Your guide for creating successful customer service webinars

Customer Service is an essential department in any organization. Your CS agents are the face of the company and the only point of contact for your customers in many situations and use cases. They inspire customer loyalty, help shape the product and brand experience when it matters most, generate new sales opportunities, and are key actors in keeping your business healthy and growing. That is why it is paramount to keep your agents happy and competent with ongoing training. And in today’s virtual and hybrid offices, customer service webinars, are by far the best format to ensure consistent and high-quality training. Here’s a guide to get you started.

Jump to:

• What are customer service webinars?
• When should you plan a webinar for your Customer Service team?
• How to plan a customer service webinar like a pro?
• Kaltura Webinars

What are customer service webinars?

Customer service webinars, also called customer success webinars, are live or on-demand instructor-led training sessions that occur online, around a customer service-related topic or new skill. The word webinar is a contraction of the words ‘web’ and ‘seminar’. The instructor moderates the session and can use PowerPoint presentations, videos, links, or other multimedia files and digital tools as teaching aids.

Trainees participate via the chat, by submitting questions and taking polls, or through audience reactions.

The webinar as a format holds many benefits for customer service training. First of all, they are location-independent, meaning team members can join in from any location in the world. They are also time-independent to a great extent. Students who can’t make the live session or students who wish to repeat the training session can view the on-demand recording after the event (minus the possibility to partake in polls, use audience reactions, or ask in-session questions).

This amount of flexibility and the possibility to use recorded sessions in a Just-In-Time learning format (students consume the content at a time they need it, enabling them to immediately put the new knowledge into practice which in turn helps retention) is of incredible value in Customer Service departments where the workers have busy schedules and are often geographically spread.

Webinars are also a very cost-effective format, removing travel, accommodation, classroom booking, and other overhead costs from the equation. Since on-demand recordings of your webinars can be reused as long as it’s relevant you save yourself the cost of repeat sessions.

When should you plan a webinar for your Customer Service team?

You’re not launching a customer service webinar because it’s Thursday. Instead, your webinar should have a reason for being or fulfill a need. The first reason that springs to mind is training your new employees. For your existing team members, you might review their performance and identify opportunities for improvement. Or you might want to help your team members hone their skills as part of a regular HR upskilling program around known industry pain points, such as:

• How to effectively handle customer complaints
• Dealing with difficult customers
• Tried and tested upselling techniques
• How to write cold emails that convert
• How to analyze sales data to improve performance

But not all webinars must be performance-based. If your organization puts out a new product or service, or an update with new features, your customer service team should be one of the first to be duly trained on that matter. A change in customer-related policy is also a good reason to set up customer service webinars. Or maybe you want to introduce new automation tools or software to your team?

The bottom line is that you should identify a need from the vantage point of your team member, the customers, and of course your company as a whole.

How to plan a customer service webinar like a pro?

Because a customer service webinar is an internal training session, it requires different planning from your average customer-facing webinar, where promotion and branding would take up most of your effort. In general, you can plan a customer service webinar in 5 well-defined steps.

1. Define the purpose of your webinar

We discussed this in the previous section. Since the general purpose of a customer service webinar is to train or inform your CS team members, you need to identify specific training needs. These needs may present themselves in the form of a new product or team member. Or you have to dig deeper and evaluate which skills in your team require honing. Having defined the purpose, you’ll also be able to define a clear objective and a roadmap of timing and learning material needed to reach that objective.

2. Create the content

Create a session plan with all the topics, exercises, and activities that need to be covered, to achieve your objective. Enrich the session plan with audiovisual material, links to online material, and pdfs to distribute among the attendees. If you’re not presenting yourself, then this would be the right time to find your instructor and involve them in creating the best content possible. Know all the features of your webinar platform and evaluate which ones might improve your attendees’ experience and knowledge retention. Digital whiteboards, and multimedia playlists are all great examples of such features (which you can find in Kaltura Webinars. More on that later).

3. Choose the right time

With the option of webinar recordings and on-demand training sessions, you might feel less limited by time. But in many cases, the immediacy and the human factor of live webinars add a lot to the experience, not to mention the possibility of participating in quick polls.

So what would be the right time for a customer service webinar?  You need to look at the variables to answer this question. If your webinar is about new features or a new product, then it’s important to train your team as soon as possible, so they can immediately answer customer questions about that new product or feature. The same goes for new employee training sessions. Newcomers should get their training in the first few weeks so they can be fully functional without delay.

Upskilling is usually less time sensitive. Maybe you can organize the training as close as possible to the time they will need to apply that new skill (Just-In-Time learning). Peak times are another important variable. Organizing your webinar during peak sales periods is never a good idea. You want your attendees to be available, relaxed, and receptive to the new knowledge.

4. Host your webinar

Remind your attendees that your webinar is coming up (the day before, the hour before). Maybe you want them to review a pdf with information or complete a task prior to the session? Make sure to have your lesson material ready, that all your equipment is working properly (get a backup!), and use the opportunity to brand your webinar session (another excellent Kaltura Webinars feature!). Check with your attendees that they, too, have all they need before the session starts.

Good luck. Be mindful of your attendees’ needs. Have an assistant collect questions from the chat function and take sufficient time to answer them during a Q&A at the end of the session.

5. Follow up

Circling back to your initial webinar purpose and objective to evaluate the performance of your webinar is an essential step. Luckily, the better webinar platforms come with advanced performance analytics to help you evaluate turnout, attention, engagement, etc.

Of course, your main objective will always be for your attendees to enjoy a great experience and actually retain the new knowledge. To that effect, you can send them a quick survey and a test, respectively.

If this is your first customer service webinar or you are in the market for a new webinar solution, you will need to add the initial step of choosing the right webinar platform for your needs. While you have several good providers on the market, we are proud to say that none of them does webinars quite as well as Kaltura Webinars. Kaltura Webinars makes it 100% about your audience’s experience and puts your brand front and center of that experience.

Kaltura Webinars

Your brand deserves better than a lukewarm webinar session in a third-party watermarked room. With Kaltura Webinars, it’s all about the experience. That’s why we packed our platform with features and tools that are aimed at elevating your audience’s experience while keeping your brand front and center:

• Automatically generated branded landing page for registrations
• A branded microsite that hosts your event. Session recordings are automatically uploaded on the same link
• Multimedia playlists with all your presentations and audiovisual material ready and in the right order
• HD video playback
• Bring attendees to the stage
• Audience interaction: chat, moderated Q&A, reactions, and polls

You can try out these features and discover what more Kaltura Webinars has in store for you by starting a 14-day free trial. Click the banner below for more information.