What tech will be in the office of the future?

Jordan Benedet, September 26 2012

Jordan Benedet is a Manager on the Client Strategy and Innovation team at Social Media Group. Follow @jbenedet.

Technology is changing at light speed. Everyday, a new breakthrough is announced that promises to simplify (or even save) people’s lives. I welcome these changes with open arms because I really enjoy understanding how technology can be applied to solve problems in the real world.

My last SMG blog post promoted the healthy lifestyle of Taking an Unplugged Vacation, which can provide time for your mind to be refreshed and help you focus on having fun or simply relaxing in a hammock. I also mentioned that the days where people are tethered to their offices are disappearing fast because technology has enabled us to be more mobile.

Yesterday, I stumbled across a closely related post on Venture Beat, which showcases the results of a recent poll deployed by LinkedIn to over 7,000 members in 18 different countries. The polled asked participants this question: “Name a technology that you feel will be obsolete in the next five years?“

The results are both expected and surprising. It’s not surprising that tape recorders, fax machines and the infamous rolodex were touted as the tools/technologies that will likely disappear in the next five years. Surprisingly, the most popular office dream tools were to have a clone to help you through the day and to have a quiet place where napping is allowed. (Bonus: a detailed infographic on napping was recently created by Patio Productions.)

Most respondents were confident that the rise of portable computing devices, such as tablets, smartphones and cloud storage technologies, will help fuel an increase to flexible working hours. Therefore, the office of the future will likely have a much stronger reliance on both telecommuting and video conferencing. As LinkedIn’s Connection Director, Nicole Williams, put it,  “The key message that we got is that the world is changing. It’s becoming more flexible.”

The poll also revealed that most people don’t feel that resumes, which ranked 14th on the list, will not be completely replaced any time soon. I’m sure this was probably not what LinkedIn was hoping to see, but I’m willing to bet that this will change quite quickly.

Are the top answers inline with what you believe the office of the future will look like? I’ll be honest, I’m pretty stoked for the whole clone thing to become a reality, but I won’t hold my breathe for it.

[VentureBeat]

No comments

Tweet

Connecting Customer Service and Social Media

Ruth Bastedo, June 1 2012

Ruth Bastedo is Director, Business Development at Social Media Group. Follow @rutbas

This week I was at a talk by Howard Grosfield, the President of Amex Bank of Canada at the Toronto Board of Trade. I was really impressed by how Amex considers social media to be an intrinsic part of future of the customer experience. Grosfield emphasized again and again how important it is for Amex to have customers willfully and actively promote American Express, especially through social media. It goes without saying that in order to encourage this type of advocacy, the quality of the customer service experience is of paramount importance.

You can get a taste of Mr. Grosfield’s take on the importance of customer service to Amex by taking a peek at an excerpt from another talk he recently did at Rotman School of Management, “Selling Service: Building a Brand on the Foundations of Service and the Customer Experience”.

The talk got me thinking about link between customer experience and social media. I revisited discussions in the LinkedIn Group “Customer Experience Management”, to see how much talk there was on the social media front. Social Media is clearly popping up as a factor that is being examined more closely by many companies.

On the SMG front, increasingly our clients are interested in integrating social channels into their customer’s experiences, and moreover, they are interested in providing value add content that supports these experiences in a  more holistic and cohesive manner.

For an overview of the space, I urge you to take a look at this great set of info-graphics, “The 10 Best Customer Service Infographics for 2012” sourced by one of the LinkedIn group members. It’s a really excellent perspective of what’s happening out there, and gives lots of food for thought.

This is a taste of the content below. Enjoy!!

Support Gets Social

No comments

Tweet