TRC Online Meeting Blog: May 2014 Archives

In a sales environment where representatives need to keep meetings with people in Arizona at 11am and then with others in New York 30 minutes later, webinars and web conferencing are king. On a daily basis we meet with decision makers to go over contracts, clarify customizations and demonstrate industry leading software solutions — all from our offices in Chicago.

Recently we took on a new strategy with our webinar technology and began hosting mass webinars on a regular basis. With these events we are able to:

Using a web conferencing solution to aid in customer support can be very beneficial in providing high quality service to clients. Web conferencing allows customer support representatives to assist customers with tools that can make them as efficient and effective as they would be on site, thus saving travel time and costs.

With the ability to conduct interactive training and support, a customer service representative can take over the customer's desktop, share instructional documents, and even provide video clips. These web conference tools are specifically designed to allow technical support teams to diagnose and resolve customer problems online quickly and effectively.

More businesses and educational institutions are realizing the cost and time-saving benefits of using web conferencing for training and instruction. Utilizing a web solution for training or educational purposes eliminates the time and cost of travel, yet allows the entire team or class to be in one place at one time.

In the business world, web conferencing solutions have built-in collaboration tools that allow participants to share documents, chat, and take polling questions in order to gauge where everyone is at and what further processes need to be put in place. Team leaders and instructors can present Power Point presentations to employees, supply team members or trainees as well as leave them with fact sheets when the training concludes.

Contacting participants after the webinar is important and it should be done within 24 hours. Create follow-up emails within this time period and, if possible, personalize them (for example, one way to personalize is to include an answer to a question a participant had). You should also follow up with those who registered but did not attend. Provide what you promised: for instance, slides, a link to the event recording and any other relevant material. You can further leverage the event by providing a link to the webinar recording on your web site, embed it in your blog, and incorporate it in your social media efforts. Invite attendees to follow you on social media.

You should critique the webinar for lessons learned and identify improvement areas for future webinars. Review any attendee feedback for ways to improve. Do a post-webinar evaluation with presenters to ID what worked and what didn't.

Video conferencing continues to gain currency as organizations are forced to constantly wring more efficiencies out of smaller and geographically distributed staffs. Conferencing in general is an effective alternative to travel because it eliminates cost and time lost in transit. Video conferencing provides some benefits that other types of conferencing (audio and web) do not, particularly the added intimacy and sense of expression that comes from the participants actually seeing each other onscreen.

Video conferences are an extremely effective form of communication when they are conducted well. Conversely, they can be an unintelligible mess of distraction and garbled communication if best practices are not followed. There are several forms of video conferencing available in the marketplace today including handheld and desktop device based methods as well as room-based video conferencing. The best practices below are intended for room-based video conferencing although many of them apply to the other forms as well.

Best practices are as follows: