With virtual meetings becoming a cornerstone of how we work today, Shure talks about how corporate end users have new shopping lists for AV technology.
Flawless audio quality and consistent speech intelligibility is essential. In a survey of 400 professionals in the US (before the Covid-19 lockdown) 82% had experienced a negative impact of poor audio quality, such as rescheduled calls and damage to their brand. And they don’t like it, with 96% saying they were frustrated with their virtual meetings.
It’s no surprise therefore, that we expect new-look office meeting spaces to feature superior virtual collaboration solutions. Reliable technology that captures every nuance, in every workspace will enable distributed teams to keep collaborating, from anywhere.
The corporate world has a new shopping list when it comes to AV technology. Prior to the wholesale shift to a work-from-home model, a lot of businesses were not open to the idea of soft codec technology to facilitate collaboration. Such tech includes the likes of Zoom and Teams, offering the ability to conference from pretty much anywhere.
Clearly, business and IT leaders have reconsidered their resistance as they look to a more resilient future built on a hybrid (at-home/ in-office) workplace.
For Shure, this means more enquiries about solutions that interface with soft codec technology. Our vendor agnosticism in this respect means we can easily integrate with the collaboration platforms our customers’ employees are now using.
Shure’s Felix Alpstaeg, senior manager market development, points to an interesting change to the remote collaboration shopping list: “The small meeting rooms where attendees used to crowd around a central ‘spider’ telecoms unit to communicate with people working remotely are getting a facelift. The ‘spiders’ are being replaced with personal mics or array mics that can be wall or ceiling mounted to be touchless and to give flawless audio quality.”
Senior decision makers gradually returning to the physical workplace are taking a closer look at their in-office audio solutions and how they support seamless collaboration with people working remotely. He explains: “They discovered while working from home that the audio solutions they’d previously perceived as ‘fine’ simply weren’t up to the task. Having experienced virtual meetings, during which they were connecting with colleagues in physical meeting rooms, the challenges of poor audio became clear.”
Shure of course is ready to help with a wide variety of products, systems and solutions. Alpstaeg concludes: “There’s demand for all our in-room systems as part of AV upgrades, but an interesting aspect is the need to ensure end users on their own devices can easily interface with the office technology. So, for example, can collaboration platforms such as Teams, Zoom and Cisco be integrated with Shure systems? And the answer is, of course, yes. This is an important factor in the decisions our customers are currently making.”