Customer Case Study – Arnold and Fuze Meeting – Better Online Meetings
We recently received a great testimonial from one of our customers – Arnold WorldWide – thanks guys! check it out below.
Interview with Will Burns, EVP, Director of Business Development and Agency Innovation at Arnold Worldwide
Can you provide a little background on the company?
Arnold is a creative communications agency focused on delivering strong business results for brands like Citizens, Jack Daniel’s, Hershey’s, Ocean Spray, Volvo, Fidelity Investments, Carnival Cruise Lines, truth® and more. With a commitment to Great Work that Works, Arnold provides clients with a return on idea that drives a business forward. The agency delivers services across all communication touchpoints under one-bottom-line, fueling holistic integrated programs. Arnold is owned by Havas and has full-service offices in Boston, DC, New York, London, Prague, Milan, Madrid, Sao Paulo and additional global resources in 75 countries through our network.
How have you done collaboration and web conferencing in the past?
Arnold’s product is ideas – and it is the task of the account services and business team to represent those ideas in the very best way possible. In a perfect world, you’d get to present the idea in person – but with the recession, most companies have cut their travel budgets, and it’s just not possible to meet in person all the time.
Before Fuze Meeting, we generally emailed PDFs and other files to clients and colleagues, got everyone on a conference call, and tried to navigate people through the documentation over the phone. With video, we’d typically overnight a DVD to a client and then discuss the video over the phone. One of the major problems with this method is that it prevents us from maintaining control of the conversation. People naturally want to look ahead to what’s coming next – if you send a presentation or a video ahead of time, they will run right to an idea without any setup. We try to carefully craft the argument to lead the client to the idea. All that is lost if they move ahead before you’re ready.
We’d also tried using WebEx – this worked OK for slides, but the video was very hit or miss, and often the sound wouldn’t work properly. I think it also intimidated some users. We do have videoconferencing capabilities, but we found the interaction could be awkward and distracting. In fact, we’d tried most of what’s out there, and none of it really met our needs, particularly around video and ease-of-use.
Why did you select Fuze Meeting?
At Arnold, the new business team is sort of the unofficial R&D group – we try new technologies all the time. We’re often asked to do capabilities presentations remotely, which was the impetus to try Fuze Meeting. It is the strongest when it comes to video – we can post and present high-definition videos for people to watch, and they look fantastic. Video is a very important medium for us, and Fuze makes it very easy to collaborate and present video in a seamless way. There have been times when there’s a rough cut being done in New York, while the creative director is in LA – now the account and creative teams can simply set up a Fuze Meeting, post the file and work on it together.
We were also impressed with the client experience – Fuze Meeting is also way ahead of the competition in this regard. You don’t want your client to have to download something complicated and deal with it during a meeting. Fuze makes sure they aren’t putting a burden of ramp-up on the person you’re presenting to. This ease-of-use has helped us get momentum behind using the product, both with clients and internally. And, we love that we can import any kind of file into one meeting – a research report in a PDF, creative brief in Word, a PowerPoint with sales data, and of course video. Our files tend to be quite robust and graphics intensive, and Fuze Meeting handles them easily.
How is Fuze Meeting helping you build your business?
We use Fuze Meeting extensively for new business – we recently presented to eight CEOs from eight different cities at same time – no one had a problem, it was a great meeting and a huge success. We also have a number of account people who are starting to use it regularly with clients It’s a great way to shrink the distance between our clients and the Boston office.
We’re also using Fuze Meeting for internal collaboration. One great example is when we were working on a big pitch – the creative team was at the office on a Sunday morning working on a presentation of more than 70 slides and needed to link in the president, the chief creative officer and some others to finalize the pitch. We were able to get everyone onto a Fuze Meeting – working from the office, working from home, or from wherever – to review the whole deck together and make changes on the fly. We just couldn’t have done that without this program.
We’re seeing a much more rapid adoption of Fuze Meeting than we saw with other technologies – I think with other technologies there’s a perception that it is going to be a hassle or difficult. As soon as people see how easy it is to use Fuze Meeting and the benefits, they quickly make it part of how they do business.
What are the business benefits of using Fuze Meeting?
