The Official Cogi Blog

Some of you may have noticed that the default setting for the times displayed in your Portfolio is Pacific Standard Time. This of course can cause some confusion if for example you’re on the east coast looking for the call you recorded at 11:00am and can’t seem to find it because it’s listed as 8:00am. The good news is that you can customize your call Portfolio to your favorite time zone.

To change your Time Zone settings, log into your Cogi account, click on the settings link and then select software settings. From the drop down menu choose the time zone in which you want your calls and other information displayed. Now all calls made by you will appear in the time zone you selected.

What about calls to different time zones? All time stamps for calls made from your account are shown from your perspective. Even calls that you share with others will still show your time zone.

Is there are feature you’d like to see? Send us a note at feedback@cogi.com

Maximizing ROM Part 1: The Problem

Meetings are an inevitable – if not essential – part of the workflow for many functions in business: brainstorming, project management status, product requirements reviews, design reviews, document reviews, staff meetings, sales status reviews, board meetings, strategy meetings, and many more. Meetings are expensive investments – for you and your team and the company you work for. But meetings often get a bad ‘rap’ in terms of productivity: They present a challenge in extracting the maximum value from what is essentially a verbal conversation.

If you take a moment to calculate the cost of your investment in meetings, you might be surprised how significant it is. Now try to calculate the return. What is the output? Thoughts, ideas, action items, common understanding, etc. captured in each person’s memory, and some quickly jotted notes. This is your “return” or value you get from a meeting. Can your “Return on Meetings” (ROM) be improved? This post explores this problem and some features Cogi has to help you multiply that “R.O.M.” and give your team’s performance a huge boost.

The cost of a meeting

First of all, most people agree that meetings are a significant investment in human capital.  Check out this meeting cost calculator that calculates the cost of your meeting based on number of attendees, length, and pay rate of attendees.  For example, if you have 4 executives in room for an hour at a “burdened cost” of $100/hour, that’s a $400/hour meeting.

Moreover, there’s also the “opportunity cost” of the time you and your team spend in a meeting, when they could be doing, ahem, “other work”.

The problem: Capturing value from verbal conversations

The value of a meeting is derived from the common understanding of content of the meeting as it is taken away by each participant, and accurately relayed to others and transformed into action. The content could be ideas, technical details, decisions, status, action items, anything you can talk about in a meeting.

Ah, but how is all this value captured? That’s where things get a bit less precise.  The thing about meetings is that communication is primarily verbal. Usually, the note pad is the tool of choice. But if you look at a prototypical meeting and its related events as a sort of workflow, you can identify the points of “Loss”.

Key “points of loss” in the typical meeting workflow:

1)      The Distraction Factor: Trying to take thorough notes and participate during a meeting is distracting at best, and impossible for most. Focus= productivity.

2)      Delay of game: Typically the recap occurs 3 – 12 hours or more after the meeting. Often, items that weren’t captured get forgotten.

3)      Selective hearing: The note taker tries to capture what’s important to him, but often things that were valuable to others get missed.

4)      Amplification of misinformation: Ever played the game of telephone? Misunderstanding coming out of a meeting can be like that but with cost of the misinformation multiplying with each “pass it on”.

5)      The Meeting II: Lastly, there is the possibility you may have to re-hash the same meeting to those who couldn’t attend.

So how much loss – whether lost content, or lost productivity trying to relay it — results from meetings? According to an informal survey I did on the Project Management Networking Group on LinkedIn, the response was almost unanimous: “considerable”, “significant”, “huge”,  “heaps of verbal gems that get missed” – in other words, a lot!

The bottom line is, much – sometimes most – of a meeting’s content gets lost along the way – either not captured or relayed – or its misunderstood and acted upon incorrectly.

Next episode: How to solve this problem and maximize your Return on Meetings (ROM) using Cogi…

Maximizing ROM Part 2: Your Meeting on Cogi

With Cogi, a meeting can be a productive, focused encounter where everyone contributes and gets an accurate, sharable set of searchable notes and dialog.  Here’s how it works:

Two ways to use conference phone to capture meetings:

1)      With a laptop: If you bring your laptop to the meeting, use the Cogi software to start a Meeting Mode recording using your conference phone. Follow the steps here to use your phone as a recorder, capturing the recording on our secure server.

