Webinars are considered a marketing move. So, how are they connected to customer experience? Many people get bored and leave such events, while others get annoyed when the speaker constantly tries to sell a product.

Webinars and customer experience

Yet, many specialists use webinar customer experience as a trampoline for sales, and they do it successfully, with satisfied clients coming back many times.

What’s the secret? Is using webinars for marketing the only goal? How to use this tool wisely to build trust and improve CX? I’ll answer all these questions in the article below.

What makes a great customer experience?

Firstly, what is customer experience?

CX is your customers’ overall experience interacting with your brand. Every interaction counts when someone builds their first impression of the company, from the first visit to your website, how long it takes to load, etc., to conversations with the support team and how fast you manage to deliver the product.

Whether the buyer had a good experience determines whether they will come back or not.

Why is it important to retain customers by providing a great experience? Because people who already bought from you are the best source of potential income in the future. A tiny 5% increase in retention may provide 25%-95% more profit.

Besides, 50% of buyers say that CX is more important for them now.

Every year, people look forward to better shopping conditions. Nowadays, a good CX includes:

• Honest marketing helps to build realistic expectations
• Self-service opportunities that are easy to access
• A live support team, preferably 24/7, that helps solve brand-related issues
• Accessible information regarding the most common concerns
• The intuitive website and product design, etc.

1 in 3 customers will switch to a competitor after having one bad experience with a business. Moreover, 92% of the people sticking with a company after a poor CX will leave if the tendency continues. It takes 2-3 negative interactions to ruin someone’s experience with your brand.

A perfect customer experience makes it very easy for the buyer to achieve their goal of using your product or receiving your service.

And interestingly enough, webinars can become a helpful part of CX.

Why use webinars to improve customer experience?

Using webinars for customer experience is logical. Back in 2020, 96% of users increased their time watching online videos. Plus, 9 out of 10 looked for more videos of a brand they liked.

It’s predicted that in 2022, the average user will spend 100 minutes a day watching various videos. The same positive video stats apply to B2B marketing.

A webinar isn’t just part of a sales funnel where you provide some useful information and spend the rest of the video selling your products and services. Online workshops, live classes, and virtual training can also be considered webinars — web seminars.

The usefulness of webinars for business is clearer now, right?

So, why use them?

Easy. Educate your customers on wise and productive ways of using your products and services. Such an approach will:

• Improve customer satisfaction
• Increase retention
• Build trust
• Increase customer loyalty.

Educational materials and practical advice can become a part of your branding and increase brand awareness and trust in the company in the long run.

Using webinars for business customer experience wisely

Simply using the customer experience webinar technique isn’t enough. You have to do it wisely to get the results you want. That’s why I’ve compiled a list of handy recommendations for you:

Answer questions

Many people attend webinars to get useful info about products and get answers to their questions. That’s why so many web events have a special Q&A part. (You can answer some questions through the web if it’s convenient for you.)

Answering several queries will help you build trust and show people that you care. Who doesn’t love a business that cares?

You can also ask customers to leave some questions in advance and adjust the flow of the webinar and topics covered accordingly.

Consult with your teams

Regularly engage with your social, support, and sales teams to find out what topics they often discuss with customers. What questions do people ask about your company, products, etc.? Do they have any concerns? Are any gaps in content?

Maybe they’re interested in a new line and want to know if there will be one. Perhaps they want more customer cases to find out whether the product or service is good enough. But, on the other hand, they may not know how to get the most use out of your product.

Most of the time, potential and existing customers clearly tell your representatives about the knowledge they lack. Have a Q&A webinar or one connected to the topics in question, and you’ll see customer satisfaction rise due to a better CX.

Invite experts

It can be an internal or external expert or both. Letting an internal speaker provide helpful information, answer questions and tell people about your products will build trust and let people know how the company works from the inside.

Getting an external specialist on board will give a fresh view on the products or the topic of interest and build trust between you and the customers since the customers will see that someone outside the business is talking about you (the talk should be for the good of the company, of course).

PLUS! People following the expert will also come to your webinar, which means a new audience and, potentially, new customers that will enjoy their stay and return.

A kind tip: invite senior specialists that your customers can’t usually access.

Hold webinars for each stage of the customer journey

There are so many types you can do:

• Thought leadership webinar — show that you’re the niche leader, and you’ll see a rise in sales and trust.
• For leads — encourage them to buy by educating them about the product or service’s features. This is literally a part of a good CX. (Workshops and case studies apply here.)
• Product demo web — 67% of buyers research products digitally before contacting sales. Help them with that research by holding a great product demo webinar. Again, education is a part of a great CX.
• Customer onboarding webinar — the essential type of webinar for new customers. During such a webinar, you can enrich their experience or ruin it for them.
• New product web — to make sure everyone knows about your new products or features, a wise, interesting webinar is a good idea. Such an approach is great for customer retention.
• On-demand webinar — making webinars accessible (recorded and ready to be watched anytime) ensures most leads and/or customers will watch them.

These improve CX in one way or another and promote customer retention.

• Promote your webinars and make them accessible.
• I talked about accessibility already, but I want to mention more ways to promote webinars. For example, along with recording videos and making them downloadable, you can write transcripts, and blog posts featuring quotes from the webinars, offer downloadable materials, presentations, etc.
• Simply making your webinars accessible isn’t enough. Make sure you promote them. Write about them in newsletters, mention them on social media, and use other distribution channels to ensure the knowledge you provide is out there.

To conclude

Webinar customer experience should become a thing. With a wide range of types and topics, easy-to-understand educational video content should become a part of your marketing strategy and customer experience.