How easy do you find it to recall a conversation? Personally, I can remember quite clearly what I said over a two week period but overtime as human beings we forget. This is the forgetting curve.

In any job within a business having the correct information to hand in a timely fashion can help improve business decision making and competency on the job. This is why I am excited by the recent launch of the Sound Branch Skill for Amazon Alexa and the Google Action for Google Home devices.

How often have you asked Alexa a question to hear the reply “Sorry I don’t know that.” Therein lies the opportunity. Sound Branch allows you to search voice notes with your voice. A combination of elastic search and short form – 10 to 20 second voice data means you can instantly recall and playback important conversations from the past.

For example, you might want to search a private conversation between yourself and a colleague. Or perhaps you have a group discussion in your team and you want to remember who said what. This is all possible because audio clips are short in length and all the audio is transcribed to text with 96% accuracy. This level of accuracy is equal to that of human beings, which means voice search is now a reality.

Now imagine something as boring as the car manual and trying to figure out how to change the oil. Instead of linking to the page in the printed manual, how about voice searching with the Alexa Skill?

Classically in business, they talk about the 30, 60, 90 day plan. What if you could recall all your conversations and play them back from 30, 60 and 90 days. Would this make you more effective in your job? Would this mean you would be less susceptible to forgetting stuff? The ultra organised will say of course not. However listening not only to your own voice but that of other people’s and playing this back several times leads to greater understanding. You might have written something down but got the meaning wrong and therefore misinterpreted the information. The ability to instantly play back and repeat a conversation gives clarity, accountability and greater ownership. Overall it means the task in hand is more likely to get completed whilst keeping all parties happy along the way.

Does voice search mean miscommunication will be eliminated? Not at all but it does give us a greater chance of understanding each other and getting along better. All of this leads to a conducive workforce, a happy workforce and a more productive team. As we all know happy and productive teams tend to win more often!

So a final thought, instead of the printed meeting agenda, you could play back your teams conversations. Your meeting would run smoother as people would not have to think about what they had said, they could simply listen. By reducing the load on your brains, you can utilize them on the more important issues of what next and what is the decision.

Whether it’s staff internally or external candidates involved in your recruitment processes audio profiles bring skills and experiences to life.

Internal staff can create their credentials so your distributed workforce can understand who everyone is.

External candidates credentials can be better articulated with audio profiles and testimonials.

Candidates’ CVs are brought to life with audio profiles and verbal references can sought by companies by listening to audio reviews.

Businesses and the public sector are not allowed to use FRS or GMRS types of two-way radios without a licence. Applying for a business radio permit from OFCOM and filling out paperwork can be a long process. It is also quite expensive, given that there are cheaper or even free and better alternatives. These will not only boost communication in your business, but they will also have more features such as saving all conversations in one place.

Two-Way Radio Cost

Furthermore, two-way radios can be costly with prices ranging from $115 to over $500 for each device. If you are a big business you’ll probably need more than twenty radios. This means the cost of the devices in addition to the cost of the licence can be pricey as your business grows.

The Modern Solution

Modern team communication apps like Sound Branch are replacing the retiring two-way radios. One of the main benefits of using such apps is that they are extremely flexible allowing you to store all communications in one place and access them from any device including PCs, smartphones, tablets, smart speakers and smart watches. No matter what device your employees use they can communicate with co-workers and management from anywhere at any time.

This, of course, makes business operations stronger and more efficient. For example, if you are a logistics company your drivers can send a voice message to inform management about the delivery of goods or a problem they may have.

When the driver sends the voice message on Sound Branch all people (e.g managers) who are in the group receive the message immediately and can respond to the driver with more instructions. It doesn’t matter what device your drivers use – messages can be sent and accessed from any device, as long as you have a Sound Branch account.

Extra Team Communication Features

Two-way radios were a great solution in the past when smartphone devices didn’t exist. More and more businesses are replacing this way of communication with team communication apps which have more capabilities.

