Everyone knows that non-collaborative and unengaging meetings cut into workers’ productivity. But what about customers? Could a lack of engagement ultimately hurt your bottom line? Research suggests yes. Hubspot recently reported that lack of engagement, especially when it comes to customer education, is one of the key reasons why customers churn. So, how can businesses craft high-value digital experiences to engage, educate, and excite their customers?
Visual collaboration tools empower companies to maximize the value of their limited time with busy industry leaders. When brands craft unique and collaborative experiences, more deals are closed, their reputation is strengthened, and customers are retained. With the right technology, companies can transform standard client meetings into insightful and collaborative engagements.
To elaborate on the value of visual collaboration technologies, and visual collaboration in general, Alleo created this ultimate guide. Throughout our guide, we will answer the following critical questions:
- How does visual collaboration work?
- What are collaboration tools for visualization?
- What are examples of successful visual collaboration exercises?
- What benefits do visual collaboration tools offer?
- Is the market for visual collaboration technology growing?
- How do you determine if a visual collaboration tool is right for your business?
What Is Visual Collaboration?
Visual collaboration is a core tenet of visual communication and focuses on developing a series of activities to foster engagement between stakeholders. Although this concept is fairly new, many organizations are beginning to realize that a strong visual collaboration practice is a critical part of customer engagement. In fact, a recent study conducted by Zippa discovered that companies with a high collaboration index increase sales by 27% and improve customer satisfaction ratings by 41%.
In the past, businesses were primarily focused on creating visually collaborative activities for in-person engagements. Considering that fully-remote and hybrid work has rapidly increased in popularity, it’s time to focus on virtual collaboration. But fostering creativity and engagement in a digital workspace is tricky. The human connection is missing from most digital experiences, and customers are beginning to feel burnt out after going through the same kinds of workshops and presentations over and over again. Think of it this way, would you want to sit through another dry PowerPoint presentation filled with endless slides of data and monotonous elevator pitches? Probably not.
So, how do you uplevel engagement for both in-room and remote participants? Adopting the right visual collaboration tools for your business is an excellent first step.
What Is a Visual Collaboration Tool?
According to a study conducted by Microsoft, you have about eight seconds to grab someone’s attention. Do you think a standard video call with a slideshow will ignite interest in eight seconds? Probably not. But, with a customizable visual collaboration platform to power your customer’s experiences, you’ll quickly capture attention and leave a lasting impression.
The main goal of visual collaboration apps and software is to help businesses develop synergetic and creative methods for engaging their customers. These visual tools empower users to manage and conduct experiences in ways that promote participation, ideation, and dialogue between moderators and audiences. Really, these platforms strive for immersive collaboration.
But not all visual collaboration tools are the same. The visual collaboration industry is fairly new—only recently taking off in 2020. The relative newness and fast growth of the industry have led to a lack of clarity surrounding what visual collaboration solutions are and what they should provide. Most platforms’ capabilities vary drastically from one another, making this a discombobulating space for people to navigate as they search for a solution.
In truth, most of these tools only offer very specific pieces of the digital collaboration puzzle. Many visual collaboration tools are comprised of whiteboards with drag-and-drop sticky notes or a few interactive drawing tools—this is very bare bones in terms of collaborative functionality. Sure, whiteboarding capabilities are an important feature, but they’re only a single page out of the visual collaboration book. To truly transform the meeting experience, modern businesses need more. Currently, users juggle multiple applications to access the necessary content and tools for purpose-driven customer engagements. Although some platforms have expanded their capabilities, accessing these additional functionalities and features often involves complicated integrations.
Ideally, visual collaboration tools deliver optimal design functionality with an intuitive user-friendly experience. Comprehensive visual collaboration tools, like Alleo, allow you to design your presentations, workshops and moderate your meetings in a centralized visual collaboration workspace. Additionally, our solution allows multiple users to simultaneously interact in a single virtual canvas across hybrid, remote, and in-person settings.
Ultimately, the best engagements excite stakeholders, spark ideas, and drive innovation—all of which are very difficult to achieve without effective visual collaboration. Using comprehensive visualization solutions makes it easy to increase the engagement and satisfaction of customers. Curious to see how this all works? Let’s take a look at some examples and see the power of visual collaboration in action.
What Is an Example of Visual Collaboration Done Right?
The experiences you create have the ability to shape your brand’s messaging and foster interactions that make a lasting impression on customers. Lack of interactivity, poor coordination, and dull graphics can easily sour a customer’s opinion of your brand—the right visual collaboration platform brings your brand’s story to life and leaves customers wanting more. But what does this look like in practice? Here are a few collaborative software examples for visualization.
