With telecommuting changing the culture of the workplace, a robust video conferencing tool is imperative. Because video collaboration has become deeply ingrained in our working world, it has permeated all types of industries and provided a way to remotely hold internal discussions, client-facing presentations, and sales demos. Video tools also facilitate team building, personal connection, and bringing people together in the new hybrid workplace.

As video becomes more ubiquitous, users may be looking to get more out of their conferencing service. Webex offers several features that allow users to customize and optimize their video meetings.

Cisco: A Leader in Video Collaboration

Webex was originally founded in 1995 before it was purchased by Cisco in 2007. Since then, the company has supported rising needs for video conferencing in the business world. In March 2021, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins reported that Webex facilitated 5.5 billion meeting minutes in the span of 11 days--signifying the growing reliance on video as a medium to resume business operations.
 
Gartner recognized Cisco as a Leader in its 2020 Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions for the 13th consecutive time because of its variety of deployment options, including managed services, cloud-premises hybrid, premises-based software, and SaaS solutions.

Webex Meeting Features

Webex is an enterprise software solution for video conferencing, online meetings, screen sharing and webinars. Its video conferencing capability is an engaging, interactive way to meet face to face with colleagues, partners, and customers over an IP network. Webex helps your business fuel more productive online collaboration through screen sharing, meeting recording, and the tool’s integrations with unified communications solutions. Let’s dive into Webex’s options for customization, insights, and engagement.

Customization

Having a highly customizable video conferencing solution improves your team’s overall user experience and enables connection in a way that works for your employees and their needs. Webex lets you customize your video layout. This means that meeting organizers can decide  whether or not they want to see their meeting attendees in numerous video feeds across their screens. In addition, hosts can curate their audience’s view, so they can limit participants’ view to stage only and in turn decrease distractions. This level of customization on a per-meeting basis can help you ensure that participants stay focused and engaged. 

Having the flexibility to join a video conference from any device is also critical to enabling flexibility. Webex allows meeting attendees to join from desktops, Android devices, or iPhones. Webex calling devices—Webex Board, Webex Room Devices, and Webex Desk Devices—help teams communicate together in real-time, but they are not required to optimize the use of the platform. These tools can help your IT staff design meeting spaces that best align with your employees’ communication styles and meet their needs.

Access and Capacity

Generating transcripts or meeting recordings has become a valuable capability for businesses. With Webex, users can record meetings and email transcripts or recordings to everyone who attended the meeting. By sharing meeting transcripts and recordings, your teams can enhance transparency and information sharing, ensuring that everyone has a record of the discussion. Recorded meetings can be used as training aids and for archives and historical documents. In addition, hosts can use Webex to stream video conferences to social media via Facebook Live for further audience reach. 

Webex also has a “meet now” feature that allows users to transition seamlessly into a conference or video call from a text-based chat. The tool also has a closed captions feature, allowing real-time translation for more than 100 languages. This capability can make meetings more accessible and inclusive for employees with hearing impairments or that speak a different language. 

Supporting various attendee capacities is another important element that Webex delivers. Webex allows you to add 1,000 people per conference call with the option to view 25 video feeds on your screen at any point in time. Users can also host virtual external events—like a virtual trade show—with up to 5,000 attendees. For larger events like these, Webex has integrated features that allow the meeting organizer to secure demographics about attendees that help the speaker to better engage with their audience and to support lead generation activities following the event.

Insights

To ensure users can find out who is participating on a call, Webex has a couple of features to help presenters and attendees to stay engaged.

• People insights: This feature allows attendees to read a person’s history with the company, professional role, background, and other relevant information. 
• Attention indicator:This feature provides real-time insights that the host can use to inform presentation strategies to improve engagement. During an event, the attention indicator shows if an attendee has minimized the event window or brought another window in front of the event window, helping you understand if attendees are distracted. 
• Reports: Following an event, you can generate reports to obtain data about individual attentiveness. This information can help users decide which changes to make for future events and aid in more robust participation. 
   

Although it can be challenging to maintain strong engagement at all times during a presentation, Webex includes a number of other capabilities to maintain participation and interest.

Participation

To help meeting hosts encourage participation and engagement, Webex provides noise detection and suppression features to cut out unnecessary background noises such as sirens or dogs barking. As a result, meetings are more focused and streamlined, making it easier for attendees to engage in the discussion.

When a host wants to facilitate a brainstorm via video, Webex can use whiteboard features and note taking to encourage group participation and engagement. When attendance from key individuals is critical, meeting organizers can take attendance to determine if all necessary parties are on the call and use features like virtual hand raising to allow attendees have the opportunity to share and be heard. 

To create a more engaging meeting experience through audience participation, Webex enables  integration with Slido polling and Q&A capability. You can take advantage of six diverse polling options and live Q&A tools to add dynamic components to the meeting without leaving the platform.

When speaking up during a meeting might lead to users speaking over one another, in-meeting gesture recognition lets participants express themselves without saying anything in a meeting, webinar, or breakout session. For example, participants can cheer on the speaker with a thumbs up. They simply make the gesture in front of their camera until Webex recognizes and sends the gesture. This also leads to more efficient meetings since participants won’t have to try to take turns to speak—all they need to do is gesture.

Bring Webex to Life with Intrado

Video collaboration has become a staple for keeping virtual and remote teams connected. It’s also become a mainstay for productivity, which is why Intrado helps businesses to access Webex solutions. Intrado meets the highest standards to be named a gold-certified member of the Cisco Partner program and can assist companies in assessing the business’s needs, procuring, licensing,and implementing the Webex video conferencing solutions. 

Intrado helps users select the best Webex deployment for their team and needs. Also, Intrado recently renewed its status as Cisco’s Customer Experience Advanced Specialization in the United States. Intrado is one of only nine Cisco Lifecycle Management partners around the world to achieve this certification.  

By taking advantage of Webex’s broad array of video conferencing features, businesses can run more efficient meetings, boost engagement, and strengthen overall productivity. Talk to Intrado today to learn about how Webex can serve your business communication and collaboration needs.