For instance, with Sound Branch, you can create private groups of teams. All voice notes are saved on the cloud. If something goes wrong with a delivery, for example, you can review what has been said on Sound Branch. This way, you’ll find solutions to communication issues.

What is even more exciting is that Sound Branch transcribes voice messages automatically. This means that if management is busy in a meeting and cannot listen to an important voice message, they can simply read it as a text message. What is more convenient than this!

Two-Way Radio Range Limits

As you probably know, two-way radios usually have a range limit of up to 30 miles. Most radios have lower limits but even 30 miles are not enough for efficient communication.

Modern communication apps like Sound Branch don’t have any range limits. As they use internet to send messages your employees can be in New Zealand and communicate instantly with other colleagues in New York or London.

Two-Way Radios vs Sound Branch

Here’s why Sound Branch is the best alternative to traditional push-to-talk two-way radios:

Sound Branch also offers more features such as history and voice transcription. It’s a VoiceFirst app and uses the latest technology available in the market.

Learn how Sound Branch can help your business by signing up for a free account. Also, request a free demo by emailing hello@soundbran.ch

Sound Branch is a voice notes app. This is an overview of how Webanywhere uses Sound Branch for internal communication, on-boarding and recruitment. Webanywhere has a branded voice site but also branded mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Sound Branch is a VoiceFirst Social Network. All audio is transcribed to text which means you can do powerful voice search with your voice. Sound Branch voice notes are recorded in 10 seconds and are called seeds. Once you create a seed other users can branch from your seed.

Sound Branch is a VoiceFirst Social Network and voice notes app which can be accessed anywhere on any device. You can access via the web, mobile apps and smart speakers such as Amazon Echo and Google Home.

This overview of Sound Branch shows you how the timeline works, private groups, chats and the inbox. We also look at conversational analytics and audio profiles with audio testimonials. You can sign up for a free Sound Branch account at soundbranch.com.

Recently, I made a last minute booking to attend a conference in Newark, New Jersey. So late was the booking that I was the last person to book on a plane departing from Manchester, UK to New York, JFK.

The Thursday before takeoff, I received an email from Thomas Cook Airlines explaining that my plane had been changed to a new aircraft operated by AirTanker and there was no need to worry. Following this, I got a call on my mobile from Thomas Cook late evening Friday having finished the working week. They regrettably informed me that because I was the last person to book the flight and that the new aircraft had less capacity, I would not be able to board on Monday.

The alternatives offered by Thomas Cook were not exactly satisfactory. Option one was to travel down South to London Stansted, just outside London, and the alternative was to board the same plane but a day earlier. With a young family and juggling birthdays, this was unacceptable so I decided to push back and complain.

Getting inbound calls from Thomas Cook is one thing, trying to call them is something else. I spent at least 1 hour and a half on hold with phone call transfers from one department to the next. The customer experience needed a lot to be desired with each department passing the book.

Thankfully, on Saturday I was called again and a few hours later having pushed back again I managed to stay on the original aircraft. I could have got 600 euros of compensation for my flight being cancelled. However, I wanted to see if Thomas Cook could solve my problem.

So here is a little bit more into how I tackled the situation which involved a multi channel approach. Alongside taking to the phones and being one hour on call waiting, I also conducted a live chat via the Thomas Cook website. The irony of live chat was after much back and forth I was advised to call the contact centre, which seemed counter intuitive. Other approaches I made included emailing various Managing Directors and the CEO himself to complain about the mishap.

Now, you could say that this extra dimension of contact added complexity to the situation or you could also see if one department talked to each other. The reality was that the left hand was not talking to the right and an audit trail of my customer journey wasn’t easily accessible for staff. This lack of communication and joined up thinking came to a head when shortly after I received a call from a customer service agent that I could stay on my flight, another person rang me to continue to apologise about that fact I had to move.

