The Age of Cognitive Collaboration is Now
Introducing Cognitive Collaboration
Leveraging the Power of Human Engagement
Eliminating Workplace Pain Points
The Role of Relationship Intelligence and People Insights The Solution: Cognitive Collaboration Cognitive Collaboration Essentials Creating Cognitively Enabled Collaboration Experiences for Better Team Engagement
Using Cognitive Collaboration Tools
Creating Cognitively Enabled Customer Experiences
What to Look for in Cognitive Collaboration
We are on the cusp of a major transformation in workplace productivity. A growing volume of workstreams and agile business models, combined with an explosion in connected technologies (think cloud, open APIs, and bring your own application), are making possible a new level of connected experience. It is poised to overcome significant legacy obstacles, removing friction points and breaking down silos to make the most of people’s individual and collective potential in the modern enterprise.
This transformation will make it possible for people and technology to blend intelligently and seamlessly, offloading mundane tasks, paving the way for uninterrupted creativity, and enabling clarity of communication, while improving relationships between colleagues, partners, and customers.
The tools, bandwidth, big data, processing power, and energy—they’re all there, ready to meld with human intelligence and ambition. Up until now, business tools have coexisted separately from the people who use them. An email app, a CRM app, or a word processing app do what they were designed to do, but they have remained static, separate, and unconnected to the collaborative process. Now these tools and the actions they perform can blend more intimately with priorities and workstreams to help people engage and connect better. They can become part of a functioning ecosystem. And the great news is, it’s already here. It’s called Cognitive Collaboration.
Context and Intelligence woven throughout all collaboration experiences.
In any working relationship, the team becomes paramount. It’s where creativity, collaboration, and solutions all come together within a group to exceed the sum of its parts. Any opportunity to break down procedural silos and create deeper levels of human engagement within teams and with customers should be pounced upon, because in an age of information overload and expectation of speed, it is the quality of that experience that will cut through to generate lasting positive results. Cognitive Collaboration is based in technology, but the primary benefits are all about streamlining experiences, enhancing human engagement and business outcomes.
The drudgery of daily work still muddies the waters of productivity and engagement. For example: • People and relationship insights Overcome challenges connecting meeting participants with relevant information. Without insights about meeting attendees, teams struggle to create engagement from the start, and participants are often distracted by seeking this information from other sources, creating less focused, less productive discussions.
• Meetings Frustrating actions like searching for meeting login codes or not being able to find and share the right version of a document don’t just waste time, they deflate synergy and strangle momentum. • Processes Emails, messages, and the ability to stay in touch with people on a minute by- minute basis wherever they happen to be should represent stepping stones toward greater achievements. Instead, they starve people of context and opportunity by transforming into overload and file sprawl. • Customer experience Disconnected, frustrating, and reactive customer interactions due to an inability to access relevant contextual information quickly destroy customer loyalty. Speed, clarity, and accessibility are the currency of innovation. To make this happen, professionals need a new breed of computing intelligence at their side. Our tools must now become part of us.
Speed, clarity, and accessibility are the currency of innovation. To make this happen, professionals need a new breed of computing intelligence at their side. Our tools must now become part of us.
The most valuable part of collaboration is found in deeper human connection. Relationship intelligence will form the basis of successful collaboration, improving team relationships and building synergy based on trust and depth.
For these richer connections to occur, we need instant access to information about the people we meet with—and we need to have it right at our fingertips. If time weren’t an issue, reviewing dozens of Google pages might suffice. Similarly, reviewing a person’s LinkedIn profile might be an option, but that relies on the individual manually updating their profile. Roundtable introductions at meetings have been used for decades, but these are time-consuming and often inadequate. The ideal solution would provide contextual insights into each individual right inside the meeting app itself. Even if that individual shares a name with hundreds of others, the app would be able to identify the correct person in your meeting. These insights need to be intelligently updated in real time and include details like job title, location, and reporting structures, as well as work history, publications, or blogs written—anything that is publicly available. These insights need to be timely, pertinent, and helpful in adding colour to the relationship. Insights that are made visible on the screen or on your device, those that move the meeting forward, elevate the experience and deepen those most vital human connections.
Cognitive Collaboration makes it easier to get tasks done in context by tapping into data sources across the enterprise and ecosystem and presenting the needed information in one seamless and intuitive place.
It is context and intelligence built in to a single system. This helps businesses ensure that:
This means delivering features that allow people to hit the ground running. From the creation of people insights to enable insightful and deep working relationships with colleagues and customers, to smooth, effortless meetings, the focus and attention stays where it should be—on communicating and collaborating, not on wrestling with the tools and devices. Cognitive Collaboration pulls everything together under a shared DNA—people insights, expertise, automation, and analytics—using technologies that are cloud based, but not cloud only, allowing companies to grow into them in accordance with existing cloud and data management strategies.
Cognitive Collaboration happens when context and intelligence are woven throughout all collaboration experiences and customer interactions. What does that mean? It involves a collection of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies working together to ensure that nothing stands between people and productivity. It involves capabilities like people insights with detailed profile information, intelligent virtual assistants, facial recognition, natural language processing and conversational interfaces, noise detection and suppression, contextual real-time assistance and name labels, conversational bots, dynamic document sharing, and analytics-based routing. Why are these important? They put true cognition into the user experience. They inject intelligence, insight, and context into the collaborative process to move workstreams and interactions to their maximum potential. They give employees and teams helpful people insights to speed connection and engagement in meetings, their own intelligent virtual assistant to offload mundane tasks, and contextual intelligence to deliver better customer service.
Cognitive Collaboration is like a form of alchemy that pairs intelligent workstreams and workspaces to forge a much-greater (and much-needed) platform for improved interaction and human engagement. Cognitively enabled collaboration experiences ensure that team members can easily connect with, and then see, hear, know, and relate to, each other. Technology becomes a bridge rather than a set of islands, and creates more opportunities for better employee and team engagement wherever work happens.
Cognitive Collaboration ensures that every act of communicating, collaborating, and meeting in the next-generation workplace is seamless and effortless. This includes:
It is vital that the same innovations that drive collaboration in the workplace be applied to hard-won relationships with customers. The contact center is transitioning from reactive service to contextual, suggestive, and predictive customer experiences, therefore moving away from fragmented journeys and toward cohesive ones. Studies show that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the primary influencing factor in buying decisions,1 and that poor customer experiences will destroy 30 percent of digital business projects.2
This means that consumers have more power and more insight than ever before and are factoring this into their buying decisions. There is greater need than ever for contact centers to leverage the power of AI and cloud-based analytics to deliver more cognitive, personal, and proactive customer experiences.
Contact centers must leverage data sources that enhance customer interactions. A complete view of their customers’ journey allows for a better cross-analysis of patterns and correlations between customer and agent. This improves lifecycle value, helps up-sell products, provides better service, and improves loyalty. Inefficient, reactive, and impersonal interactions must be replaced with engaging conversations that prove to customers that the company knows and understands them. 1. “Customers 2020: Future of B2 Customer Experiences,” Walker. 2. Gartner: www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/is-your-organization-customer-centric/