Cisco’s Frank Murphy makes his team meetings more impactful and memorable with mmhmm

With Frank Murphy, Director of Customer Success Engineering at Cisco, no meeting is typical. Draping bungee cords over his shoulders or donning dark glasses over a tense soundtrack, he uses household items and creativity to create memorable moments with Webex and mmhmm.

Webex is a leading provider of video-conferencing and cloud-based collaboration solutions, including video meetings, calling, messaging, events, customer experience solutions.

Injecting some fun into his Webex video meetings does more than break up the monotony. That creativity helps him grab everyone’s attention so that they’re laughing at his costumes and scene changes—all while absorbing the message that he wants to get across. “Life is short. Meetings are long. They don't have to be long and painful and boring,” he says.

When he joined Cisco about a year and a half ago, he understood that the pandemic-induced hybrid workplace had punctured a hole in people’s ability to pay attention. He noticed that people’s faces would drift off at a 45 degree angle as they multitasked during meetings.

"With mmhmm, I will join a few minutes ahead, play some music, and at one past the hour I start. Nobody shows up late. It has made meetings much more impactful.”

Frank Murphy

Director of Customer Success Engineering at Cisco

But soon after he got settled into his new position, he discovered mmhmm and started using it to communicate internally and with customers. He would transform the first five minutes of his meetings into a mini-production, where he might step into a red chair dressed like The Matrix’s Morpheus, or where he might recreate a pivotal scene from Apollo 13 to get everyone to pay attention. What had been mindless chatter became a moment of engagement and intrigue for the whole team.

“The first five minutes of a meeting are so abused because people talk about the weather, sports, what they did, all kinds of inappropriate stuff for that large of an audience. With mmhmm, I will join a few minutes ahead, play some music, and at one past the hour I start. Nobody shows up late. It has made meetings much more impactful,” Murphy says.

Soon he watched people actually stop multitasking and turn back towards their computers to see the action. “When I use mmhmm, they're like, ‘Wait, how did you do that? How come you're in front of the slides and you're moving around? Your background’s changing,’ and it just blows people away,” says Murphy.

Murphy has also found success in engagement with his customers. Instead of directing them to dry help articles, Murphy finds that creating short video demos has been a game changer, making his customers happy and his team successful. “With a distributed team, it's really, really, really hard to deliver services to customers consistently around the world. mmhmm helps the message propagate and keeps people engaged so that what we're communicating to them through knowledge transfer, is the stuff we want them to hear.”

In addition to improving communication with customers, Murphy also benefits by saving time. “It’s my favorite meeting because it’s the meeting that doesn’t have to happen,” he says.

He’s converted many of his direct reports into mmhmm power users, and they’re transforming their old, boxed-in meetings into must-see TV. “They give me feedback that says that their presentations are more impactful and that helps the team scale,” Murphy says.

“I will never go back to just plain old slides.”

Learn more about the Webex and mmhmm integration at the Webex App Hub.