The Results Are In: Here Are the Winners For The First Annual 2019 Cisco Collaboration Inaugural Webex Customer Awards!

The Webex Customer Awards program recognizes and celebrates our Webex Customers who have captured the lending-edge versatility of Webex

We are excited to announce the inaugural Webex Customer Award winners. We had an overwhelming response with 215 entries and it was tough to choose, because we consider all of our customers winners. Here are the 2019 winners in 12 categories from North America.

Category 1: Webexceptional Achievement—Ford Motor Company

Our Top Award—Celebrating a customer with the most amazing business outcomes from Webex. Examples include but not limited to: revolutionized business processes, streamlined communications, reimagined workspaces, and lives affected

Nominees: Citizens Bank (Citizens Financial Group), Cognizant, Ford Motor Company, HCA Healthcare

Ford recognizes that their future is more about moving people from point A to point B than about selling or leasing individual cars. They see autonomous vehicles, ridesharing, connected cities and connected people as the evolution of mobility, and they recognize that technology is at the heart of this, from a revitalized manufacturing process to a real-time, personalized approach to working with customers and suppliers. By turning to Cisco Webex, Ford is simultaneously acknowledging and updating the vision of its founder who said, “Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress, working together is success.”

Ford uses Webex Teams for meetings, calling, video conferencing, texting, and file-sharing as its new ecosystem. It also sees how the Webex solutions can more easily and effectively resolve manufacturing problems by having people meet and work virtually, as well as making life easier in smaller ways. As just one example, they use Webex technology to welcome a Ford worker visiting an unfamiliar Ford facility, by identifying available parking spaces, providing a discount voucher for lunch, and using natural language to guide them to a convenient workspace—preconfigured with the necessary settings and files.

Category 2: Bridge to Possible Award— Be The Match

An organization who is using Cisco Webex to make a positive humanitarian impact in the world

Nominees: Be the Match, Charter Communications, Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles

The Bridge to Possible award celebrates an organization that is using Cisco Webex to make a positive humanitarian impact in the world. Operated by the National Marrow Donor Program® (NMDP), Be the Match® has managed the largest and most diverse marrow registry in the world for the past 30 years. Its work helps find a cure for the thousands of people who are diagnosed every year with life-threatening blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma.
Be the Match uses Cisco Collaboration tools to communicate with its worldwide volunteer courier network, provide a support group for patients, interview hospital representatives and medical professionals to determine the cause of diminished cord blood usage, and to collaborate internally.

Category 3: Video First Award—Facebook

A customer who is using Cisco Webex to transform their business to a VIDEO-FIRST culture

Nominees: American Eagle Outfitters, Broadcom, Cognizant, Facebook

Our Video First award honors a customer who is using Webex to transform their business to a video-first culture. Our inaugural winner in this category, Facebook, is a pioneer in the technology and social media worlds and is certainly no stranger to almost everyone who has ever gone online.
Facebook has over 10,000 Cisco video endpoints – one in every conference room in every one of its 150 offices worldwide. This gives unprecedented communication access to its 36,000 employees globally. They average nearly 40 million minutes of video per month, which works out to almost 24 hours of video per minute.

Category 4: Awesome Adoption Award— Dignity Health

A customer who took a fresh or innovative approach to drive adoption of Cisco Webex, their way

Nominees: Dignity Health, Royal Bank of Canada, Midco, Oakland Schools

This award is presented to a customer who takes a fresh or innovative approach to driving adoption of Webex. Despite going through one of the biggest mergers in the healthcare industry (with Catholic Health Initiatives), Dignity Health has used Webex to bring together 60,000+ employees and 10,000+ physicians – across 41 hospitals in 3 states, providing $2.1 billion in charitable care and services.
In a typical month, the national health care system holds around 134,000 meetings with 590,000 participants, and they expect these numbers to grow as their Webex presence expands, making engagement and adoption easier. Dignity Health has taken full advantage of the opportunity to bring their staff to a video-first platform to help build the post-merger Common Spirit organization. Their adoption of Webex tools, paired with the merger has been a truly transformative experience that points to direct benefits to patients and healthcare workers alike.

Category 5: Innovative Integrations Award—Utah State University

A customer who has integrated Cisco Webex into a business process and is now achieving a specific business outcome as a result

Nominees: Luma Health, New York State ITS (Workers Compensation Board), Utah State University

Utah State University (USU) has a tradition of embracing new technology in order to fulfill its mission of providing access to education to all. From sending professors to remote areas by plane or train, then later using correspondence, satellites and the internet, it now offers interactive video classes to help students affordably earn degrees completely online. The integration between Webex (Teams, Meetings, and Training Center) and Canvas is key to making the education experience simple and cohesive for students and teachers alike. USU always likes to work on the cutting edge of teaching and has continued to push Cisco to innovate and meet the needs of the classroom of the future.