Fuze Meeting gives us many of the benefits of an in-person meeting — the real-time collaboration, the give-and-take, the ease of moving between different media, and the ability to control the flow of the presentation — without the travel. We’re saving thousands of dollars in travel using Fuze Meeting. It also fits with Arnold’s brand – we’re an innovative agency, and using a next-generation application like Fuze Meeting helps us project this.
Another benefit is efficiency. Being able to get everyone on the same page at the same time from around the world dramatically increases the speed with which we can complete work. Fuze Meeting makes complex collaboration and presentations simple and quick.
Finally, Fuze Meeting is enabling us to better communicate and sell our ideas, and that in turn helps us close more business.
What? You didn’t see us present our social and mobile meeting apps at DEMOfall 09?
Are you serious? You missed it? Well, lucky for you, it was caught on video. For those unfamiliar with the DEMO format: You have 6 minutes to launch your latest product. We had a lot of fun prepping for this – and yes – that is my son and daughter in the video. Our premise and internal goal is to TRULY make our web meeting app “so easy a five year old can do it” – whether you are joining from your mobile device or the web.
Online Meeting Etiquette for Effective Decision Making
The code of conduct or etiquette for a formal meeting involves everything from your dress code, behavior, attitude and style of presentation. Meetings that are online today with less scope for people to see each other face to face surprisingly haven’t made things any different. The etiquette of having an effective meeting online is something all professionals must be acquainted with. These online business meetings demand certain behavior and by putting into practice the same, it indicates the respect you have for your co-employees present in the web conference that facilitates worthwhile outcomes and decisions. This indeed does justify the purpose of such meetings.
While in an online meeting it is advised that concentration should be totally on the topic that is being discussed without frequently being tempted to open other desktop applications. Since a computer could open scope for us to multitask between other applications and a web meeting, the very concept of doing so while in an online meeting is considered indecent or an undesirable etiquette. By doing so, there is a chance that you could get distracted from the main stream of discussion and may need clarifications on and off . This could send uncomfortable vibes to all the others participating in the web meeting. At times this irresponsible behavior could give people a feeling that you are disinterested or are not giving the issue genuine importance and thought it should get.
The meeting could happen in different ways. It could be a simple chat session amongst a group of people through the web conference facility or it could be a video conference where one gets to see the other especially if it is a meeting involving only two people. Video conference interviews are very common and an ideal way of knowing a person personally even if they are miles apart. While in an online meeting where people from different places communicate through the voice chat option, the basic etiquette for the listeners is to mute their own voice so that their mic doesn’t catch all the different sounds in their environment be it an office or home. This could cause disturbance in the thought flow of the individual who is speaking at the other end.
Following the required rules that could enhance the effectiveness of your online meeting becomes inevitable especially when the topic discussed aims at arriving at a substantial decision that could help. The World Wide Web consists of numerous softwares that could help you install the set up for a web conference. After installing one, you could run the executable file and get ready to be accessed and access all your colleagues on a web meeting that you could have scheduled. Numerous free softwares are available but to make the best choice, a survey could help. The mic, speaker, headphones, web cam and the basic conferencing software are the minimum requirements along with the best etiquette for an online meeting to take place effectively. Improvement in technology should in no way take a toll of our behavior or manners in any given situation.
Attend a global meeting while walking the dog
” Why would I want to attend a web conference on my phone? My laptop goes wherever I go.”
Sometimes, I get this response from people when I talk about attending a web conference via an iPhone or Blackberry. While I have my own reasons, it’s always much more interesting to hear the reasons customers give.
This is what we discovered while presenting FUZE online meeting to a UK-based multinational corporation. They specialize in infrastructure development and with projects taking place around the globe, the concept of “business hours” has become meaningless for them. Employees in multiple time zones simultaneously participate in meetings so somebody is always working “after hours”. Attending a team conference call at home after hours is stressful enough but it is even worse if you need to hunch over your desktop or laptop while following the meeting online. In this situation, attending a web conference via a mobile device makes a lot of sense. You can follow the audio conference and view the online presentation from a device that fits in your pocket instead of being tied to your laptop. Using your mobile phone to participate in the meeting minimizes the impact on your personal life – you can roam around the house or even attend a meeting while someone drives you to dinner.
In a recent personal example, I attended a team meeting on my iPhone while walking the dog! Think of how this technology can change your world. As the lines between personal and work life blur, mobile meetings are just one more tool to help keep things in balance.