BENEFITS

Collaborative Equity

Now more than ever, it’s crucial that all participants can collaborate at a high level anywhere, anytime. With Alleo’s innovative software, teams can work synchronously and asynchronously without missing a beat. All work, edits, and progress are made in real-time for all participants to see. Increase engagement in your meetings, presentations, and workshops.

Imagine the increased diversity of thought and ideas you can yield with Alleo’s non-verbal communication features in addition to live video and audio. Ensure every voice is heard and every idea is expressed with Alleo.

Kristen Elfering TechPoint

It is a joy to work with them [Alleo] and use their product.

Jörg Rong Senior Workplace Consultant with merTens AG

Alleo realizes the Workplace 4.0 today

Richard Edwards Director of Quatreus

The security features that are built into the platform from the ground up are a real differentiator over other canvassing solutions.

Simone Lo Russo CEO and Founder of Impianti S.p.A.

Alleo is an innovative solution able to meet all needs and to have everything in a single virtual workspace.

André Markowis Head of Business Development Auviso

We believe that Alleo’s collaboration software is a game-changer in the industry

Simon Härke CEO of DEKOM AG

With tools like Alleo, it can be ensured that despite a spatial separation, the ability to innovate through collaboration remains secured.

Tony Scelzo CEO, Ceemless

Alleo has been a single source of truth for our team to plan and build on. We are more efficient, and barriers to working remotely seem to have vanished.

Alleo Partner Confidential

The platform is providing our customers with unprecedented levels of situational awareness.

Fawzi Benmessaoud, PhD Professor of AI and Informatics

Alleo makes the learning experience collaborative and personalized. As a result, it’s more engaging, fun, and productive for the students.

Gary Kayye THE rAVe Agency

I don't know why everyone’s not using this as a collaboration system inside of meeting spaces and experiences spaces.

Alleo Customer Confidential

Alleo enables me to produce virtual presentation experiences that incorporate multimedia content and short interactive exercises - all in one easy-to-use platform.

Digital Experience Center

Imagine this: You’re working with a high value customer, getting ready to start a major project together. You sit down at your computer and open the meeting. Your client’s C-suite of executives appear on screen, easily visible to you and each other, along with your company’s intro video playing in the background. You start the meeting with introductions and seamlessly pull up a world map that automatically shows each person’s location along with the territories they cover as they speak. 

You then move on to the first exercise, a themed icebreaker customized to the project you will be working on today. Each attendee can participate by selecting preset icons to answer relevant questions, so everyone’s answer is easy to see and quick to deliver. Your clients are fully engaged and immersed in the experience your brand is providing, and enthusiastic to begin working with you.

That is what a digital customer experience center can deliver, and why it matters to your business.

What Is the Purpose of an Experience Center?

The purpose of a customer experience center (also called customer briefing or brand experience centers) is to immerse your clients in your brand while focusing on their needs. Ideally, the customer feels like they are co-authoring a solution tailor-made for their needs. 

These centers aren’t just about making a sales pitch. They are designed to:

  • Educate customers on your brand and how it could provide value
  • Build trust in your business
  • Show that you truly value your customers
  • Illustrate your innovative use of the latest technology and best practices
  • Validate your ability to solve their problems

What Is a Digital Experience Center?

A digital experience center is simply a subset of the wider idea of a customer experience center, where participants interact virtually. These digital experience centers are more than just a virtual meeting where the moderator shares a Powerpoint. They are all about using digital experience platforms to truly bring your audience on a customized trip through all your brand has to offer—a place where you can talk about the world and DO the work.

Many in-person experience center events will include virtual attendees, so the impression of the people joining digitally always matters. But there are a variety of situations where the ability to run a fully virtual experience would provide even more value. 

These digital experience centers could easily come into play if:

  • Your company doesn’t have a dedicated in-person space appropriate for a large event.
  • Your company wants to allocate all the budget to creating a stellar virtual experience instead of splitting resources between technology and physical space expenses.
  • Important client representatives (like the CEO) suddenly aren’t able to attend in person due to travel issues, illness, or scheduling conflicts.
  • Relevant customer attendees are based over a large geographic area and do not wish to travel to attend a physical event.
  • A pandemic or other natural disaster makes holding a physical event implausible.

What Is a Digital Experience Platform?

The definition of a digital experience platform, Gartner defines a digital experience platform  as “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.” In the case of a digital experience center, this platform is the technology you use to create and run an event in this center. 

Since digital experiences are entirely virtual, the technology you use plays the most essential role in your success. Have you ever been working with an important client on a web call, only to need to stop a productive conversation to ask someone else to share a screen or advance to the next slide? Do you cringe when it happens because you know what kind of impression these technology glitches make on potential customers?

