July saw the team pass 12 months of running our weekly Webinar program. During the time we’ve delivered more than 75 sessions with 7500+ views, covering all manner of Prima topics from deleting sales order lines to introducing automation in to a business process.
I feel it’s fair to say the sessions have widely been well received by our customers, but this method of delivery has certainly provided some learning points for our team…
Lessons learned
Consistency has been key to the project, with our weekly sessions taking place every Friday at 14:00. Customers know where to find us, if the time can be allocated to tune in. This has been driven a new marketing strategy for promoting the sessions. Customers receive multiple reminders and session updates via email and our @PrimaHelp and Facebook social media channels. We engage the user community regularly to suggest topics for upcoming sessions, and even then we really have to focus on selling the Webinar to our customers.
I’ve been really surprised at the difference the topic itself makes to live audience numbers, and it’s something we work hard at to maintain each week. The difference in the views for something like a What’s New session can be up to 10 times more popular than a specific training topic. They’re all important, however.
Vary the content and trainers
For the first 2-3 months it was myself delivering the vast majority of the sessions. Customer feedback was that my sessions were perhaps too long, so we addressed this quickly and moved to delivering bite-sized, focused sessions which are more convenient for our user community.
The Friday timeslot is still not convenient for all customers however so creating our Prima YouTube channel has allowed all users to have access to the webinar library whenever its needed. The Youtube channel is used both internally to cover training topics with new members of the team, and also to supplement a training call that we may receive through the Customer Service desk.
Many of you will have heard Oli’s voice on the sessions and it true to say he’s really been the driving force behind preparing the sessions. He has made an effort to bring in other members of the team with specific skills such as PrimaGO, to deliver webinars too.
I caught up with Oli:
“My experience in delivering the Webinars has been really positive from feedback from customers and from dealing with customers who regularly tune in. As with any business and software, the need to continue learning is key to improve skills and efficiency. I feel that, especially with the new feature webinars, customers are presented with the opportunity to maximise the use of the software to increase efficiency whether that is de-allocating an item from stock or allowing a customer to collect copy invoices from the PrimaGO Webstore – these little features can save your business crucial time.
Over time delivering the Webinars, this has left behind a true long term value to customers as we have built up a collection of training tutorials that you can watch anytime and anywhere! Whether you need a refresher on how to delete a line from an order or to find some in-depth reporting, we hope to provide you with the training content to be able to achieve your training needs.”
So how are we going to move this forward
Whilst we are satisfied with the regular content being delivered each week, there are areas we will be working on in the coming months to add more value to the Webinars for customers:
- Improving the script of the webinar session topic so that we can publish the notes on our PrimaHelp site
- Continuous improvements to the preparation and presentation of the sessions
- Do more of what is popular, including key new features and sales topics
- Explore some consultative topics around business growth, a series of sessions
- Q&A Webinar sessions
- Relevant guest industry speakers
Why tune in live or subscribe to the Youtube channel?
For any user that still has not seen any of our Webinar sessions here’s a brief summary of why I feel they are great for users:
- Keep up to date with the latest product features and processes
- The sessions are generally concise, max. 15 mins
- Tuning in live allows users to ask questions on the YouTube chat and engage directly in the session
- Topics are relevant to current customer queries and feedback
- Catch up any time, the webinar library is available 24/7 at help.primasoftware.co.uk
- It’s free training, share the Youtube links with your team!
Customer feedback
I have put some customer feedback below to give readers an understanding why other users have found the webinars useful so far:
“Prima has been a key part of our business since we went live with the software back in 2011. The system is robust and has many features that help us retain a competitive edge. We have a great relationship with the team at Prima, the support and training teams are always at the end of the phone and are always helpful. They hold regular user group meetings and have recently launched a weekly training webinar, both of which help us to understand and master all the features in the software and we feel fully engaged with how Prima will develop the software.”
SHARON WOLLAND, EVOLUTION OFFICE GROUP
“Following your Webinar session today on Customer and Supplier returns, I just wanted to thank you for giving us this valuable “Snapshot” training each Friday.
It is proving really useful to the whole team, and we are now making a date in our diaries every Friday, to ensure we do this, and catch up on previous sessions we may have missed. Being able to provide our own requests for Webinar sessions, means we can get first hand training on vital information and problem solving, to ensure we utilise Prima fully and in the correct manner.”
ANNIE HOLLANDS, FIELDSKILL
“I’ve just been watching Steve’s webinar on Invoicing – my first, so I have a few to catch up on. Firstly, I think they’re absolutely excellent & will really help us in getting up to speed with how we should be maximising Prima, so thank you. Knowing that we’ll be made aware of all the new features that are continually being added is great too, so we can continue to improve the service we give our customers aswell as the way we run the day to day of our business. I’m thinking the webinars will stop us from getting stuck in a rut of doing things because ‘that’s the way they have always been done’ and enable us to continually review & improve our processes, as you continually review & develop Prima as a whole. It’s a win win – what’s not to like?”
CAROLYN, SCRIBBLE&INK
