Summary: Web conferencing has helped businesses be more successful whether it means enabling them to reach a global audience, or helping them to reduce their communications and travel expenses. Successes in web conferencing are evident across the entire spectrum of business, from SOHO and small business users, to enterprise users; and across every industry from education, to manufacturing and finance. Some of these web conferencing success stories will be highlighted in this article.

Web Conferencing Success Stories

Web conferencing delivers advantages that were unheard of a decade ago, giving small businesses the ability to reach out globally, and giving larger businesses the ability to reduce their communications and travel expenses.

The technology of web conferencing is based on Internet protocols, and transmits video and/or audio packets over the Internet on a prioritized basis. Early on in the Internet’s evolution this was not possible because of the “best effort” nature of Internet Protocol, but newer technologies offering packet prioritization higher-speed transport and broadband connectivity make web conferencing practical for everyday use. More importantly, it has become affordable for nearly everybody.

Successes in web conferencing are evident across a spectrum of business, from SOHO to small business users to enterprise users, across every industry from education to manufacturing to finance. This wide scope is possible for several reasons, including:

• The maturity of the technology, which has led to decreasing prices over time
• The availability of hosted web conferencing services, which eliminate the need for up-front capital expenditures
• The scope of sophistication of the technology, which ranges from simple webcam connections to high-end room videocamera hookups

Let’s take a look at a few companies that have had success with web conferencing, and the benefits the technology has delivered to them.

GoToMeeting from Citrix Systems
Papa John’s International delivers a lot more than pizza. The national pizza restaurant chain uses GoToMeeting to significantly reduce the company’s travel costs. The company’s aggressive expansion plans require a great deal of coordination, meetings, and training sessions to execute its plans to open hundreds of new restaurants over the next few years throughout the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Reducing business travel is a primary benefit of web conferencing, and Papa John’s focused on this cost center to reduce the expenses of in-person training and meetings.

According to Papa John’s executives, the training and strategy sessions were very detailed and couldn’t have been done through an ordinary phone call or audio conference. The meetings were used to conduct in-depth training and review store plans and financial documents with franchisees, and Papa John’s ideal solution was GoToMeeting. The company was able to take advantage of the software’s application sharing and annotation tools to boost interaction with franchisees and increase overall productivity.

In addition, Papa John’s branch uses GoToMeeting regularly to conduct meetings and discuss quarterly updates with global franchisees. This gives them the advantage of meeting with multiple franchisees, in several locations, at the same time, without having to fly different franchise owners into a central location.

Papa John’s also uses web conferencing technology for educational purposes by hosting training sessions for franchisees on a variety of management topics, like quality management and using the company’s in-house software systems. An average training session incorporates eight franchisees at once in different locations, and often in separate countries. The company estimates that it saves as much as $10,000 per training session in travel costs. The company also cited an example of travel savings when an overseas director was required to attend a conference in Florida, but was occupied opening a store in Portugal and was not available. The director was able to attend via GoToMeeting—allowing him to continue with his local responsibilities and save about $12,000 in travel costs.

GoToMeeting is easy to use, and because it is integrated with Lotus Notes it is possible for Papa John’s to set up web conferences through their internal email system. These meetings provide easy sharing of documents and use of annotation tools for reviewing store layouts. The company uses of Microsoft Visio to create store layouts, and each member of the conference can see the images even if they do not have Visio installed.

Overall, GoToMeeting has been fundamental to Papa John’s International’s maintaining its aggressive growth agenda by giving them better and more frequent communication with their franchisees.

GoToMeeting is also a strategic tool for business consultancy Kaulkin Ginsberg Company. The currency of consulting businesses is communication, and as they cannot function without it, a good web conferencing system has been essential to Kaulkin Ginsberg.

One of their units, Kaulkin Information Systems, provides accounts receivable, collections and financial services software to clients. In promoting that software, the company initially made the mistake of using an unreliable, poor quality online meeting system. By conducting remote demonstrations to prospective customers, the sales staff saved a great deal of time with each individual presentation, and was therefore able to reach out to more prospects. However, this only works if the underlying technology allows the online presentation to be as seamless as an in-person one. Regrettably, this was not the case, and the poor quality of the conferencing software Kaulkin had been using caused them to make a poor first impression.

Kaulkin Information Systems discovered GoToMeeting while attending a meeting with one of their vendors, and signed up immediately. The company now uses GoToMeeting and has been able to sustain better presentations, and make better first impression on their clients. In addition to making scheduled sales presentations, the company also uses GoToMeeting for ad hoc, last-minute demonstrations. The ease of use of the GoToMeeting system makes it possible for the company’s sales staff to move into a presentation as soon as the need arises, without advance preparation.

Because it allows up to 25 participants in a meeting, the company also uses the technology to conduct group sales demos to multiple prospects simultaneously, greatly increasing the productivity of the sales staff.

Beyond the initial sale, customer training is an important part of the Kaulkin’s process, and they use GoToMeeting to that end as well. The company reports that they have reduced training time by 30 percent, while retaining effectiveness. Before implementing the Citrix technology, training was usually done using a standard phone connection, which was inefficient because it lacked a visual element; GoToMeeting added that visual element to the training.