If so, the digital experience solutions you currently have in place are limiting your potential for customer experiences. Upgrading your digital experience strategy to include a platform that enables all the features you want can make all the difference. Alleo is one of the top digital experience companies and specializes in creating world class digital experience centers for our enterprise clients.

Digital Experience Centers: What Are Examples of the Customer Experience?

Let’s go through a few digital experience examples to give some concrete cases of how virtual experience centers can be used across different industries.

Case 1: Enterprise Consulting Firm

A consulting firm is beginning to work with a professional sports franchise to plan their upcoming season and develop their marketing budget. To kickoff the project, their team invites ten of the top decision makers within the franchise to a day-long event in their digital experience center. 

  1. The event opens with a welcome slide that includes all attendees web cam views, and a custom highlights reel of past successful campaigns carried out by this client (showing the consulting firm has done their homework).
  2. Each member of the consulting firm introduces themselves, opening a custom slide with their specific areas of expertise and the role they will play within this event and the wider project. 
  3. An ice breaker begins with the question “What is your favorite sport to watch?” Each participant’s video is automatically lined up across the top, everyone selects their answer from a preset list of icons (like football, track, swimming), then everyone’s selected icons appear under their video. Participants are more engaged than if they were doing the same activity by typing in chat or answering verbally (which takes forever and can be dull).
  4. A short presentation begins on the team’s successes and challenges for the pre-season, guest hosted by the team’s head coach. She uses the main display space of the virtual platform as a white board with preloaded video clips, player bios, and field graphics. She’s able to draw new plays directly on screen, sharing the team’s infectious enthusiasm for the upcoming season. Her presentation finishes up with some roadblocks the team is facing.
  5. A brainstorming activity begins around roadblocks faced by the team’s audience. Each participant is invited to add a potential roadblock they see for their audiences. These roadblocks are added instantly to the central work space. Each participant is then asked to drag and drop an icon of the team’s logo to each roadblock they also recognize as a problem.

International Hotel

A world renowned hotel group is creating a digital experience for the executives of the top 25 travel agencies they would like to promote their holdings. The hotel executives plan a two-day digital experience with ten of their own important stakeholders and 50 travel agent execs. 

  1. The event begins with a welcome page that includes the logos for each travel agency, and participant’s video displays under their agency. 
  2. During introductions, the logo for the agency introducing itself enlarges to fill the screen, and each attendee video display enlarges as they share their name and role. The view also includes a map where they simply click to highlight the travel destinations they specialize in.
  3. An ice breaker starts asking “What is your favorite vacation type?” Each participant selects from a preset list of options like beach, mountain, city, adventure. Because the size of the group makes taking in individual data more difficult, the results are shown as a pie graph and each one section can be clicked to show the individual respondents.
  4. A presentation begins that features a celebrity fan of the hotel. They provide a voice-over narration of a recent trip they took staying at one of the hotel locations. The celebrity switches views within the presentation to show personal video of them in the hotel, official photo shoots of them at nearby attractions, and their social media posts during the trip. 
  5. A feedback activity starts where each participant can anonymously add a sticky note to a central board about what parts of travel are most important to their guests. The moderator can then help the group organize the sticky notes into overall categories and discuss how a hotel might help address each main category.

How Do I Create an Experience Center?

Now that we’ve gone over some concrete experience center examples, let’s talk through how to create this type of immersive customer experience.

  • Step 1: Focus on the customer. This should be customer-focused from start to finish, so make sure you think about what type of customer you are making this center for, in what way it will add value to them, and what will they need it to do to meet their needs.
  • Step 2: Choose the right technology. Before you can plan what will be included in your center, you have to choose one of the digital experience platform companies that will work best for you. You want to pick a platform that is infinitely customizable but also offers flexibility and is simple to use, like Alleo.
  • Step 3: Create a strong theme or flow for your experience. Creating various immersive experiences is great, but making them one cohesive experience center means they need to be connected through story and purpose.
  • Step 4: Plan each individual component you want to include, then think about how a customer would move between them in space or time. Make sure there is a range of learning moments, engagement opportunities, and brand interactions to keep the experience interesting and useful.
  • Step 5: Follow up after the experience is over. A platform like Alleo lets you create permanent boards and store everyone’s comments, allowing you to stay connected as customers revisit the work done within the experience center.

Why Do You Need a Digital Experience Platform?

You need a digital experience platform if providing this level of experience with your brand is a priority. Enterprise businesses who are wasting valuable time trying to plan high caliber customer experiences by piecing together many different tech solutions need a better way. Companies that really want to show their prospects how they embrace innovation from the planning level on down need this. Businesses that value their customers and go above and beyond to show them rather than just tell them need this.

