Webex saves 13 weeks per year streamlining its processes with Smartsheet and Brandfolder

Founded in 1995 in San Jose, California, Webex is the global leader in cloud-based collaboration solutions. It offers options for virtual meetings, calls, messaging, and events, as well as customer experience solutions and collaboration devices. With 2.2 million registered users, Webex applications enhance business processes for companies of all sizes across the world. 

Spotting the challenges 

In 2021 alone, Webex offered over one thousand innovative solutions to its customers. Trusted by 95% of Fortune 500 companies, it is committed to delivering world-class collaboration and customer experiences at a higher level—to do this, the company expanded its global team by 40% to accommodate the growing demand for its services. 

“We expected to gain more project workload with the new growth and also faced visibility and communication issues,” begins Janina Hill, Marketing Program Manager at Webex. “Everybody needs to be on the same page, whether you’re a stakeholder, project lead, or team member. We need to know what to do and make sense of what we’re looking at if we want to continue expanding.” 

The company was already using a series of tools to manage its projects, but they weren’t the same across the organization. 

“There’s information overload because we switch between multiple tools and go through many platforms and websites. We needed to create a one-stop shop for our internal team to access resources and data in real time easily and quickly,” says Hill. 

Work smarter, not harder

With over 15 years of project management experience, Janina Hill was already a seasoned Smartsheet user and knew that the platform would meet Webex’s needs. “I often say ‘Smartsheet can do that!’ when I come across workflow challenges. So I felt that it was the same case here,” she says. 

Hence, Webex started using Smartsheet as a single platform for content, campaign and employee management. This involved using forms, trackers, and templates for project submissions and planning, which enabled the team to easily see updates and reports across all business activities. 

“Then, we started tracking our success using dashboards and reporting and ultimately optimizing everything we have to get the most out of our campaigns, and so deliver the best offering consistently to our growing customer base,” says Hill. “For example, we really made use of the content calendar by filling it with our events and launch dates throughout the year. It has really encouraged more organized teamwork as everyone can see what’s going on.”

“Everybody has different levels of Smartsheet skills. But with drag and drop, all solutions are easy to use. Also, the workflow is much smoother when all processes are automated and all information is in one place,” explains Hill. 

Achieving more in less time

Using Smartsheet has sped up daily operations at Webex. “I can submit my request in a quarter of the time I used to take because the forms are prefilled and I don’t have to check the character count in another application,” says Erin Breitspecher, Digital Experience Manager at Webex.  

Webex employees are also on top of things as they receive automated notifications for tasks while leaders can get a breakdown of each campaign at any time. 

“With Smartsheet automation and reporting capabilities, we’re saving 1,352 hours yearly. Using dashboards, we can achieve 42% faster leadership reporting,” says Hill. By being more productive with its time, Webex can support its mission to offer more innovative collaborative solutions to a growing customer base. 

Connecting Smartsheet to Brandfolder 

As manual outreach to customers was very time consuming, Webex decided to connect daily operations on Smartsheet to Brandfolder. This helped create a resource library on its customer success hub, webex.com, and launch kits housing quick start guides via share links to help drive customer adoption. The resource library contains all campaigns, offering over 1,900 assets in 10 languages, and is made publicly accessible to customers and internal teams. And with the help of Brandfolder, the team successfully launched a rebrand in 2021. The Webex team was able to easily develop as many as 12 quick start guides each month resulting in 19,000 views in one quarter alone. And by leveraging analytics to better understand asset performance, Brandfolder continues to help them understand which content to produce.

“We are focused on the customer lifecycle—onboarding, nurturing, and driving adoption,” says Caity Serra, Leader of Digital Marketing at Webex. “In our experience, it’s seven times more expensive to gain new customers than to take care of the ones you have. Having all resources in one place makes it easier for us to meet the individual needs of every customer.”

The analytics feature in Brandfolder is crucial to understanding which type of content is performing well and where there are gaps so the Webex team knows which type of content to create. For example, their team learned that email templates have increased usage over infographics. Brandfolder empowers the Webex team to invest their time in creating assets that have maximum impact. 

Smartsheet and Brandfolder help Webex unlock the value of their assets and keep hundreds of thousands of assets remarkably organized to support their lifecycle. “With the webex.com customer success hub and resource library, we’ve seen over 130,000 assets consumed via self-serve, making service more efficient in the long-run,” says Serra.

“With Smartsheet, we’re now able to look at the data in a story format and simplify daily operations, saving 13 weeks of man hours via Brandfolder workflows.” 

Another way that Brandfolder saves time for the Webex team is with Smart CDN links. When new products launch, the Webex team is able to centralize asset updates using Brandfolder so they only have to update an asset in one central location. With the help of Smart CDN, the asset will automatically update everywhere else. 

One for all and all for one

Moving forward, Webex plans to continue expanding into new global regions. With the help of Brandfolder and Smartsheet, Webex is now better equipped to offer quality services and can continue to explore further options for optimization. “Using one scalable marketing solution allows us to keep growing, and we’re always ready to tackle more.”