Now, I’m told Thomas Cook are bringing in new business processes from September and they are aware of the broken process of automated email informing customers they don’t need to worry when they do.

The whole experience got me thinking about what if there was a better way. Coincidentally, I was journeying all the way to America to attend the Voice Summit AI, which is all about how voice can bring about a better customer experience through new technologies. Thomas Cook is an airline company, not a technology company, but this traditional travel agent could massively improve productivity and profitability whilst increasing customer experience with a voice first approach.

In my kitchen prior to departing, I asked Alexa to ask SkyScanner for flights to New York and after a few qualifying questions I was made aware of the options and prices. What if Thomas Cook had an Alexa app which could answer my question. Perhaps I would not have had to wait one and a half hours on the phone? All I needed was the reassurance of what stage my query was at and the next steps in the process. Using instant voice messaging, I would have heard the empathy of the Thomas Cook customer service team and they would have had an audit trail of who said what which would be instantly searchable.

I’m sure all travel agencies will adopt Alexa skills, instant voice messaging and other artificial intelligence to make the customer experience delightful. It’s just a pity that the business to consumer technology space always seems to be ahead of the business to business tech capabilities.

We have Alexa Echos and other smart speakers in the home but these new opportunities such as multi modal voice experiences have yet to be realised in business. The sooner business adopt voice controlled technologies for a new era, perhaps we can all be saved from IVR and more traditional call waiting, which bears the most terrible music jingled and the words “We thank you for being patient, your call is important to us we will be with you shortly”. In the now economy, saying “We will be with your shortly” will let your competition win. What customers actually want is instant gratification and if they can’t get this with you they will go and shop elsewhere.

Voice first allows all staff in your business to search all the conversations with customers including the boss.

You can sign up for free to Sound Branch by visiting SoundBranch.com where your voice notes are all transcribed and you can search conversations with your voice!

Author Bio

Sean Gilligan is a UK based entrepreneur and author of the book “Flexible”. Sean for the last 15 years has run Webanywhere in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice Poland. Sean is number 67 in the Worldwide Listing of Corporate Learning Movers & Shakers 2018. Sean is a bootstrapper and has not taken on outside capital to grow Webanywhere in 3 countries and has recently founded Ventures Anywhere his start up arm which includes Sound Branch.

A lie detector test is used by crime agencies to get to the truth of what an undercover agent is saying. The conversation is recorded and a graph spikes when lies are told. Using a voice first approach to your business and ensuring that people agree to appropriate privacy statements means you can start recording conversations and, then, get to grips with what is being said in the business.

Just as a company owns its email and phone records so too should it have ownership of the proprietary content of voice mails, voice notes and voice messages. We are, after all, on working time and work is paying the bills. In a world that when and where we work is changing, voice messaging is justifiable for check-ins with remote workers and better connected teams.

Every business has an organisational structure which perhaps is updated annually and shows who reports to whom. What it doesn’t show is who speaks to whom and how often. No doubt some people will talk more than others and will have solid lines of communication rather than dotted lines. Furthermore, some people will ignore the organisational hierarchy and go over managers’ heads to have conversations. Depending on your company culture, leap frogging the hierarchy will have varying degrees of acceptability. I personally believe everyone should be able to talk to anyone from the cleaner on the shop floor to the CEO and Chairman.

To start with, understanding who is conversing the most and listening the most is useful for active participation in your business. This does not speak to the quality of the conversation, but the frequency of listening and speaking gives you some level of understanding around organisational relationships.

Now a person could be listening and talking a lot, it could be office politics or gossip, and this is where word counts come into the analytics. What words are being used, are they negative words such as can’t and won’t or are they positive like we will or we shall. How many open ended questions are being asked can be discovered by measuring the frequency of What, Why, Who, Where and How in conversations.

