David Weekley Homes Builds a Strong Foundation of Collaboration
David Weekley Homes has grown to become the largest privately held home builder in America. Starting in 1976, the company now spans across 13 US states and recently opened their newest support office in India. With over 2,300 employees committed to building dream homes and enhancing the lives of customers, the team at David Weekley Homes is passionate about the communities they serve.
A Virtual Solution for Time and Travel Costs
In order to deliver the highest quality service to their customers, the teams at David Weekley Homes needed a scalable communications solution to connect its global employee base. As a member of the Technology team for over 20 years, Richard Clark has served David Weekley Homes with responsibilities in network security, server management, voice, and communications. Prior to signing with BlueJeans, Richard was tasked with organizing in-person town halls for the leadership team. Eventually the compromised time and money required to get all executives to join in the same space prompted Richard to explore remote options.
Initially used only for quarterly executive conferences, BlueJeans is now a daily fixture in ad hoc and scheduled team meetings at a variety of office sites.
Richard says the first solution he tried, Telespace video conferencing, was a poor fit. “Support, reliability, and features were not up to snuff. Quality was always questionable, and we were never able to get anything to work for these critical quarterly meetings.” After a test trial run with BlueJeans Meetings, Richard was instantly convinced of a superior experience.
From March 2015 through December 2019 David Weekley Homes has increased their total annual meetings from 272 to over 2,700 — a 1000% jump since starting with BlueJeans!
Positive Executive Feedback
Straight out of the gate, Richard and the executive team at David Weekley Homes experienced an improvement in quarterly meetings. “We needed to easily record these presentations so some staff members could view at a later time. These BlueJeans recordings were accessible for anyone who needed to see them. In the past we’ve been burned by vendors that don’t save the recording after it ends,” Richard says. Meeting participants became comfortable with BlueJeans very quickly and that took lots of pressure off these executive presentations.
Moderator Controls and Ease of Use
From an administrative perspective, the IT department uses back-end meeting controls for important gatherings. “Sometimes we want full control of the flow during an all-hands meeting. We can switch between different video layouts while people are talking or use the mute and unmute options.” Richard says.
Since the deployment of BlueJeans over four years ago, David Weekley Homes has become a power user beyond executive-only meetings. Aside from 1:1 and smaller discussions, customer-facing teams also use BlueJeans for external calls. Inviting those from outside the organization is easy, according to Richard. “BlueJeans’ WebRTC capability makes meetings simpler because customers don’t need to download the desktop app, all audio and video are supported by common browsers.” To create even smoother user adoption, the IT team created specific meeting IDs and phone numbers for each office so they were easily memorized by users. Additionally, each employee can use their own personal phone number as their unique ID for faster onramps to BlueJeans Meetings.
Bringing BlueJeans Overseas
David Weekley Homes utilizes conference rooms in its US locations, but a recent international move brought BlueJeans technology overseas. “We recently opened an office in India to accommodate our growing team. Given the time change, our teams frequently host meetings early in the morning between campuses,” Richard says.
Other than occasional maintenance with cameras and conference room hardware, IT support issues have dropped significantly since the David Weekley Homes offices started using the product. The BlueJeans post-meeting survey has also been a great way to measure end-user satisfaction. By utilizing BlueJeans Command Center for usage and trends, Richard can pull detailed reports about their meetings environment. “Once per quarter it’s very helpful to prove ROI on BlueJeans Meetings. It’s easy to access our entire deployment and quickly run a report for our Chief Financial Officer,” Richard says.
“BlueJeans’ WebRTC capability makes meetings simpler because customers don’t need to download the desktop app, all audio and video are supported by common browsers.” – Richard clark, Technology Manager, David Weekley Homes
For more information on how David Weekley Homes uses the BlueJeans platform in the construction industry, read the full case study here and test out your free trial of BlueJeans today.