Category 6: World Class IT Award—Farmers Insurance Group

IT Team within a customer that has gone the extra mile with their implementation of Cisco Webex. An opportunity for end users to celebrate the team behind the magic of their meeting experiences. (Can be nominated by end users)

Nominees: Dignity Health, Farmers Insurance, Synchrony, Verisign

Our World Class IT award honors the customer that has gone the extra mile with their implementation of Webex. Farmers knows a thing or two about the importance of effective meetings, and their Collaboration Manager, Jonny Mancilla, has taken extra steps to ensure Farmers’ end users have everything they need. He posts Weekly Webex Tips on video, mobile app, and their Facebook Workplace app (Facebook Workplace is a highly adopted social media app for all of Farmers Insurance employees). Through this deployment, Jonny can see how many people have viewed his posts and which articles seem to spark the most interest. He immediately answers questions from users on a particular post, so they don’t have to go searching for an answer. He has also created adoption materials customized for Farmers Insurance so that employees have an apples-to-apples comparison on how to use Webex services based on Farmer’s processes and procedures. He also makes sure any recorded onsite trainings and collected collateral goes on the Farmers Today’ site, under their Webex resources page.

Category 7: Workplace Transformation Award— Kohl’s

A customer that is successfully transforming their workplace with Cisco Webex and seeing the results

Nominees: Citizens Bank (Citizens Financial Group), Kohl’s, MetLife, USDA FNS

The workplace transformation award recognizes a customer that is successfully transforming their workplace with Cisco Webex. Kohl’s IT Service and Delivery group needed a reliable and compatible collaboration tool capable of supporting the numerous ad hoc meetings to the formal executive level video session.
The team deployed multiple Cisco Collaboration products in their environment. The IT Team actively advocates for the best, most intuitive end user experience and has worked closely with Cisco to ensure top tier user experience within the entire collaboration portfolio, an initiative that has been mutually beneficial. Kohl’s has helped its end users streamline the sharing of design content, iterate design files via Webex Boards and reduce the amount of paper used to print design mockups. People now spend less time shuttling between different buildings on campus and can maintain productivity remotely and safely during stormy Wisconsin winters.

Category 8: Webexemplary Growing Business— Midco

Recognizes a growing business that has the best story to tell about their success with Cisco Webex

Nominees: Midco, Premier Research, Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP

As a Midwest provider of high-speed Internet, cable TV and home phone service, plus home automation and security, Midco understands the need for its employees to collaborate efficiently and execute a seamless user experience.
The IT team chose to replace a redundant collection of diverse messaging and communications apps with Webex Teams for their primary collaboration platform. They knew that real success would come from achieving a high adoption rate from their end users, so they partnered with their Cisco Customer Success Manager to focus on raising awareness and providing resources to increase knowledge and adoption.
Midco created a survey for their users to discuss potential adoption barriers, they wanted to understand the current perception of Webex and asked for areas that needed more focus and improvement. They created an internal knowledge base, with quick reference guides and brochures to give users unfamiliar with Webex the ability to walk into a meeting room and quickly adopt the technology with ease. They also provided targeted training sessions and live demos. The adoption was received with high endorsements throughout the company from executive leadership to the end users

Category 9: Webexemplary Higher Education— University of North Carolina at Pembroke

This award honors a higher education institution with the most stellar outcomes from Webex

Nominees: Liberty University, Oakland Schools (Educational Services Agency), University of North Carolina at Pembroke, University of Wisconsin Whitewater

In 2015, the Division of Information Technology at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke set out on a mission to redefine and refresh meeting and learning spaces by adopting and standardizing a solution that supports a variety of pedagogical requirements. Previously, meeting and learning spaces functioned differently from building to building, and on occasion, from room-to-room within the same building.
UNC Pembroke now provides Webex Teams and Webex Devices in classrooms and across campus. Every student, staff and faculty member have a Webex Host account and a Webex Teams Account. There are over 50 Collaborative Classrooms built on Webex devices that any user at UNCP can utilize.