When you’re ready to provide a world class digital experience center for your clients, you need Alleo. Visit our website today, or contact us for more information.

Visual Collaboration Tools

The way we work has changed dramatically over the past several years. For many organizations, remote and hybrid work are here to stay—as are the technologies that empower teams to collaborate and communicate with colleagues scattered across the globe. But it’s not just the way we work that’s changed; the way we do business has transformed as well. According to Hubspot, only about one-third of sales leaders reported an in-person sales strategy in 2022, whereas 50% reported a hybrid strategy and 18% reported a fully remote strategy. These numbers are likely to persist in the years to come as companies continue to define their new normal and standard operational procedures.

But it’s not enough to simply recognize the changes, keeping up with them is paramount to success. Yet, they do mean a fundamental shift in the way calls, demos, and other onboarding activities are held. Here’s where visual collaboration enters the room. This relatively new approach to customer engagements champions interactive, equitable conversations between your team and your customers, prospects, and stakeholders. It makes no difference whether they’re in your customer experience center or at their laptop. Visual collaboration software allows you to create flexible, customer-focused experiences that truly drive outcomes. 

At Alleo, for example, our visual collaboration platform enables teams to create custom hybrid presentations and engaging experiences that drive inclusion, productivity, adoption, and innovation.

In this guide to visual collaboration technologies, we’re answering key questions such as:

  • What are collaboration tools used for?
  • What are the benefits of visual collaboration tools?
  • How do you find the right visual collaboration tool for your organization?

What Is Visual Collaboration?

Visual collaboration encompasses various ways that organizations communicate with stakeholders, typically using activities and innovative technologies. While a more simplistic visual collaboration definition may just consider virtual whiteboards, true visual collaboration goes much deeper than that. Visual collaboration has the potential to utterly transform the ways that businesses engage their brands, with functionality for ideation, workshops, presenting, activities, live communication, polling, and more.

Consider for a moment the dozens—or even hundreds—of virtual or hybrid meetings or experiences you’ve had with customers over the last few years. Of course, some may stand out more than others, but odds are they all share some characteristics. They probably took place over a video conferencing system with limited features to collaborate. There was likely a linear slide deck of some sort to guide the conversation. And, sometimes it might have felt like you were wrestling to get your stakeholders to engage, ask questions, or collaborate with you. While meetings like this certainly have the potential to be successful, they can feel repetitive and ordinary, especially in a world where 83% of professionals spend between four and 12 hours of their calendar week in meetings..

Visual collaboration changes the game entirely by putting key elements like engagement, flexibility, innovation, equity, and customer satisfaction at the center of each experience. By adding elements and functions that are designed to engage everyone in the meeting—no matter where they are physically or the ways they’re comfortable communicating—you can capture your customers’ attention from the get-go. And, while many applications claim to offer truly innovative visual collaboration tools, Alleo goes beyond the norm to drive innovation with pre-built templates, widgets, activities, and full customization capabilities.

What Is the Importance of Visual Collaboration?

Broadly speaking, visual collaboration enables compelling experiences that improve customer outcomes across the board. In other words, these kinds of conversations are not only more productive and creative, but they add value to your customer relationships, too. 

The fact is, engaged relationships are better for business. In fact, Gartner reports that a high level of customer engagement leads to: 

  • An elevated brand experience 
  • An increase in customer loyalty and trust 
  • A clear pathway to customer insights and feedback
  • An increase in sales funnel velocity and conversions
  • An improved overall customer experience

Essentially, visual collaboration—when done well— can enable your team to close more deals, increase revenue, and strengthen relationships. In a world where 73% of consumers consider customer experience a critical factor in their purchasing decision, according to PWC, this can make or break a sale or relationship.

Of course, we know it’s certainly easier said than done. That’s why finding the right visual collaboration tools and methods is so vital to success.

What Is a Visual Collaboration Tool?

A visual collaboration tool is a software solution that enables organizations to work together and communicate more effectively with their customers and stakeholders—especially in remote or hybrid environments, where it’s challenging to keep everyone’s attention. As we mentioned previously, some correlate video conferencing or virtual whiteboards, but in truth these are merely features of holistic visual collaboration tools for business. The best collaboration tools empower organizations to provide meetings and experiences that are dynamic, equitable, and engaging.

Flexibility

Today’s customer experiences necessitate adaptability and flexibility—as well as online collaboration tools that allow you to foster these characteristics. Virtual collaboration platforms must be able to support in-person, remote, hybrid, synchronous, and asynchronous meetings and interactions to keep up with work environments of the future. With Alleo, you can tailor your experience with purpose-built activities, interactive content and widgets, embeds, live chat, and more in a single, infinite virtual canvas that’s available even after the meeting is over.

