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How long would you make participants wait before you cancel a Webinar due to technical difficulty?
You are in the middle of a very good presentation, boom…. No sound! You keep trying to fix it, but no luck, how long would you wait before you tell participants that the webinar is cancelled, five minutes? Ten minutes? More than ten minutes?
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5 Answers
Remember that old urban legend in college? That if the professor didn't show up for class within 10 minutes, class was canceled?
That occurred to me one time about nine years ago, as we went through that exact situation -- our office Internet connection was down. No way to connect to the webinar provider. No IP phone. We could dial in with our cell phones, but there would have been no way to advance our slides. The Webinar producer reported the number of questions and people kept slowly dropping, dropping, dropping.
And there we were. Ten minutes in. No immediate prospects of resuscitating the event.
We immediately emailed everyone who had signed up for the event, apologized, told them we'd reschedule and offered a Podcast of the presenter for download within two days of the event. Eventually, we started a practice of having one of our employees on one other network on the line at all times, ready to advance slides so if we needed to dial in from our cell phones, the show could go on.
So... 10 minutes. It worked in college. I think that's a general practice here.
I recommend the following:
AFTER TWO MINUTES:
Acknowledge the technical issue(s) to webinar viewers. If the webinar platform supports it, place an "overlay" on top of the webinar console, with a message to say that you're currently undergoing technical issues - and you're looking into it. You don't want to put up this message too early, in case your engineer(s) solve the issue quickly. But at the same time, you want to clue in viewers as soon as possible.
AFTER FIVE MINUTES:
End the webinar. If you've ever sat through a webinar experiencing technical issues, five minutes is actually a really long time. You'll want to issue an apology to all viewers and consider scheduling a re-airing of the webinar.
IN ADDITION, consider offering something of value to each viewer (e.g. a giveaway, a free technical consulting session, a free technical assessment, etc.). It's ironic, but the special attention may end up converting "ticked off viewers" into more qualified leads.
Steve and Tekle: I like the 10 minute rule. Honestly, I hadn't thought about this.
More important, you HAVE to have plan B and plan C. I just moderated a webinar two weeks ago where we had some technical difficulties but our contingency plans "saved the day":
1. I lost the ability to advance slides -- the webinar producer was prepared to advance, she took over from there.
2. I lost my phone connection -- I have NEVER had that happen before and used to tease webinar producers when they brought this up. Now on this, we had a backup phone dialed in which I picked up and finished the webinar.
Steve, Dennis and Craig, I appreciate your thoughtful responses. I guess there is no "standard" practice as to when to inform participants or end a webinar in the event of technical difficulty. Anticipate that it could happen and therefore, have a backup plan or plan "B" or "C" as Craig stated it.
1) Immediately acknowledge that there is a problem to prevent people from immediately abandoning the presentation
2) After a few minutes send a status update to manage expectations
3) After 5 minutes, I would suggest cancelling the presentation. Let the participants know what the plan is: a continuation/rescheduled presentation and/or materials to be distributed
4) Within a few hours of the presentation, send an email to all participants to apologize for any inconvenience and an outline of your plan B: a rescheduled presentation and/or .pdf of slides and if possible, offer a related benefit as a token of appreciation for their understanding and to keep them positively engaged with your brand
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