2)      Without laptop (or when your conference phone doesn’t have a direct dial line):

1. Call in to the Cogi Access Line (415) 691-4045,
2. Login by phone: Enter the phone number you registered with, and the PIN code that you received in your Welcome email.
3. Recording will begin automatically (tip: you can press the # key to skip the prompts)

(Note: This discussion assumes your meeting is all in-person, where everyone is in the room. For meetings when you have one or more people on the phone, use Cogi in calling mode to place the call from your conference phone to the other end  - either a person or conference bridge. See our tutorial here www.cogi.com/help.)

Highlight the high points

Once the call is underway, With the Highlighting and Transcription features, the meeting leader makes a simple gesture to flag an important point in the conversation, and that portion will be transcribed into a verbatim text note. You can decide how much gets transcribed several ways:

1)      A Highlight – this is a 30-seconds of audio around that moment – so the highlight ‘back up’ 15 seconds – that way you don’t miss anything – and continues another 15 seconds forward. This highlighted audio is then sent to be transcribed. Our transcription turnaround time goal is next business day, but its usually faster (often the same day).

2)      Lock highlighting on to get a transcript of any length (until you turn it off)

3)      Transcribe the entire meeting: After the meeting is done, hangup the phone, and the software will show options to transcribe the call, and/or to share it.

Share the wealth (of notes and audio!)

Cogi provides a feature called Share that lets you send a link to view and hear the meeting online. Login to your Cogi Portfolio, open the desired Call (we call them calls – even if they’re just meeting mode), and click Share. Enter the email addresses and a note, and Send. Voila – everyone on the same page!

The recipients don’t have to be subscribed in order to view and hear the call – they’ll automatically receive their very own “guest account” login.

In conclusion, in-person meeting are an extremely efficient way to collaborate in many cases – even compared to trying to do the same via IM/email/text chat back and forth: Most people can talk a LOT faster than they can type, and ‘broadcast’ (everyone can hear you) is built-in. Our goal with Cogi is to help you capture the valuable content created during these significant ‘investments’ in meeting time, so you can make the most of it with your team.

Does your day ever get so busy with back-to-back calls and conversations that you don’t get a chance to follow up on all of them?  Our subscribers have commented they are often so busy they even forgot they had used Cogi — and how glad they were they logged in to their Portfolio and found all those calls were captured! This led to another request: “Can you send me a reminder?”

Cogi’s new Daily Call Summary feature sends you an email with a summary of your Cogi activity for the day including calls, meeting recordings and memos.  Here’s an example screenshot:

Summaries are sent to your registered email address each day at 5pm Pacific Standard Time.  Details for each Cogi event include: who was called, what time, the call length and if any highlights and call subject were added.  Clicking the link from the email notice takes you directly to the log in page for your call Portfolio.

From your Portfolio you can listen to those calls, add notes, review transcripts if requested and even share those calls with others. To find out about this and other Cogi features, check out the help page at www.cogi.com/help

At Cogi, our mission is to capture the important parts of your conversations and meetings so you can review, share and search that content. It all starts with recording your calls and meetings and Cogi can help you do that.

Do you even know how to record a phone call? Many of us think of Watergate or government wiretapping when we hear the phrase ‘record a phone call.’ On the other hand, we are also more familiar with call recording due to increased use by large companies to track their customer service calls. When you call a customer service line for your bank, credit card company or any company you do business with, you often hear the phrase “this call may be recorded.” That is their way of taking care of their legal obligation. If you prefer not to be recorded, you can tell the customer service agent and they will either turn recording off or have you call a separate phone number that doesn’t automatically record all calls.

The fact is there are lots and lots of people recording phone calls today. In most states, you are legally required to notify the other party if and when you are recording a phone call. To read more about call recording laws, click here.

Have you ever finished an important phone call and then wondered exactly what was said? Unlike email, where our commitments are captured in text form, the content of our phone calls is gone immediately after the call has ended. And, often times we have very important phone calls and we are unable to take accurate notes. So what do we do? We have two choices: we can either call back and try to get clarification on the points we missed (which is  embarrassing), or we can just muddle through and hope we get it right. Imagine the impact on your productivity if you always had that important information available to you? Now, there’s a new option: use Cogi to capture your important calls so you can listen to them again, or just read a transcript of the critical items and share that content with your colleagues. Click here to try Cogi call recording free for 30 days.

When you use Cogi to capture a phone call, the audio and transcript of that call are available in your ‘Cogi Portfolio’ on the Web. Once the call is completed, you can log in to your portfolio, listen to the audio, read a transcript of the points you marked, request a transcript of the entire call, or share the call and associated transcript with friends and colleagues.

Here’s a 90 second demo of how Cogi works.

In our next post, we’ll talk more about how Cogi works and about how you can use Cogi to capture not only phone calls, but also in-person meetings.