How Delta Dental of Washington inspired collaboration with easy-to-use technology
Delta Dental of Washington
Seattle, Washington
Challenge
Video conferencing has long been an option for communication at Delta Dental of Washington, but complicated and inconsistent technology from room to room resulted in low adoption and difficulty collaborating from different locations.
Results
Neurilink partnered with Delta Dental of Washington to develop technology solutions that married Zoom’s ease-of-use with trusted hardware, increasing video conferencing use to almost 700 hours per month at the Seattle office.
Setting The Stage For Greater Connectivity
Delta Dental of Washington is a leader in disrupting, transforming and revolutionizing the oral health industry. Since their beginning in 1954, when dental x‑rays were $10 and cleanings were $5, they’ve been removing barriers to oral health care and powering healthy smiles.
Fast forward 60 years, Delta Dental of Washington found itself in need of a modern workplace environment to better serve patients. Their legacy video conferencing system was hard-to use, antiquated, and made remote collaboration a burden. Delta Dental of Washington wanted to update their workplace technology to improve connectivity between employees and business partners.
A Legacy System Impacts Business
Delta Dental of Washington had experience with video collaboration. However, it was only used by a handful of employees because of three main issues.
Unreliable Conferencing: All company meetings were a major production, with AV support teams at each location in case something went wrong.
Complicated and Limited Technology: The systems were complex and the log in process was so complicated few employees used it. The video conferencing that did exist was limited to internal conferencing and didn’t connect to external partners.
Inconsistent Experience: Each room worked differently due to inconsistent technology and hardware. Some rooms had access to video conferencing while others didn’t, which meant the experience wasn’t the same for employees from room to room.
Finding the Right Solution
The question wasn’t just how to make a room usable, it was how to make people want to use it.
Delta Dental of Washington moved to a new location in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. They wanted to find a partner who would help design technology solutions for collaboration and meeting spaces.
The team started by using a Design Thinking approach to immerse themselves in the problem. They interviewed a range of employees to understand the current user experience, what worked, and what didn’t. From that, they were able to capture three main priorities for the new solution.
- It had to work consistently
- It had to be easy to use
- It needed to make collaboration intuitive
Delta Dental of Washington selected Blue Sky (now Neurilink) as the audio visual partner for the project. Blue Sky developed solutions for huddle rooms, large conference rooms, design studios, incubators and other spaces which featured an easy-to-use, consistent experience.
The team chose the Zoom meeting solution which Blue Sky integrated with the necessary displays, microphones, speakers, cameras and interface. The added hardware enabled the system to scale up for large conference rooms or down for huddle spaces. Blue Sky leveraged technology from Crestron, Phoenix Audio, Shure, Sharp and Logitech to create a positive user experience regardless of room size.
The Results
The conferencing technology consistently works, whether a conference room is connecting with participants on a computer, a phone, or another conference room.
Across the board the systems seamlessly sync with Outlook and feature one-touch connections. Everyone can connect and share wirelessly without the need to login to a computer.
Finally, every room operates in the same way. There’s no difference between the experiences in a huddle room and large conference room.
The AV project team took a well thought out, deliberate approach to upgrading the audio visual technology resulting in more collaboration regardless of location. The project was so successful they’re planning on rolling out similar solutions at satellite offices throughout Washington.