After Cisco acquired WebEx in March 2007, Cisco employees couldn’t wait to begin using the Web collaboration solution—especially sales employees, who saw an opportunity to meet with more decision makers, more frequently. “With WebEx we are interacting with customers and partners three or four times as often, cutting travel-related expenses, and improving job satisfaction with the ability to communicate with our families using video when we’re working late,” says Rick Sexton, product sales specialist, Illinois Commercial Sales, Cisco.
Merging with Unified Communications Infrastructure
WebEx is a hosted service managed from a data center in Mountain View, California. Cisco IT realized that WebEx would become even more cost-effective if the voice portion of the collaboration sessions traveled to Mountain View over Cisco’s WAN instead of the public switched telephone network (PSTN). “To minimize our buildout, hardware investment, and deployment time, we decided to test whether we could integrate WebEx conferencing with our existing Cisco Unified MeetingPlace infrastructure,” says Dorinda Brews, project manager, Cisco IT.
Quick Deployment for Quick Returns
Cisco IT and the voice engineering staff built the proof of concept in a lab environment in Amsterdam. To test the solution, team members dialed one of the company’s local Cisco Unified MeetingPlace numbers and selected “3” for a WebEx conference, which placed the call on the Cisco corporate IP backbone and routed it to Amsterdam. There, the call was converted to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and transferred to the WebEx audio mixers in Mountain View. All WebEx features were preserved, including “look who’s talking” and call back.
To speed up production, Cisco IT built out each element of the production solution in Mountain View immediately after successful testing of the corresponding element in Amsterdam. As expected, in just six months—half the usual time for a project of this scale—the voice portion of all WebEx calls began traveling over the IP network, at no cost.
Boon for Sales Teams
Cisco’s Illinois commercial sales team credits WebEx with helping a small group cover a very large geography, manage thousands of small and midsized business (SMB) accounts, and coach and motivate hundreds of partner account managers. The team’s unified communications specialist, who lives in Kentucky, uses WebEx Meeting Center to conduct several customer briefings each week—more than he could manage if he had to travel. He also takes advantage of WebEx to conduct multimedia prebriefings with the account team, partner, and customer to develop a relevant Customer Briefing Center (CBC) agenda. “Not only are our meetings more productive, but customers get the ‘wow’ factor and start thinking about how they can use virtual meetings to scale their own businesses,” says Sexton.
Wow Factor, Continued
Cisco IT in San Jose, California, was using WebEx to conduct an executive briefing about Cisco’s data center strategy when the customer unexpectedly asked about Cisco’s compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. “Nobody on the call was prepared for that question,” says Lyle Rochon, IT program manager. The briefing team e-mailed the Cisco Sarbanes-Oxley program manager with an invitation to join the WebEx conference within an hour. Thirty minutes later he joined and gave a presentation. Rochon says, “The ability to connect to subject matter experts so spontaneously was very appealing to the customer and reinforced the impression that Cisco has a well-connected collaboration infrastructure.”
Improved TAC Experience for Cisco Customers
The Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) uses WebEx Support Center to help employees work more productively and improve the customer service. To start a remote support session, the support engineer pastes a customer's e-mail address into the start window and clicks "Start Meeting." The customer interface provides straightforward options for chat and yes/no prompts from the support engineer. “Customers like WebEx because it is secure, easy to use, does not require special hardware or software, and gives them complete control over data access,” says David Thompson, a business development manager in the Technical Services group at Cisco. “The support engineers like WebEx because they can quickly and easily connect to the customer without wasting time, and get to the thing they do best, solving customer problems. It is a win for everyone.”
Integration with Salesforce.com
Cisco is constantly discovering new ways to take advantage of WebEx to create a human network between employees, partners, and customers across the globe. For example, in December 2007, Cisco IT integrated WebEx with salesforce.com for users in Singapore and Hong Kong to provide interactive Web 2.0 capabilities. “Now Cisco salespeople can schedule WebEx conferences using their salesforce.com interface,” says Adam Orzen, WebEx client services representative. “And when the salesperson conducts a WebEx meeting, the activity is automatically entered in salesforce.com. The tightly integrated solution saves the salesperson some record-keeping work and therefore increases productivity.”
Results: Enthusiastic Employee Uptake Plus Cost Savings
As of March 2008, more than 15,000 Cisco employees had WebEx accounts, and 1000 to 1200 more are registering weekly. In March alone, nearly 7000 individuals hosted a WebEx meeting. And Cisco IT’s project to integrate WebEx with Cisco’s unified communications infrastructure has already achieved payback: Cisco sales organizations expect to save US$3.2 million quarterly by eliminating long-distance charges for the audio portion of WebEx sessions.
For More Information
Cisco on Cisco
Trends in IT: Web 2.0 in the Enterprise
Cisco on Cisco Unified Communications