Collaborative Equity

We do better work when all of the different voices in the room can be heard equally. Collaborative equity ensures that everyone in your meeting, no matter who they are and how they’re connected, can effectively express their thoughts and ideas. Additionally, remote work has shifted expectations for a lot of people, and businesses that don’t enable these kinds of experiences may be edged out by their competitors that do. With Alleo’s verbal and non-verbal communication features, attendees can share and interact in a way that feels authentic and comfortable to them.

Engagement

At the end of the day, it all comes down to capturing your audience’s attention. Microsoft estimates that you have roughly eight seconds to do this, which means there is little room for error at the top of a meeting. Visual collaboration tools like Alleo offer features to ensure you and your audience are interacting at every stage of a conversation. Work synchronously and asynchronously and craft personalized customer-driven presentations that truly stand out from the crowd.

What Features Do the Best Visual Collaboration Tools Offer?

Many types of collaboration tools exist on the market today, ranging from point solutions that offer just a whiteboard to end-to-end solutions that power not only your video conferencing and chat but your collaboration tools as well. With the number of visual collaboration technologies on the market, however, it can be challenging to find the right solution for your team. Here are 10 key features to look for in your next visual collaboration tool.

  • Digital Storytelling: Today’s customer engagements must be built around personalization, empathy, and interactivity. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all calls, demos, and onboarding meetings. With a visual collaboration tool like Alleo, you can develop multiple journeys within a presentation to allow your attendees, as well as their wants, needs, and pain points to guide the discussion. 
  • Video Conferencing: Of course, most collaborative engagements focus around being able to see and/or hear one another. With Alleo, not only do you have video conferencing capabilities, but you can even define—per slide—what video feeds show up. For convenings with multiple presenters, this can be a game changer.
  • Live Chat: Along with video conferencing, live chat is another common feature of online collaboration tools. Alleo provides functionality to offer unique chat feeds per slide so you can highlight only the most relevant topics. Of course, because content persists after the meeting ends, you’ll still have access to chats, questions, and ideas to follow up on.
  • No-Code Design: Let’s face it: there’s not enough time in the day (most days), which means there is little time to learn totally new applications and programs. The right visual collaboration tool should be quick and easy to use. At Alleo, our no-code approach means that anyone can build and customize interactive, engaging presentations without the need for programmers or designers.
  • Pre-made Templates: While some organizations may be interested in designing their templates from scratch, pre-made templates make it quick and easy to design decks for ideation sessions, presentations, workshops, and more. The best online collaborative tools make it easy to customize these templates to fit your brand so everything you do is personalized. At Alleo, we offer dozens of templates that were built with engagement in mind. From simple meeting templates to empathy maps, prioritization matrices, lean canvases and more, there are templates to enable all kinds of convenings.
  • Purpose-Built Activities: Part of prompting engagement comes from shared experiences and conversations. Purpose-built activities like polling, gamification, and flip cards can bring together disparate attendees 
  • Whiteboards: While whiteboards aren’t the end-all-be-all of visual collaboration, they’re certainly a part of it. The best virtual whiteboards allow you to ideate, annotate PDFs, and video files, use sticky notes, and so much more. At Alleo, all of your content persists after the meeting ends, so work can be done both synchronously and asynchronously. 
  • Interactive Polls and Surveys: Find out how your attendees think and feel in real time with interactive polls and surveys. Features like this can help you truly understand who is in the room, their thoughts or beliefs, and how you can better customize your presentation to meet their needs.
  • Emoji Reactions: While some people are more comfortable speaking in front of other meeting attendees, others might not be. With widgets like our emoji reactions, even those more reserved collaborators can feel empowered to react and respond in real time.
  • Visual Twin Capabilities: With Alleo, users can seamlessly navigate their presentations from a central control unit  that enables them to personalize the experience for each individual attendee. This can be particularly powerful when you wish to highlight multiple features or functionalities simultaneously.

Alleo: Virtual Collaboration Made Simple

At Alleo, we’re on a mission to help organizations connect people, content, and tools—without the limitations that interfere with flexibility, collaborative equity, and engagement. Our no-code visual collaboration platform enables businesses to hold high-impact customer-facing meetings, presentations, and workshops that drive results. With video conferencing, live chat, pre-built templates, and a variety of widgets and interactive activities, Alleo makes it easy for businesses to design, facilitate, and collaborate to drive better experiences.

Stop searching online for which is the best collaboration tool and experience a best-in-class platform like Alleo. Sign up for a demo today to experience it for yourself.