How Webex innovations are powering more inclusive collaboration experiences

Necessity is a great catalyst for innovation. When the effects of the global pandemic drove much of the world’s workforce to full-time remote work, the Webex team delivered hundreds of technology solutions to help our customers connect and collaborate effectively. As they make the shift to hybrid work and needs change once again, we continue to design and deliver Webex innovations that make the experience more efficient, engaging, and inclusive.

Accelerating innovation for hybrid work: Webex Leap and Vidcast

We’ve been on a roll when it comes to introducing new solutions to the Webex Suite, and now we’re taking it up another notch with Webex Leap, a new incubator program designed to accelerate innovations for the next generation of Webex products that don’t squarely fit in the existing portfolio. Think of it as a path – or an express lane – for exciting new Webex solutions to be discovered and delivered!

Today we’re announcing Vidcast, the first innovation to come from the Webex Leap Program. Vidcast is an all-in-one asynchronous video messaging solution that uses recorded, instantly-shareable video to keep teams connected at any time. Asynchronous collaboration is more important than ever in the new era of hybrid work, where many of us find our colleagues scattered across time zones, and back-to-back meeting days have become increasingly common. The irony is that the busier you are, the longer you have to wait to meet with another busy person!

When you need to keep work flowing and maintain momentum – without sacrificing precious time or adding one more thing to the calendar – Vidcast is a game changer. With Vidcast, users can record, edit and share short video messages. These messages are an easy way to provide feedback and updates to your colleagues without being tripped up by meeting schedules and time zones, and allow viewers to get caught up on their own time. Vidcast includes advanced navigation tools that allow users to easily find and jump to relevant moments, closed caption options for silent review, and a content repository to organize, distribute and manage access to video messages. Users can also post comments and add reactions with emojis, ensuring that everyone has the ability to provide input and add their voice to the conversation, no matter where or when they view.

Have I piqued your interest? Join the Vidcast waitlist and look for more innovations coming out of Webex Leap soon.

Customization and advanced analytics for inclusive and engaging meeting and events experiences

In the hybrid world, webinars, webcasts and large-scale events are increasingly important as a means of communicating, both with your teams and your customers. Making sure that events offer a high-quality and engaging experience for all attendees and presenters is a top priority for every customer I meet.

Webex Events allows you scale to reach larger audiences, easily tailor registration pages to best reflect the look and feel of your brand and create more engaging experiences for attendees. Choose different color themes, add custom logos or background images, and make speakers profiles standout. Attendee pages can be optimized for both desktop and mobile for seamless interactions – wherever your audience is.

And to support excellent event experiences, we’ve evolved the capabilities within Control Hub to offer real-time insights and advanced troubleshooting for Webex events. For example, we’ve refined search and filtering functionality, allowing IT admins to quickly and easily locate specific participants and presenters that might be experiencing issues. The “sort by severity” feature easily brings participants with issues to the top of the list, and a real-time data refresh ensures that IT admins know about a problem as soon as it occurs.

The volume of data for a large-scale event can be staggering – imagine having to sift through analytics for 10,000 people to pinpoint a problem! Now with one click, administrators have easy access to individual-level data and can quickly and easily resolve quality issues, ensuring that everyone enjoys an equally engaging event.

More channels and greater insight: Webex Contact Center

All of us are busy. We are constantly shifting from task to task. The new world of hybrid work has had a huge impact on how we communicate in the workplace and which channels we use.

We expect those we do business with to give us the flexibility to communicate on our terms – and that goes for our customers, too. Your customers increasingly expect to interact with you via their channel of choice, and have their problems solved or questions answered quickly. Gone are the days when endless customer service phone calls were the only option! Now customers have many more channel options to choose from.

Greater choice and flexibility empower customers to interact on the channel that’s most comfortable and convenient for them – a far better experience than struggling with an unfamiliar platform or simply not reaching out at all. Therefore, this month, we’re enhancing the digital communications channels supported by Webex Contact Center to include Facebook Messenger and enhanced SMS text messaging. These represent the first of many channels we plan to make available from imimobile’s expansive ecosystem of digital communication channels to serve the preferences of more customers. Look for more to come in the next few months.

Also in August, Webex Contact Center customers can take advantage of out-of-box bi-directional communication with CRM and ticketing providers – including drag and drop workflow builder support for Salesforce.com, Zendesk and Zoho. Connecting customer history and data from core business systems like these helps to create more impactful and contextual interactions.

Sophisticated, yet simple-to-use visual workflow orchestration tools bring capabilities from imiconnect into Webex Contact Center, allowing any user to orchestrate customer interactions and design workflows … even if they don’t know how to code! Businesses can rapidly integrate and change workflows on demand, saving time and reducing costs.

When it comes to enabling inclusive customer experiences that consider every step in a customer’s lifecycle and accommodate a variety of communications preferences, Cisco is setting the bar. Our cloud based Webex Contact Center was named a leader in the 2021 Aragon Research Globe™ for Intelligent Contact Centers – important validation of our focus on designing and delivering meaningful Webex experiences for our customers and their customers.

Empowering connected healthcare experiences: Webex Instant Connect

Telehealth is another area that has grown over the last 16 months, with more patients turning to technology to do everything from scheduling appointments to receiving virtual consultations. Just as Webex Contact Center empowers agents with contextual information to provide better customer experiences, the new Webex Instant Connect allows for seamless integration with care provider workflows to provide better health outcomes for patients.

Instant Connect for virtual care is just that – a collaboration solution that allows healthcare staff and patients to connect with just one click for virtual visits. The browser-based video experience is easy to access as a standalone application or through electronic health record systems like Epic and other clinical healthcare systems, and no application to download or install makes it simple to use. Instant Connect even offers virtual waiting room support, giving patients the opportunity to test their video, audio and speaker hardware while waiting for their care provider to join. And of course, Instant Connect is highly secure and HIPAA-compliant, ensuring that virtual sessions are as private as being in person.

Instant Connect for virtual care extends our Webex collaboration solutions for healthcare, building on the Webex Telehealth Connector for Epic which we introduced last year. By supporting a wider variety of healthcare systems with a more integrated solution, we’re raising the bar on connected healthcare experiences.

Lastly, I am thrilled to share that Webex has been selected as UC Today Best Collaboration Platform award winner once again! Check out our blog for more information.

Powerful collaboration experiences start with Webex

As we’re all getting started on this hybrid work journey, you can count on Webex to lead the way in delivering powerful innovation and enabling engaging and inclusive collaboration.