I had the opportunity to speak this morning at a breakfast for CIOs and CMOs at the Forrester Content and Collaboration Forum on how new human-centric collaboration technologies are helping leading brands create powerful customer relationships.

The world’s leading companies strive for true customer intimacy and engagement and for good reason.  According to Gallup Consulting, organizations that have optimized customer engagement have outperformed their competitors by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth.  Their customers buy more, spend more, return more often and stay longer.

I believe that the advances in video technology are going to give us new, innovative options to help. Throughout this conference we’ve heard about the rise of video from Forrester, and I believe this technology – if implemented properly – is going to help us all with the next level of customer engagement.  As I see it, video can (and will) fuel the “next phase” in improving customer collaboration: 

• Phase One: Collaboration technology saves time and money that can be used for customer-facing initiatives
• Phase Two:  Collaboration technology allows businesses to increase interaction and voice
• Phase Three: Collaboration technology provides high-touch, human engagement

 Phase Three is where companies will begin to realize the ROI (return on investment) as described by Gallup.

Given this, we (PGi) started thinking about how technologies like video combined with social media would put people back into collaboration and earlier this year we introduced iMeet.  iMeet is an online meeting room that combines video and audio conferencing in a simple, easy-to-use space built for today’s businesses.

Our customers are now pushing us into new applications with this technology.  Large global software companies are asking us to integrate directly into business processes to allow for easy, real-time collaboration.  Even media companies and rock bands are exploring ways to link fans to the stars they love through the iMeet platform.  Contextual, engaging customer interaction is opening endless possibilities.

The future of implementing video conferencing in new and innovative ways is just beginning – and it has the power to expand reach without limiting intimacy. 

How are you using collaboration technologies to connect with your customers?