Uninterrupted Workstreams with Webex: Way more than just a meeting!

Uninterrupted Workstreams with Webex

If you’ve been following us lately, you probably know very well that we’re all about delivering more than just meetings with Webex. You see it in our product pitches, our executive keynotes, and our blogs.  We know many of you are using just the basics of Webex functionality, humming along with your reliable online meeting. And no doubt you’re looking for ways to expand that meeting to get more productive.

So I’m talking to you efficiency seekers! Thanks to our platform open APIs, the integrations we’ve created for you, and our strategic partnership solutions, we have curated a set of experiences you can use today to integrate the tools you use to get work done with Webex (with a limitless set of capabilities you can build yourself with our open APIs). This helps drive a simpler and more intuitive way to get your job done from start to finish. Even if most of your work doesn’t include meetings! Let me show you how.

To deliver a truly uninterrupted workstream, users need to get their work done in a single place, because every time you switch between apps you lose efficiency and context. This goes beyond just launching a meeting – it means assigning work items to finish a task, working together to resolve a service incident, building and delivering a better customer experience – you name it. You may decide your productivity is optimized by doing this in your Webex app, or, should you choose, in other applications where you may spend more of your time.

Delivering this type of experience is a major part of how we’re delivering a cognitive collaboration solution. As Aruna Ravichandran, VP Cisco Collaboration Marketing puts it, cognitive collaboration is:

Context and intelligence woven throughout all collaboration experiences. This fosters human relationships, enhances customer interactions, and builds high performance teams across boundaries to make smarter and faster decisions and allow you to serve your customers better.

Stitching together an uninterrupted workflow for users is squarely how we ensure that users have the right context at the right time to enhance relationships and customer interactions. And with our partnership with Salesforce, this example fully comes to life.

Taking Collaboration to You

Sales, service, and marketing professionals spend the better part of their work lives in Salesforce. Thanks to the power of the Cisco and Salesforce partnership, we’ve made Webex Teams capabilities available everywhere in the Salesforce UI. We’ve done this by building a widget that ships out of the box with Salesforce Lightning so that sales teams can leverage power of Webex right from within the Salesforce interface! Let me walk you through how this uninterrupted workstream makes lives easier:

Pretend I’m Jono the sales engineer (SE). I’m about to head on site to a customer to close a sales opportunity, and need a quick refresher on the account. I first go to the customer record in Salesforce and view all of the details I rely on – notes, activities, information about key players, etc. Thanks to our work with Salesforce, I can also now do much more through the Webex for Salesforce integration:

I can pull up any relevant content the team has been sharing about the account in Webex Teams. Specific spaces can be added to the customer record for easy reference to the messages and files shared to help close a deal.

I can check in with the team or even with other systems tracking account status, such as Jira. I can ask the Jira Cloud bot something like: “@jira getrecentprojectissues” to be appraised of any recent bugs we’re working on before talking with the customer.

Additionally, messaging excerpts from Webex Teams can be saved into Salesforce, so very specific chats like the buyer’s reaction to a new offering can easily live on within the customer record.

Further, when face-to-face discussions are needed, I can:

View the presence of the account manager/owner within their business card so that if they’re active and if I need to get some detailed questions answered, I can start a high quality audio/video call right within Salesforce, powered by Webex!

All of this through a single interface, with multiple tools coming together in the place I spend my work days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xkt-_V0mTQ

Sales Teams Never Stop!

Let’s say the customer meeting goes really well but they need more value for the pricing we’re offering. I jot these messages down into the Webex Teams space where we’re discussing the account. With the Webex Teams integration with Microsoft OneDrive, a colleague adds the proposal document into our space and we can co-edit and fine tune the details together right in the same Webex Teams space. I’m now ready for what I hope to be my final customer meeting to officially seal the deal.

Context Delivers Better Outcomes

Whether working in Salesforce or in Webex Teams, the scenario above shows that Webex helps sales people gain the context they need to be more effective in their jobs. The right information is unleashed from multiple tools into one workflow, so that the relevant people get that information at the right time. This saves time, increases information transparency, and ultimately delivers a faster and better business outcome. This type of workflow is only possible within the intelligent Webex suite, and is even further enhanced with other cognitive features that we’re rolling out this calendar year. Stay tuned for more exciting updates to come!

Learn more about the new Webex platform

Have Salesforce Lightning and Webex? Get started with the native integration.