Building Cabinets & Connections: How American Woodmark Gets ‘Uninterrupted Communications’ with Zoom

Manufacturing more than 10 million kitchen and bath cabinets a year is no small feat, but as one of the largest cabinet makers in the world, American Woodmark is up to the task. With clients ranging from big-box retailers to builders to independent showrooms, American Woodmark needed an easy, reliable, and secure communications platform that would enable its team members — 10,000 employees connected across more than 30 locations — to serve a wide range of customer needs.

Josh Keiter, manager of client, collaboration, and technical support services for American Woodmark, introduced Zoom as a unified communications solution to help his employees connect with clients, business partners, and colleagues to get more done.

When the company transitioned to working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom became integral to enabling day-to-day communications, even allowing employees to collaborate on cabinet designs from afar. Here’s how Keiter and his team are creating a more open, reliable communications experience.

What was your company’s biggest communications challenge?

For years, our company struggled with communication solutions, and none provided a dependable or intuitive user experience. Being an Office 365 subscriber, we used Skype for Business, and most recently, Microsoft Teams. We also used WebEx, GoToMeeting, and other solutions. Users became so frustrated that they began finding their own solutions, using FaceTime, WeChat, and Google Hangouts to conduct business meetings and share company data. We knew it was time to standardize our meetings solution.

Why did you switch to Zoom?

Zoom really seemed to understand the needs of its customers for conducting web meetings and providing an intuitive user interface. We started by trialing Zoom with a small pool of users in different business units ranging from IT, marketing, sales, and HR. We immediately heard positive feedback and expanded our trial to really kick the tires, and even included our senior executives.

When COVID-19 hit, how did you transition to working from home?

In March, our CEO implemented a work-from-home policy for the safety of our employees and their families. Communication between team members, managers, their employees, and our suppliers and vendors was now more important than ever. Zoom played a huge role in the early success of our employees working from home. They were able to stay connected, see each other through video, and collaborate on their documents and designs.

What’s your video meeting experience like now?

Video meetings are conducted with uninterrupted communications. Our employees are using their full meeting time to conduct business, versus spending their first 5 to 10 minutes getting connected or trying to share their screens. Zoom’s customer success team did a fantastic job conducting user training sessions, which we recorded for additional training. Our adoption continues to rapidly grow throughout the organization. Our first two months using Zoom we averaged over 8,000 meetings each month. We surpassed 10,000 meetings a month in less than three months!

What about Zoom has been most critical for your team?

Our users have become resident experts, conducting meetings on desktop and mobile, collaborating on projects, sharing screens, using the annotation tools, and holding secure meetings with the new security enhancements in the app. We also use Zoom Webinars for our all-hands meetings, training, and employee communications meetings; Zoom Team Chat; and Zoom Phone for a truly unified communications solution. We plan on expanding Zoom Phone into our meeting rooms coming up at a later date.

Security is another important focus for us, which is why we were extremely impressed with Zoom’s 90-day security plan. Zoom was extremely responsive, open, and honest throughout the entire process and gave us peace of mind to conduct our business meetings in a secure way. The enhancements to security over those 90 days were impressive, and it goes to show that Zoom is focused on the security and confidentiality requirements of its customers.

How are you adapting to a post-COVID future?

Our company principles of customer satisfaction, integrity, teamwork, and excellence are the foundation we have built our teams upon for the past 40 years — and these values enable us to stay focused on serving our customers now and in the future. I’m confident in our team’s ability to succeed. It’s my job to provide them with the solutions and services they need to perform their duties and move our company forward. Zoom has played a huge part in that over these last few months, and I’m excited about future projects we will work on together as collaborative partners.

To learn more about how your business can leverage Zoom for reliable unified communications, sign up for a personalized demo today.