With Moore’s law, computing power has improved over the years and this has accelerated the rate of change in technology. Once computers used to fill research centres and entire rooms, now small chips fit into smart watches.
Whilst artificial intelligence has improved, the human brain is still far superior. That’s not to say that artificial intelligence isn’t catching up, it’s just if you try to have an intellectual conversation with Amazon Alexa you’re not going to get that far.
So, if wisdom and knowledge are your people’s heads how do you better extract that information? We all know that people contributing with their opinions and thoughts make some feel part of the decision-making process and the business journey. Survey monkey and other similar tools are useful or less personal ways of gathering people’s opinions.
In this bottom-up management approach, the leaders of the business serve the employees who are closest to the customers. In fact, the hierarchy of your business is flipped with management serving the frontline staff. The basis for this is that your staff serving the customers probably know more about the realist use at the coalface than senior management does in the Ivory Towers.
Making better decisions means that you have all the facts and data on hand. If this is real time then that’s awesome but a close second is to have this information just-in-time. You can provide Town Hall speeches and have interactive workshops and these sessions have their place. Such large-scale meetings are very costly to businesses and therefore only happen once in a blue moon.
So if SurveyMonkey is less personable and large-scale face-to-face meetings are too costly where is the middle ground? You still want to hear people voicing their emotions and thoughts.
This is where transcribe voice messaging comes in. It converts voice notes into text which are then searchable. If you get all your staff contributing to the big issues of the day and indeed big opportunities you can quickly brainstorm and reach a consensus based on the wisdom of the crowd. As they say, if it looks like it’s fish and smells like a fish it’s probably a fish. If all your staff are saying the same thing then the board can listen to this and take the appropriate action.
Business intelligence based on substantive data which is not just numeric but also raw with emotion can give you the strategic competitive advantage. You need the numbers but you also need the stories behind the numbers.
So what do you need to do in order to make this happen? The reality is people are already using voice notes in their personal lives. In Argentina and China, most people use voice notes over text because it’s simply quicker given the Chinese typeface.
With the rise of voice-based technology such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant coupled with the popularity of podcasts, people are becoming more accepting to recording their voice. Many businesses record calls for training purposes in any case. The only real habitual change is using a business base messenger to record people’s voices.
One way of getting people to share their voices is for them to do a morning brief and debrief on a daily basis. Voice notes can be done in short snippets which might be 10 seconds or 20 seconds in length. The voice data is immediately converted to text and is searchable. Then, management teams can use conversational analytics such as door graphs, which make the most popular words appear very large on screen.
Looking at conversational analytics, the more popular a word becomes the more clues and red flags get obtained, which helps to direct the team straight to the issues. Just adding search engine optimisation importance of keywords is needed for your website to appear high up in the Google ranks. Keywords of the conversations across your business allow you to think about where you need to invest more of your money. Perhaps the London office is coming up a lot in your reporting. Is that because the London office is doing particularly well or is there high staff attrition there? It might be that particular competitor’s name is coming up quite often in a particular area!
You don’t know what you don’t know. The biggest assumptions businesses make is to find the problem. Where the friction is in business is where the opportunity is. Therefore more intelligence around the quality of conversation in your business will lead to better decision-making, period.
If you’re interested in learning more you can sign up for free as an individual or as a premium account, available for teams.
Simply click the link below and sign up for free today to start trialing voice messaging.