerships with Zoom and Microsoft, with many others to come and we expect a majority of Poly’s growth to come from continued organic growth through strong ecosystem alliances and partnerships.

With respect to strategy, Poly will continue to build on our legacy of audio and video excellence by leveraging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to include features such as noise block which removes distracting noises and continue to innovate to make the connections as “human” as they can be.

Ankur Goel, Managing Director for Poly India