As a software company dedicated to helping businesses improve relationships with customers, Zendesk has to connect with clients and prospects to earn business. But to make this happen, the customer relations platform had to be able to connect at scale, at any time and anywhere where its clients may be.
So, Zendesk decided it needed to provide high-quality digital experiences to create those opportunities for connection with its customers. Webinars, in particular, proved to be one of the most reliable tools Zendesk had to build business, generate leads and sign new customers. In fact, in 2018, the leading customer relationship platform achieved a 55% conversion-to-close ratio with webinars, the highest win rates by any channel.
How did Zendesk achieve such great results? As Hope Villaluna, Senior Manager, Global Online Events at Zendesk, puts it, realizing such great results comes from focusing on the values behind the company.
“We like to say we’re in the business of relationships. We help our customers build better relationships with their customers,” said Villaluna.
Scaling with Customer Needs
When Zendesk first started using webinars to interact with customers, it hosted four webinars a quarter. It used these digital events to build trust and credibility for its company.
But Zendesk quickly realized the potential of webinars, especially when contributing to pipeline, and quickly increased its event output. Now, it hosts roughly 25 webinars each quarter and has since created a robust webinar hub, which includes educational resources, product updates and more.
Delivering Across the Globe
But providing great digital experiences takes more than just surface-level treatments. Since Zendesk operates across the globe, it needed a digital experience partner that could work at its scale.
For Villaluna, that meant partnering with a provider that could provide her team with the digital tools to support global and multilingual capabilities, including closed captioning and localization help.
“ON24 is the only company I know of that provides support across the globe, which has really helped us provide more meaningful engagements with our audience,” Villaluna said. “ON24 takes into account all of the things we could ever think of as a marketer and how to improve our webinar programs.”
Driving Engagement with Every Audience
For Zendesk, though, providing a strong digital presence meant giving its audiences the means to interact with the Zendesk brand. After all, those interactions, when measured, can add up to new campaigns, better market insights and a more satisfying brand experience.
To make this hope a reality, Villaluna takes advantage of the interactivity webinars can provide. For example, a good presenter can directly engage audiences, ask them to participate in Q&As and respond to polls and surveys. Presenters can even directly respond to conversations and questions raised in a live chat setting, too.
“All of the enhancements that ON24 has provided over the years definitely addressed this whole need for allowing our audience to be a little bit more engaged with our programs,” Villaluna said.
Moving Ahead with Digital Experiences
Now, Villaluna runs a quarterly webinar series called “What’s New at Zendesk,” which is broadcast across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas. Prior to linking up with ON24, Villaluna notes they used to have a couple of hundred registrations for a single webinar.
Zendesk now regularly has thousands of webinar registrations with an almost 45% live attendance rate — a success which Villaluna credits to ON24’s unique engagement tools and global capabilities.
“Just when we thought we’ve hit the max, as far as our registrations and attendance rates, we keep surprising ourselves,” Villaluna said. “It’s exciting for us.”
While Villaluna counts on ON24’s metrics and analytic tools to measure the success of her webinars, and routinely tracks average registration, attendance and engagement rates.
But, more importantly to Zendesk, Villaluna keeps a careful eye on attendees that return to Zendesk’s webinar programs and continue to engage with their brand.
“Success is also defined by the value and impact of the content we serve, and the quality of the experience that we provide to customers,” she said. “ON24 helps us deliver on that.”
