Spanish
If web seminar and videoconferencing technologies are regularly used in the majority of companies, in multinational companies they are indispensable for obvious reasons. There are a great many providers offering webinar services with increasingly more advanced features, such as interactions with social networks, enabling various speakers on the transmitter side, or increased visibility of the listener’s commitment. When selecting a webinar service, actually what is most important is that it adapts to the needs of our company and serves all phases of the business. Giving thought to the needs of each process will help us choose better. But, what are these needs? Here we outline these briefly:
1. Market immersion phase: A good way to make your solutions known while strengthening your customer loyalty is to run online seminars on specific topics (courses, conferences, product updates). These are usually done at a fixed time and generally open to the public with prior preregistration. It’s vital that the system has easy web access for many receivers without requiring installation.
2. Commercial phase: During the sales and post-sales process, personal contact is truly vital for connecting with the customer and creating a stable bond. Multinational companies in contrast conduct this phase remotely on many occasions, not just to save transport costs of the sales representative, but also because often customers do not reside in the same place and prefer not to travel. In such circumstances, it is essential that the solution is easy for customers to use (no need for onerous installations) and possess a good video conferencing system with multi-language capabilities, should prospect customers be of different nationalities (often the common case).
3. Implementation phase: International teams come together in this
phase to make decisions on how to use the product and adapt it to the business processes. Typically team members do not reside in the same places and represent different countries. That’s why it is indispensible to use a webinar tool that enables not just verbal communication but also makes it easier to share documents and the product demonstrator’s screen so participating stakeholders can define and reach consensus on all issues under discussion and facilitate decision making on customer requirements gathering or on the specific configuration of customer’s system. In this phase, it is also vital the system enables remote control of the customer’s computer to assist in the proper implementation of their product.
4. Training phase: In the last stage of development, training via webinar is only different from onsite training in that it is remote, particularly when the system enables remote control of student screens, and thus, direct correction of their exercises. It is also essential the system shows the degree of student participation with some kind of indicator on the activity they are performing during class, if they are actively following up or not… Although this is difficult to measure, there are some distributors who offer services of this kind. It is of great interest to use this application to contribute to an e-learning programme through adding video or webinar presentations; these can be replayed according to the student’s choice after the live course, if it comes with an enabled recording system which can also be used to prepare videos designed for this purpose directly.
5. Maintenance and Support phase: Like in the implementation phase, remote control is the key required for performing periodical product upgrades as well as for resolving all kinds of incidences. So the type of webinar applications needed are very similar to the ones at the implementation phase.