Analytics to detect the mood of a conversation and hence its energy can also be reviewed. So a high energy conversation using positive words and lots of open ended questions is what we are aiming for if we are to increase the quality of conversations in our business. Furthermore, users who are managers should be listening for a greater duration of time. Then, they are speaking and the analytics can show the listening to speaking ratios which should be 2 to 1. Twice as much listening as talking.

Wordle analytics can also be used to determine which customer names are coming up the most. This might then indicate a big opportunity which has landed or perhaps a customer complaint, which needs to be resolved. Likewise, location and names of cities can be analysed to determine what the big issues are and drill down into conversations from a bird’s eye view. Clicking on ‘New York’ lists all the conversations with ‘New York’ in the sentence can be played back for further investigation. Green words depict positive conversations, amber for indifferent conversations and red words for conversations which are negative in nature, word composition and tone.

How much a conversation branches can flag problem identification or opportunity uncovering. Conversations which do not branch and which are one line statements might simply be the CEO reading the news to be broadcast one way rather than a highly engaged brainstorm by employees. The number of likes, listens and replies can also surface more interesting conversations recorded.

Just as word counts are used by students writing essays, word counts of conversations can be utilised to coach staff into more effective communication. People who need to create multiple recordings of say 20 second clips might have a problem staying on point or being concise. These people can then be given the appropriate coaching and feedback.

On a more serious note, you can protect your business from malice by using indexes of words with fraudulent or other serious consequences, for example, password sharing which goes against security policies. Indeed people will start logging onto applications using face and voice id in the future to protect your business.

Recording conversations and analysing their content needs to be seen as a self improvement tool for employees, a quicker way to remember and administrate a business and a tool for management to make smarter decisions. There will be nay sayers who will flag conversation around privacy and personal freedom but the hope is that the benefits to the individual and organisation to foster better more meaningful conversations will surpass these concerns. To do this, the voice first technology has to have the WOW factor. As artificial intelligence advances, we will come to a point where the machines give us scripts to suggest the questions we should pose and will coach us on how to say them! If this means we are more effective in our jobs and we get paid more, people will be happy with this and put the privacy concerns to one side. Conversations recorded will also help to avoid disagreements about what was agreed because playing back audio will bring clarity to conversations just as a pond filter clears out the dirt from murky waters!

Author Bio

Sean Gilligan is a UK based entrepreneur and author of the book “Flexible”. Sean for the last 15 years has run Webanywhere in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice Poland. Sean is number 67 in the Worldwide Listing of Corporate Learning Movers & Shakers 2018. Sean is a bootstrapper and has not taken on outside capital to grow Webanywhere in 3 countries and has recently founded Ventures Anywhere his start up arm which includes Sound Branch.

As people make purchasing choices in the consumer economy, surfers on the internet are looking for social proof that they are making the right decision. Long gone have the impulse purchases following window shopping, and in comes the parcel drop on the doorstep ready for returns should an item of clothing not fit.

TripAdvisor for holidays, AutoExpress for cars and OpenTable for restaurants. How a product or service is rated has a bearing on its future success and consumer confidence in a brand.

So why is it when it comes to employee references this is harder to achieve. Yes, you can get testimonials and endorsements on LinkedIn but the traditional reference these days is a poor state of affairs. What people say about you when you are gone matters!

I’m not saying that you can’t get a carefully written reference from an excellent boss. But the typical corporate procedure of simply confirming that a member of staff did work at a company historically is ripe for disruption because it is not longer adequate.

There must be a better way. What you will be remembered for and your personal reputation is what matters. Now we can get into what you should and should not post on social media to ensure you have a professional reputation online but that is for another article. What I want to focus on is how you can leverage your personal connections, your integrity and past accomplishments for career success.

Just as a consumer wants social proof that their holiday package is a good choice, prospective employers want to validate that they are taking the right bet on a candidate they are hiring. This is important because hiring is not a zero sum game and nobody has a 100% hiring success track record.