Category 10: Transformative Medicine—Head and Neck Pathology Consultations

Recognizing a company that used Webex technology in managing disease and improving human health

Nominees: Head and Neck Pathology Consultants, Pancreatic Cancer Action Network

In recognizing a company that used Webex technology in managing disease and improving human health, we chose Head and Neck Pathology Consultation of Woodland Hills, CA, operated by world-renowned pathologist Lester Thompson, M.D. His practice helps doctors more accurately diagnose cancer and other diseases, and he works with consulting pathologists who need a second or expert opinion for a particular case. Since many of these referrals focus on cancer cases, it is vitally important that Dr. Thompson is able to confirm or rule out whether a tissue sample is cancerous or not, as well as identifying the type of cancer the cells represent and how aggressively it spreads.
Dr. Thompson uses Webex as an integral part of his consulting practice. For each consultation service, he schedules a Webex session through which he uses video conferencing to connect with consulting pathologists, and HD screen-sharing to review high-resolution imagery of the cell samples and to work through the diagnosis details.
The benefits to Dr. Thompson, his consulting pathologists, and his patients include:
• improved connection and communication with doctors, many of whom are located elsewhere across the country or around the world.
• more accurate diagnosis for consulting pathologists with greater detail and texture behind the opinion, giving patients and pathologists a more comprehensive understanding of a particular disease, and avoiding false positives.
Dr. Thompson considers Webex as an essential part of his practice. He feels it is an excellent medium for communications and medical education. Through his work with Webex, he is improving health care for patients and helping medical practitioners improve their capabilities.

Category 11: Exceptional Customer Experience—USAA

Recognizing a company that uses exceptional customer experience and commitment to their customers

Nominees: Be the Match, USAA

USAA provides insurance, banking, investment and retirement products and services to 13 million members of the U.S. military and their families. Known for its legendary commitment to its members, USAA is consistently recognized for outstanding service, employee wellbeing and financial strength. USAA membership is open to all who are serving or have honorably served in the U.S. military, and their eligible family members.
A principle element of their sterling reputation for service is the empathy demonstrated by the front-line contact center team of member service representatives. Nearly 1 in 4 of USAA’s employees either served or are military spouses. Their ability to treat their members in a personalized and respectful manner is core to the USAA mission.
One of the key platforms behind the scalable, personal experience for USAA’s members is its use of Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE). Supporting more than 22,000-member service reps and connecting over 9 million contacts per month in a secure and reliable manner, UCCE is an essential component of USAA’s member engagement strategy.
UCCE provides USAA with the ability to scale and meet their members’ demands while delivering a single consistent experience.

Category 12: Webexcellent Global Initiative—Cognizant

This award recognizes a company that has adopted Webex Teams, Meetings and Devices around the globe on a large scale

Nominees: Cognizant, Manhattan Associates

New Jersey-based Cognizant provides IT services, including digital, technology, consulting, and operations services to clients all around the world, and Webex is the engine of its collaboration process. In fact, Cognizant has clocked over 1 billion meeting minutes in the last 11 months, using 65,000 hosts. Symbolic of its progress into new and better productivity methods, video collaboration at Cognizant has grown more than 120% in the past 11 months through more than 4,300 Cisco cloud connected video endpoints. Not only has the Webex Platform connected thousands of people and projects, it has also helped the company realize huge savings in travel and other costs. Cognizant remains an enthusiastic adopter of new Webex features and in doing so, provides Cisco with valuable feedback that helps us improve the user experience for all our customers.

Category 13: Webex Teams Power Partner

Awarded to the customer who has partnered the most with the business unit to develop Webex Teams

Nominees: HCA Healthcare

HCA Healthcare, one of the nation’s leading providers of healthcare services was an early adopter and is now one of the largest users of Webex Teams. They have worked closely with the BU to develop and test new features and currently have 70,000 users on Teams.

Winning the Webex Customer Award

In addition to bragging rights, customer winners will each be presented with a plaque at our awards ceremony. We will also publicize the winners and their stories through our extensive social media presence.
For the winner of the Webexceptional Achievement Award (Ford Motor Company), I will be paying a personal visit to treat the members of the team to lunch, and we will be featuring them in a video showcase.

In Closing

We were thrilled by the volume and quality of nominations for this inaugural award. It goes to show just how well the Webex suite of products is replacing the patchwork of apps and techniques with something cohesive, convenient and very intelligent.
While we raise a glass to this year’s winners – role models and achievers – we are already looking forward to reading the stories of next year’s contenders.
Cheers!

You can watch the entire awards ceremony here.

Join the 1st Annual Cisco Webex Customer Awards on Twitter #CLUS