How Walgreens Boots Alliance Implemented Self-Service Webcasting with Qumu Enterprise Video
WATCH NOW: Launching Self-Service Webcasting on a Global Scale
Overview
As a global leader in retail and wholesale pharmacy, Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) was experienced in the power of live streaming video, primarily in the form of executive webcasts to its worldwide employee base. But with new generations of employees demanding more video content as well as streaming capabilities, the company saw a growing need for self-service webcasting as a cost-effective way to leverage the power of video throughout the enterprise. Under this vision managers, team leaders and subject matter experts would be able to create, distribute and promote their own live video events and recordings—anywhere, and on any device.
But how does a massive organization introduce an entirely new way of communicating to a globally distributed employee base? WBA knew from experience that simply turning on a new technology would not automatically ensure adoption. After all, even WBA’s most tech-savvy employees were video consumers, not video experts, and producing a live streaming event for co-workers could be intimidating to many.
“We don’t have webcasting support people in Italy or Spain. It was me on a video call, sharing my screen, showing users how to run a webcast in an hour. That’s all it took to train someone on how to do this.”
Matt Hetherington, Corporate Support Manager
The Qumu Solution
Building on their existing Qumu Enterprise Video platform, Walgreens Boots Alliance chose to add Qumu’s new Self-Service Webcasting solution. This solution provides everything an individual or team needs to produce and promote a webcast, including built-in, easy-to-use tools for broadcasting, recording and editing—plus personalized email and surveys for driving interest and managing registrants.
To ensure a successful rollout, WBA launched the new self-service webcasting capability globally, by creating a collaborative event called GeekFest, the company’s first annual virtual technology conference for IT people by IT people. Broadcasting worldwide from three locations—Nottingham, England, Milan, Italy and Zaragoza, Spain—the day-long event consisted of 38 live concurrent presentations on various technology topics. An individual at each location managed and produced their portion of the webcast on a £250 production budget using only a laptop, a webcam and microphone.
In addition to demonstrating to these key internal influencers how easy self-service webcasting can be, the event itself was a huge success with 100% of the attendees saying they would attend future GeekFest events and 90% wanting more live streaming events.
Use Cases
Employee Education
Live webcasts are providing a great way to train retail store staff—WBA’s first point of contact with the customer—on new products. For example, a new beauty product can be introduced by the manufacturer and demonstrated to Walgreens store staffers across many locations, bringing the product to market quickly while saving time and travel costs.
Executive Webcasting
The WBA self-service culture includes senior managers as well. Business unit managers and other leaders no longer need studio-level production support to meet with large globally distributed teams. Any leader can conduct on-the-fly updates or professional-level broadcasts to their teams—or the entire company—from any desktop or video meeting room.
Virtual Conferences
The WBA GeekFest demonstrated to the organization that with self-service webcasting technology, conducting virtual conferences with multiple live speakers from multiple locations can be highly interactive, yet surprisingly low cost and easy to produce.
Summary
From any mobile device, laptop or virtual meeting room, WBA employees can live stream broadcasts across the globe using the Qumu Enterprise Video platform. And thanks to the distributed computing architecture of the Qumu platform, offering large-scale, self-service broadcasting and streaming across the employee base has no negative impact on the network.
If you would like to learn more about how the Qumu Enterprise Video platform can help your organization increase employee collaboration through self-service video, please fill out our Contact Us form and someone will reach out shortly.