From the employers perspective, they do not like it when candidates get references falsified by friends or referees that are not senior enough to substantiate a reference. I’m not saying character references are invalid but quite often when employers burn bridges with companies they often seek references from their friends at a company and not the official management. Quite often these non management references are not checked and are taken at face value. Ultimately this means companies are taking on risks which they need not take on.

If someone we trust makes a recommendation we often make purchasing decisions on this basis. For most businesses wages are their biggest spend annually so ensuring recommendations are authentic is paramount to success.

What if you could not just read the reference but actually hear the person’s words? How would this help your business with time to hire and quality of hire metrics, which drives your future growth. You could also research the credential of a referee and validate their positions and current place of work.

Audio testimonials is not rocket science but, until now, has not been done at scale. However it is quicker for a person to give a reference with their voice notes and this recording can be leveraged by both candidates and employees whilst satisfying company compliance and quality controls.

The truth is saying something complementary about someone not only helps a person’s career but makes us feel good. Whether it’s a nice word said by your University lecturer or a word of backing from a former line manager. Positive reviews are good for our self esteem and our confidence. Add audio to your professional reviews and a higher level of authenticity is reached.

We are not there yet but we will come to a point where reference requests are not made by your future employer but are downloaded from your online credentials. Employers will be able to review not only your competency and certification credentials but also what others say about you.

And the punchline is the nicer you are to people, the more likeable you are, the more you give then the more you will receive in positive reviews. In turn, this will allow you to fulfil your potential and your career aspirations.

You can learn more about audio profiles and audio testimonials by signing up for free at SoundBranch.com

Author Bio

Sean Gilligan is a UK based entrepreneur and author of the book “Flexible”. Sean for the last 15 years has run Webanywhere in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice Poland. Sean is number 67 in the Worldwide Listing of Corporate Learning Movers & Shakers 2018. Sean is a bootstrapper and has not taken on outside capital to grow Webanywhere in 3 countries and has recently founded Ventures Anywhere his start up arm which includes Sound Branch.

How often have you had a meeting canceled? We have all had them called off once and sometimes twice! We all have things to do and juggling priorities can be tricky, especially when lots of people are expected at a meeting.

So how about this for an idea: “Just In Time Meetings”? Instead of turning up to a meeting and attending for the full duration you can drop in and out as you please and when needed. In order for this to work, you need a strict agenda and plenty of questions posed. Now in a real time meeting conduct, face to face or real time online, leaving the meeting might be seen as rude. However, in a “Just In Time” online meeting, you can listen once or twice or as many times as you like. You can join and leave only to rejoin again. It’s not rude because people can see you have listened to each point and contributed posting questions and answers.

The benefit of this approach is that you can leave a meeting without the fear of showing a lack of interest. Therefore, you can use your time more productively.

Think about a “Just In Time” meeting where it didn’t matter if you were 5 minutes late or early, all the meeting minutes are automatically transcribed and you could play back individual points. No more wasted time listening to irrelevant sections of meetings where you are not needed.

In order to carry out a “Just In Time” meeting follow these simple steps:

• Create an Account on SoundBranch.com
• Create a Private Group
• Invite your attendees to your Sound Branch Private Group
• Create seeds (voice notes) and post branches with agenda items and questions
• Cut and paste the URL to your Meeting Agenda Seed into your calendar and invite your attendees
• Attendees join the meeting by clicking the URL to the Sound Branch Meeting Seed and start responding
• Click the Transcription button to get meetings minutes and who said what

You can learn more and get your free Sound Branch Account by visiting the link below:

https://soundbranch.com/

Author Bio

Sean Gilligan is a UK based entrepreneur and author of the book “Flexible”. Sean for the last 15 years has run Webanywhere in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice Poland. Sean is number 67 in the Worldwide Listing of Corporate Learning Movers & Shakers 2018. Sean is a bootstrapper and has not taken on outside capital to grow Webanywhere in 3 countries and has recently founded Ventures Anywhere his start up arm which includes Sound Branch.