This post originally appeared on Voodle’s blog April 8, 2020.
We believe the world’s best products are built by organizations that dogfood their own technology. And at Voodle, we’re proud to call ourselves power-users of our own platform. It’s been a fun journey and we’re learning a lot about the power of short video for business communications. Primarily, voodles are a great resource for increasing efficiency and building institutional knowledge across teams and the organization. This is especially true in the era of COVID-19, where everyone is sheltered in place and working from home. As a result, we’re craving human connection more than ever.
Voodles allow us to quickly capture all kinds of really important information and easily share it with our teams. From project concepts to initiative updates, successes to failures — and sometimes just for a little fun! And, we’re hearing the same things from many of our early testers as well. Simply put: Voodle is transforming the way we communicate. Our short video app improves the way we connect with one another and feel a part of each other’s workday.
As we continue our journey, we thought we’d share on-the-ground updates with you! Today, we have some of the ways our early users are adopting our technology to drive business impact. We’re here to build the world’s best short video platform for the enterprise. And you’re invited!
Organizational Alignment
Timely and authentic communication has never been so important. That’s why one of the most popular use cases for Voodle is senior leaders sharing what’s top of mind. By leveraging the power of short video, it’s simple to make regular connections between. Stay up to date with what teams are working on and how that maps to the overall strategy and mission of the company.
Slack’s State of Work Report underscores the importance of the worker-to-organization alignment: “Aligned workers feel connected to their companies and inspired to do their best work. Unaligned workers feel disconnected, unempowered and pessimistic about their company’s future.” Traditionally, opportunities to drive alignment happened at in-person meetings, around the water cooler or even in the hallways. COVID-19 is challenging the way we stay connected and forcing leaders to discover new and impactful ways to drive organizational alignment across their dispersed workforce.
Voodle gives team and senior leaders a new way to capture and share important moments. Consequently, information flows freely from managers to the organization without losing context or personal touch. This can be even more important for global organizations. As one participant shared, “Voodle is great for connecting with our Amsterdam and Singapore offices where time zone is an issue — you can’t just hop on a video call. By using Voodle everyone in the company gets the same experience: precise and engaging communication with real context and sentiment. That’s a lot more than what a slack message or email can do.”
Quick Updates
A podcast about how to make meetings less terrible inspired our company to re-think our regular meeting schedules. Subsequently, we looked at how much time our teams were spending in meetings versus the value derived from that time spent. We discovered that while our collaborative and curious culture really does demand regular connections in order to be more effective, there were many meetings that could be replaced with voodles and made much more efficient. For example, our status meetings are now done via Voodle. On our own time, we each record our morning update (30 seconds each) then share to our ‘status’ channel. Now, we can quickly watch short videos or scan the transcriptions from our team members’ posts and get up to speed fast. What used to take a half hour or more now takes just a few minutes — and sitting on status calls seems egregious!
Voodles are also a great way for salespeople to provide updates on targets, key wins and loses, as well as lessons learned, with their manager or entire team. We hear that salespeople especially love voodles because they offer a cure for TLDR-syndrome.
For instance, one user publishes a weekly newsletter which most people admit to not reading. To make it more engaging, the publisher now asks each contributor to create a quick summary voodle on their topic. Viewers can now watch the voodle highlights in less than a minute to obtain relevant information, then decide to dig into the full text for a deeper perspective. That is to say, Voodle forces brevity, which can be great when sharing news cross-department in particular.
Field Insights
Earlier in the year, we hit the road to share Voodle’s vision and gather feedback to help inform product, marketing and sales strategies. Voodles quickly became the go-to (and best) way to share insights and key takeaways from these offsite meetings with the right people. It was an easy, fast and effective way to update the organization and specific team members on what was happening on the road.
Similarly, salespeople often spend most of their time on the road, or on the phone, attending several meetings a day. Each meeting requires a written contacts report, most of which don’t get done until late at night or several days later, once the salesperson is back at home. During this time-lapse, important information often gets lost. Voodle makes this better.
With the click of a button, the salesperson can now quickly record and share post-meeting voodles no matter where they are located. For instance, voodle while driving in an Uber, logging in at a coffee shop, or eating in a foreign cafeteria. The fast and versatile nature of Voodle helps salespeople capture insights immediately after meetings. That is to say, they can share while the information is still fresh in their head and top of mind. And even better, each voodle is transcribed so the text can simply be copied and pasted into Salesforce. What a time saver!
More Examples
Additionally, Voodle enables the salesperson to share real-life customer moments with their team. By capturing the customer in a voodle, anyone can hear straight from the customer’s mouth about what they care about most.
Short video is also a great way to provide your team with updates from conferences and trade shows. With Voodle, you can now share those “you had to be there” moments with anyone in your organization. From the Voodle Pool your team can watch highlights from events at the time that’s best for them.
We’ve also heard reports of voodles being made during ride-alongs and job shadowing days so anyone on the team can benefit from what their coworkers are learning in the field.
Best Practices
One of the primary concerns we hear from our community is that, “there is so much knowledge out in the field, but we have trouble harnessing it and sharing it with the right people, in a consumable and consistent way.” Voodle helps democratize expertise sharing and transforms how insights are mined from the frontline workforce and shared with relevant team members.
Voodle is your go-to short video app, whether you want to share:
- Demo of a new product feature in action
- Showcase of how a customer has customized their product experience
- Quick update on an emerging competitive threat
- or more!
Voodle transcends time and geography to ensure equal access to these hard-earned lessons. Then, insights from the trenches can be turned into best practices.
Our head of product creates quick voodles for each new feature we rollout. After that, this is shared across sales, success and marketing teams. In addition, these voodles can also be put into the hands of customers or prospects in the blink of an eye. The creation of these voodles replaced a monthly WebEx meeting, and it’s like we never missed a beat! In fact, we love how much more dynamic and efficient feature rollouts have become using Voodle.
Finally, we want to hear from you! How would you use Voodle in your organization? We’d love to hear your thoughts! Send us a note and sign up to try Voodle on Android, iOS, or web browser now. We think you’re going to love it!