Visual Twin Capabilities
The Alleo platform enables users to seamlessly navigate their presentations using a central display to control all other displays. This helps both moderators and viewers take control of the experience and makes it easy to collaborate during activities. For example, if you are running a demo for a customer and want to highlight certain aspects of your solution or product, you can use the visual twin capability to streamline engagement and have your customers test out multiple features at the same time. See the visual twin capabilities in action here.
Presentation and Activity Templates
Alleo’s no-code platform allows anyone to build immersive and interactive experiences for presentations, workshops, ideation sessions, and more. With an intuitive user interface and effective visualizations, our templates are purpose-built to support high-level participation engagement. Each template is easily customized, allowing you to craft an experience that truly matches your brand’s purpose and your customers’ needs.
Alleo also allows users to insert a wide array of media into their presentations including video, live media, widgets, interactive web browsers, and more. From goal setting to meeting notes, our broad selection of templates can easily accommodate all collaboration styles and work in any setting.
Digital Storytelling
The Alleo platform allows you to create multiple journeys within a presentation. This way, a customer can choose how they want to interact with the information you are presenting by selecting the aspects of your presentation that they are most interested in. This method of engagement is far more collaborative and personalized compared to watching a moderator go through every talking point. Our interactive journey functionalities are especially useful in customer experience center settings where you want customers to really dive in and explore what your brand has to offer. Want to see for yourself? Watch the video below and see Alleo in action.
By the Way, Alleo’s Improving Virtual Collaboration Across the Globe
Discover how Alleo’s technology is helping Yuyu Korea, a leading reseller of audio-visual solutions in South Korea, fortify its visual collaboration capabilities here.
What Are the Benefits of Visual Collaboration Tools?
At a high level, adopting a visual collaboration solution makes it possible for businesses to enable powerful interactions with their customers. But what are some tangible, specific benefits? Since it would be impossible to list all advantages in one space, we decided to highlight a few of our favorites.
Closing More Deals and Growing New Business
Creating personalized and inclusive engagements encourages participation and often leads to discussions related to customer needs, opinions, and ideas. A visually collaborative engagement allows you to show your customers what your brand is capable of in real-time and encourages deeper discussions related to pain points and problem solving. Not only do these types of engagements foster stronger relationships, but they also lead to upsell opportunities.
Here are two examples of how visual collaboration tools help boost conversions and upsells:
- Streamlined Sales | Visual collaboration tools expedite the sales process by giving sales professionals the opportunity to collaborate with customers on a deeper level and showcase exactly how a company can solve problems. Additionally, customer questions and concerns are easier to address right away in a collaborative atmosphere. Greater collaboration and opportunities for a back-and-forth dialogue make customers feel heard and help sales professionals build trust.
- Enhanced Demo Experience | Visual collaboration software makes product demos more convincing and entertaining for the customer. Using a platform like Alleo, your audience can easily interact with various aspects of your solution and truly immerse themselves in the story you are trying to tell. Taking an interactive approach to demos fosters improved participation from audiences and encourages them to think critically about the information you are presenting. Put simply, an interactive demo is a memorable demo.
Strengthening Customer Relationships
Everyone knows that you must delight and inspire your customers in every interaction to nurture relationships. Visual collaboration tools make it possible to have consistently meaningful and positive exchanges. Here’s how:
- Improve your customer’s understanding of technical processes by providing them with real-time demonstrations and activities
- Educate your customers by providing immersive resources and hands-on learning opportunities
- Strengthen your customer relationships with easier communication and equitable engagement
- Make workshops and presentations more intuitive and synergic so your customers feel like active participants in their journey, rather than passive passengers traveling through the sales funnel
Enhanced Knowledge Sharing and Ideation
Being able to work in virtual collaboration space allows business to share more knowledge and improve decision making internally, and when collaborating with customers or partners. Using an interactive visual canvas, businesses can bring together people, content and tools to create a more collaborative and effective experience. With a visual collaboration solution you can enhance your knowledge sharing and ideation sessions by:
- Improving remote planning by enabling distributed teams to collaborate, whiteboard, and present using an infinite canvas to visualize the strategic planning process.
- Making it easier to encourage and display diverse perspectives and out of the box thinking
- Allowing users to contribute and interact with each other on a central canvas—ensuring that everyone has a chance to make their contributions heard.
Deep Collaboration, An Important Part of Knowledge Sharing
Deep collaboration is a fairly new concept that gives people access to a single space to simplify digital collaboration, improve productivity, and create equitable engagement. This involves merging communication tools, media tools, and ideation tools so every part of the visual collaboration process can be executed, accessed, and viewed in real time. Watch the video below to learn more about how deep collaboration works!
Accommodating All Types of Collaboration Styles
Everyone collaborates in unique ways, but very few customer engagements accommodate different types of communication or learning styles. Most experiences, virtual or otherwise, take a lecture format. However, studies have shown that lecture-style engagements are fairly boring and ineffective. But breaking away from lectures poses new problems. When attempting to accommodate varying communication and collaboration styles, businesses are forced to juggle a combination of disparate tools for video sharing, spreadsheets, whiteboarding, and more.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Alleo’s comprehensive technology makes it possible to cater to the diverse communication needs of your customers, without the hassle. Here are just a few notable features.
