Blue Jeans Launches Online Forum for Customer Collaboration

Blue Jeans Network wants to make it easier for customers not only to talk with each other, but also executives and engineers at the video conferencing vendor.

Blue Jeans has created an online forum that enables customers and other industry players to swap ideas, give feedback on products, suggest new features and offerings, get help with problems and get a direct line into the company.

The Blue Jeans Community platform was designed to be more than the usual online customer relationship interface, according to Chief Commercial Officer Stu Aaron.

“Plenty of forums put people in touch with troubleshooting customer-service reps, but very few place an emphasis on peer-to-peer interactions and direct access to experts deep within the company and community,” Aaron said, adding that the company views customers as “industry luminaries who have a lot to contribute to shaping the future of video conferencing technology.”

For a company dedicated to bringing people together via cloud-based video solutions, giving customers an online forum through which to collaborate was important, officials said. By being able to communicate with each other, end users get access to a range of information, from best practices and strategies to advice on what equipment works best with Blue Jeans’ technologies.

Officials also said that input from customers on technologies and products is important to the company. About 83 percent of conversations between customers and Blue Jeans executives and engineers during the platform’s trial phase dealt with new ideas, insights into the larger industry and sharing knowledge. Seventy-eight percent of product or feature ideas from end users have either been considered or planned for future releases by product managers.

Blue Jeans offers cloud-based video conferencing products to an industry transitioning away from complex and expensive room-based systems and toward more cloud- and software-based offerings that let users more easily collaborate on a range of devices, from smartphones and tablets to immersive telepresence systems. IDC analysts have been tracking the changes as quarterly sales of video conferencing hardware continue to fall. In the first quarter, equipment revenues dropped 15.9 percent from the same period in 2013, even as enterprises continue to see video collaboration as a priority.

Blue Jeans in May released a survey indicating that most workers like to communicate via video, with 65 percent wanting all of their online and remote meetings to be done over video and 80 percent saying they prefer to meet or speak with clients and potential customers over video.