At Kia Motors America, collaboration isn’t just best practice, it’s a foundation of their business. Committed to creating a sense of “togetherness” through mutual communication and cooperation both inside the company and with its partners, Kia promotes collaboration as one of five core values that represent the company’s corporate culture and brand promise.
Every Kia employee has responsibility for applying these principles to day-today life throughout the organization.
“We’re expected to apply our core company values to decision-making at every level of the business,” said Hilary Grieve, Corporate Administration Manager at Kia Motors America.
“For our team, that means enabling collaboration through technology choices that help Kia employees and partners work together better. Conferencing is a critical part of that equation.”
After nearly seven years with a legacy audio conferencing provider, Kia was frustrated by a lack of transparency on pricing and poor customer service, and looking to explore options for a more modern, streamlined solution that would suit the varied needs of their national user base.
“At a large company, you’ll run into people that have different levels of comfort with technology and varying needs depending on their job,” said Grieve.
“We needed a solution that was up-to-date, simple enough for anyone to use, and that would make it easier for them to connect and communicate day-to-day.”
Following a brief trial, Kia selected LoopUp to replace their existing conferencing provider. They were able to deploy LoopUp quickly, without interrupting their employees’ daily activities.
“LoopUp was an obvious choice for us for a number of reasons, most importantly, we’re getting a better product for the price. It’s simple to use, and the visual interface is clean and user-friendly,” said Grieve. “This makes it easy to get people together for calls and meetings, and because you can just click the link to join, it means everyone can get to work faster.”
At Kia, employees work primarily on PCs and rely on Outlook as their main calendaring tool. With Loopup, users regularly schedule and join calls with Loopup’s Add-In for Outlook and often use LoopUp from their mobile devices. They’re also increasingly using LoopUp’s one-click screen sharing during meetings. Account management is straightforward, and adding and removing users doesn’t put extra burden on administrators, who don’t sit in the IT organization.
As a company that puts people first (another of the brand’s five core company values), Kia strives to enable a productive and efficient workforce. In fact, the company recently launched Smart Kia, an internal company-wide initiative that encourages employees to explore ways to make better use of their time, be more effective day to day and seek efficiencies across the business.
“Conferencing is instrumental to how our teams communicate internally, as well as their interactions with our dealers and suppliers around the country,” continued Grieve. “LoopUp not only makes it easy for our users to collaborate, but also saves them time and helps us achieve our goals for efficiency and work-life balance around the organization.”
“We’ve heard from a lot of our internal customers that they enjoy the experience of using LoopUp and are happy we made the switch. We’ve been surprised that more people are requesting accounts,” added Grieve.
It’s refreshing to see a conferencing product just work.