- Share and show everything in one space. No need to jump from tab to tab. Host everything you need in a centralized location including embeds, live video, graphics, whiteboard activities, and more.
- With Alleo, there is no limit to what you can include in your experiences. Share as much information as you need and access various mediums to convey all of your ideas.
- Improve collaboration and have multiple viewers simultaneously interact with your content in a single space. Additionally, Alleo provides a great experience for hybrid, remote, and in-person engagements—giving you the flexibility to accommodate customers wherever they are.
- Keep everything intact and refer back to your content for future reference. While most video conferencing tools only allow you to share video recordings, Alleo preserves all of your content on its canvas so you don’t have to transfer information from one place to another.
- Alleo can be used to create stunning and interactive engagements in customer experience centers. If you want your content to adapt to the big screen, Alleo has the tools you need to make a lasting impression.
Which Is the Best Collaboration Tool For Visual Collaboration?
Businesses are faced with significant operational burdens when it comes to designing and facilitating their meeting experiences and other customer engagements. As we referenced before, many visual collaboration solutions are difficult to adopt, requiring users to navigate complex integrations, manage multiple tools, and often design their experiences from scratch. Sounds like a lot of work, right? The best visual collaboration tools take complexity out of the equation and make it easy to design, facilitate, interact with, and consume information. A no-code, plug-and-play solution mitigates these operational burdens and provides the following key advantages.
- Flexibility
From meetings to workshops, the ideal visual collaboration solution should empower users to craft individualized experiences for various audiences. The platform you choose should have everything you need to create and facilitate in a single virtual canvas. Some features you should look for include:
- Pre-made customizable templates
- The ability to create purpose-built activities
- Interactive widgets
- Embedded content
- Whiteboarding
- Live chat
- Video conferencing
- Collaborative Equity
Any solution you choose should account for neurodiversity and enable you to inspire your customers in their preferred communication styles. When choosing a visual collaboration solution, be sure that it provides the tools to allow anyone to contribute during an engagement, regardless of collaboration or communication preferences. Here are a few key features that help create a more equitable atmosphere when engaging customers:
- Sticky notes
- Interactive polls
- Emoji reactions
- Ice-breaker activities
- Real-time surveys
- Greater Engagement
Increasing collaboration and participation in your customer experiences should be your main focus. Worthwhile visual collaboration tools provide a central visual point of reference for communicating big-picture ideas to multiple stakeholders in various environments. Your solution should allow for both synchronous and asynchronous work, creating the perfect canvas to develop and present your work. Additionally, all media, comments, and interactions should be viewed in real-time for all participants to see. Some key engagement features include:
- Craft unique well-choreographed experiences
- Utilize attention-grabbing visuals and interactive widgets to spark interest
- Display real-time data to give customers additional insight and quickly answer their questions
Is the Visual Collaboration Market Growing?
Yes, demand for visual collaboration tools has skyrocketed in a short amount of time and all market predictions point toward continued growth. According to Fortune, visual collaboration applications will become the center of 30% of meeting experiences by 2024. Another survey found that two-thirds of CEOs from companies across the globe have shifted their focus from traditional, offline engagement strategies to digital visual engagement tools as they work to improve their customer experience.
Regarding future projections, Market Watch’s most recent report found that the global Visual Collaboration Platform market size is expected to expand at a CAGR of 18.0% during the forecast period, reaching USD 1619.77 million by 2028.
All of this growth means one thing—visual collaboration tools are the future.
Alleo: Creating Memorable Experiences and Powerful Engagements
Roughly 55 million meetings happen daily, and many of them lack impactful engagement—it’s time to make a change. For years, companies have been getting by with visual collaboration software that partially fulfills their needs. At Alleo, we believe that enabling the human element of engagement is vital for effective collaboration. Our intuitive, no-code platform was built to further collaboration and simplify the processes of creating presentations, running activities, and maintaining participant attention. We built our solution with three core elements in mind: Accessibility, customization, and simplicity.
- Accessibility | Cater to your customer’s needs by designing unique experiences that can be viewed and interacted with at any time anywhere.
- Customization | Create beautiful customized experiences and activities that foster collaboration and enhance the ideation process.
- Simplicity | Eliminate multiple disparate tools and work in a centralized canvas. Our easy-to-use interface makes it possible to create stunning engagements and ensures audiences can intuitively navigate your activities and workshops.
- Engaging | Capture audiences with ease through this collaborative tool.
And there you have it—Alleo’s guide to visual collaboration software! If you’re interested in learning more about visual tools and technologies for collaboration and social business, sign up for a demo and see what Alleo has to offer!
