Without expos and seminars to physically go to, decision makers have largely relied on webinars to get their message across and update customers and partners on their business. 

Webinars have also taken the place of training days and partner events, with the personal touch being dropped for an approach that means attendees sit in front of a screen for hours on end. Logistically that is something that makes sense but may not be the best way to get results in the end. 

“The problems with running webinars in the past have revolved around interaction and the delivery,” said Callum Hardie, Head of Solution and Pre-Sales at Exactive. “Essentially you have to run these sessions through a third party but scheduling and organising is done through the solution your company uses day-to-day. So the whole process of inviting attendees and promoting the webinar is segregated.  

“Similarly with interaction, the only opportunity attendees have to raise questions or interject in a webinar is through a question and answer session at the end. That means that, if a participant isn’t quite following what you’re saying, they have to wait until the end of the session to ask a question that affects their experience. 

“From an organiser’s point of view, the lack of interaction also makes it hard to gauge how popular the webinar is and if the participants find it informative, which impacts their decision to run future sessions.”  

The Interactive Alternative

In comes Microsoft who, at their recent Ignite event, announced improvements to its webinar functionality in Teams, with stand out features that include up to 1,000 interactive attendees, live feedback in the form of emojis, the ability to poll attendees throughout the session, and concise reports at the end of the session. 

With a lot of webinars aiming to bring in more business as well as inform its participants, Hardie pointed out that seeing how the audience reacts to each section of the session will provide a rich data set, compared to the optional feedback forms currently informing webinar providers.  

“When you run sessions in person, you’re able to see people’s faces, but currently there is no way to gauge what the audience are thinking when running a webinar online. With these improvements in Teams, if someone likes the content on screen, hosts will be able to see which parts of their presentation the audience is enjoying and engaging in, what they want to see more of and which parts are getting too much time. 

“This also improves webinars from a reporting aspect too. Over the past year, if we ran a webinar, we’d have to dig through a CSV file to find out what the engagement is like, which is a really painful process. By running webinars through Teams, all that data will be summarised within the meeting and I’ll be able to see how many people came in, the amount of time somebody spent in the webinar and how many people didn’t attend. With that feedback, businesses will be able to assess potential sales leads, and work out whether it’s worthwhile running more sessions in the future.” 

Securing the Sessions

Away from the customer-facing departments, IT professionals within organisations will also be able to benefit from better security measures around meetings and webinars, with Hardie adding that the adoption of Teams still needs to be rolled out securely. 

“There’s obviously a lot of concern around how security is viewed within Teams. For example, in the past, if you’re running a public meeting, there was nothing technically stopping somebody from coming in and disrupting the meeting with their video on. The new features within Teams will allow presenters to disable video for those users and limit the disruption they cause.  

“A new lobby setting will also be available in the Teams meeting options where only meeting participants who were explicitly invited to the meeting are able to join directly. Once applied, any participants who were not invited directly will be directed to the lobby where they will wait to be admitted.”

“These types of enhancements are important as Teams is not just a video conferencing solution, there’s obviously things like file sharing and external channels which can be exposed from a security perspective. The way to get around that is to make sure that you know how you are going to use Teams and that your businesses’ security configurations are at the heart of these plans” 

 



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