Because Kaulkin is in the financial services business, security is a high priority, and the online meeting security has also proven to be an important asset of GoToMeeting. The conferencing system includes password-based authentication and end-to-end encryption

Adobe Connect Pro
Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro is another leading web conferencing product that has delivered positive results for a number of clients. Australian Kitchen Industries deployed the system, and saw a return on investment within seven months and dramatically improved their e-learning initiative.

The company, with 400 staff and 20 retail outlets, needed to maintain consistent quality as it continued to grow. Their new franchise business model had the potential to greatly expand sales, but this involved a major focus on recruiting, training, and enhanced communication. Australia is a large country, and the franchisees were geographically dispersed, making training a major expense and an even greater challenge. Acrobat Connect Pro delivered dual advantages, allowing the company to rein in costs while providing the scalability needed to continue their growth pattern.

Adobe Connect Pro allows them to implement both web conferencing and e-learning throughout the organization. They use Connect Pro along with Adobe Presenter to create on-demand presentations, supplementing live training sessions with a library of ready-made, on-demand presentations for many different purposes.

Previously, the company had outsourced their training at significant cost; Adobe allowed Australian Kitchen Industries to bring it in-house and significantly reduce costs very quickly. At the same time, they were able to expand their training offerings beyond simple dissemination of company policy items to broad training that incorporated other participants, including kitchen designers, manufacturers, and franchisees.

Regardless of the users’ location, the Adobe system provides easy access and a user-friendly and flexible training infrastructure. In addition, on-demand courseware is easy to locate and well organized, because the system tracks the courses based on roles. The training modules can include animations, audio, video, and interactivity, which enhance the overall learning experience. The system is also used to track and deliver personnel assessments.

The Ontario Ministry of Education also uses Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro. The province’s vast education system brings with it several challenges, and Adobe helped the district overcome those obstacles. The system is used to promote Internet-based learning and host online meetings, and has dramatically changed the state of education in Ontario. For example, instructors use Acrobat Connect to bring web-based learning into the classroom, enabling teachers to teach in two classrooms at the same time, effectively doubling the number of students they can reach. Students that are not in the same room as the teacher can still interact with the rest of the class through the live chat feature. The technology makes it possible to establish online classes, which also helps to build up the remotely located schools and give them access to the same curriculum and teachers as students closer to the city.

In addition, the school district uses the technology to allow outside speakers to address classrooms and access to resources that were previously unavailable. The guest speakers host interactive presentations, and share their wisdom with thousands of students throughout the district at the same time.

Even better, the students use the technology to collaborate across classrooms and even across schools to work on various projects. For example, two elementary schools 400 miles apart collaborated on a book study project. Additional benefits include allowing students that may be inaccessible or in the hospital to participate with the classroom as well.

The technology is also used to keep staff up to speed and to offer them training and orientation. And, the school board also operates a series of virtual learning centers that accommodates adult learners and home-school students.

Cisco Systems WebEx
Cisco Systems’ WebEx is one of the best known and most widely used web conferencing systems on the market, and Hong Kong-based TradeLink Technologies, a supply chain information solutions firm operating in 40 countries, had great success with it. With customers around the world, TradeLink needed a way to communicate with them easily while making the most of their time and resources. In addition to communicating with customers, the company also needed an effective way for its worldwide staff to communicate from remote offices in multiple countries.

WebEx created an online portal for TradeLink that serves as a central virtual meeting place. The company uses the technology for sales, support, and installation. While installation and training was previously done in person at the customer site, WebEx now allows the option of installation over WebEx.

The sales and support teams use WebEx as part of their daily operational process, like when a customer calls for assistance. In such a case, the agent can enable WebEx and walk the customer through the problem and come to an effective resolution quickly. WebEx also delivers a major advantage to the sales team. In Asia, many companies still travel to meet customers in person, which takes time and money; WebEx allows them to meet with customers virtually as needed.

The National Bank of Indianapolis uses WebEx to allow its small IT staff to effectively service all eleven branches. The two-person IT staff needed to meet government regulations and perform the IT needs of the extended branch network, and WebEx allowed them to achieve these goals while improving overall customer service. The system eliminated the need for the IT staff to travel on-site for manual maintenance on each branch’s IT system. WebEx also helped them adhere more closely to regulations by giving them a more effective way to manage and distribute software patches and respond to security threats in the network.

WebEx met a particularly major challenge during the switchover to Daylight Savings Time. The bank’s IT system required two separate time updates, and under other circumstances the IT team would have had to shut down other projects to perform the switchover. Instead, the bank used WebEx for software distribution and patch management, and they have since fully automated critical IT functions like this. WebEx completely transformed the way the bank rolls out software updates, and saved a great deal of time and money in the process. The bank particularly appreciated the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, which allowed them to start using WebEx immediately without a long rollout period.

Internal support is also facilitated with WebEx, allowing the IT staff to resolve problems on any one of the network’s 300 computers from a remote location. IT issues can now be resolved often in a matter of minutes, and without IT staff having to travel to the branch location.