Blue Jeans has a great brand. They took a risk, with an unusual name which was already associated strongly with a completely different industry. But, a few years later, we can now look back and see how well it worked for them. They stand out among obvious techy cloud names, and in our little corner of the world when someone says “Blue Jeans,” we don’t think of pants first. What is more important than my belated appreciation of their brand, is the industry’s begrudging appreciation of their vision. Not only has the industry shifted to a cloud based model to address interop and B2B, many of their competitors will even describe their new solutions as “something like Blue Jeans”.
It wasn’t so long ago that Blue Jeans was the little upstart taking shots at the established players. Now, they find themselves the target of competitive advertising, while continuing to grow at a phenomenal pace and are continually adding features. Their new larger room size is well appreciated by their customers, and the positive reaction to their new recording feature was even more than they hoped for.
Finally, although this was announced after InfoComm, I think their new Community Platform is worthy of mention. This industry has had historic difficulty establishing lines of communication between user groups and vendor organizations. Blue Jeans is attempting to help bridge that gap through their new Community platform. I spoke with Brett Smith, and Jay O’Conner from Blue Jeans about this new knowledge sharing resource. Like any online forum, the real draw (in my opinion) will be the quality of the participants. They already have questions coming in from real users, creating direct discussion with their actual product managers and executives. This move may seem like it is out of left field, but it actually is the logical next step to their existing customer service philosophy. They have an extremely pro-active customer service and VC adoption program, including a high touch “Customer Success Team” providing direct interaction with customers. This all ties into the general InfoComm themes regarding the shift from focusing on the product, to focusing on user needs. The new Blue Jeans Community platform simply takes their existing customer relations program to the next level.
Here are a few interesting discussions already underway at the Blue Jeans Community.
- Feature Ideas
- Customer To Customer Recommendations
- Deployment Strategy Knowledge Share
- Product Feedback / Praise
