Transforming the Customer Experience with Webinars

Good afternoon and welcome. In late 2019, somewhere in Sweden, one of my colleagues sat down at a slightly cluttered desk, opened a laptop and plugged in a basic headset, and he ran our first webinar for about 300 people. He had no studio, no ring light or backdrop. Now, he had an office and his said laptop, but six years later, that cluttered desk has become a dedicated webinar studio. The audience has grown to over a thousand registrants per single session, and we've run 139 webinars across multiple languages all over the world. My name is Andreas, and I am the content manager at Intersolia. And for the next 40 minutes or so, I'd like to take you on a journey from that first office desk through a pandemic and onto that studio we have today. And on the way, I'd like to share what we have learned and what we wished someone had told us. Some of it you'll already know. Some of it might give you a new angle. And one or two things might just save you from a very expensive mistake. Before I tell you what or how we did it, I need you to understand what we run them about. Because Intersolia helps companies manage chemical risk, as they said in my beginning here. And that means safe data sheets, regulatory compliance, risk assessments, dangerous goods, and a small mountain of legislation that, if you read it cover to cover, would put a well-caffeinated squirrel into deep, peaceful sleep. Now, here's the problem. Many of our customers, they have somebody who's been given the responsibility for chemical safety, for protecting their colleagues at work without ever receiving formal training in chemistry. They get the title, they get the responsibility, and then they get a stack of safety data sheets and a lot of acronyms. So when we sat down in 2019 and asked ourselves, how do we actually help these people? Webinars made sense. Webinars are accessible. They're free. They scale. They're on demand. And, well, they don't require you flying to a conference. But most importantly, they let us take a difficult, technical, slightly intimidating subject and break it down into 30 minutes that anyone can understand. And that last part turned out to be more difficult than it sounds. But if we can make safety data sheets engaging, then I promise you, whatever you are trying to communicate, you can make it engaging as well. So, late 2019, our very first webinar. 300 people registered. 68% of them showed up live. For a debut on a niche topic with zero brand recognition in the webinar space, that was a result we were quietly very pleased with. And then a few months later, well, the world changed. March 2020 happened. And we all know, offices closed, conferences canceled. And suddenly, every company that were planning to maybe try webinars next year were all running them by Friday. Now, we had a small head start. Not because we were visionaries. I'd love to say that we saw it coming. But we didn't. We just happened to have started a few months earlier. And like everyone else, our team scattered to their homes, their kitchen tables, and to wherever they were quiet enough on a Wednesday afternoon. And that gave us something important. You don't need the perfect setup to start. You just need to start. Our first webinars were run by our colleagues with consumer-grade webcams, basic headsets, and whatever room was quietest, 2 o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon. The production value was, let's say, charmingly modest. But people watched. People learned. And people came back. Because content beats production. Every single time. Now, that said, a small word of warning from the COVID era. If you're going to broadcast from your homes, do consider your surroundings. Children have an uncanny ability to need something the moment you go live. Dogs have opinions about delivery drivers. And neighbors sometimes decide that 2 o 'clock on a Wednesday is the perfect time for an enthusiastic ABBA tribute at full volume. In the beginning, our webinar hosts were our subject matter experts. Our customer success managers and salespeople who happened to also have chemical safety as their degree. They knew the topic inside out. And they presented it themselves. Host and expert in one person. And that worked for a while. But we'll come back to why it stopped working for us. Once it was safe to come back to the office, we set up a small webinar corner at our office in Gothenburg. A better webcam, a ring light, a proper microphone. You know, the kind that doesn't make it sound like you're broadcasting from within a tin can. And that setup ran for years. Not months, several years. And in parallel, we had a colleague who became something of a traveling webinar circus. Since we help our other neighboring countries to organize and stream their webinars as well, he'd pack a camera, a microphone, and a sturdy laptop, and travel in between our international offices. Helping our colleagues. To broadcast their own webinars in their own languages. A one-man production crew, country to country. Which brings me to the next lesson. Improving step by step beats waiting for the big investment. We could have waited four or five years for the perfect studio. But instead we improved our setup. Year by year. And in small affordable steps. Better camera. Better mic. Better lighting. Better backdrop. Each step was small, but the cumulative effect was significant. And here's something I want to flag to anyone in here that might be thinking about how their organization broadcasts. Consistency in quality matters more than peak quality. During the pandemic, we all saw the spectrum. Of home setups. You'd have one speaker beautifully framed, lit, and mic'd. And then the next speaker would appear from their bedroom. With a spare mattress propped up against the back wall. A webcam from 2010 and a basic gaming headset on their head. Now both of them had perfectly good things to say. But one of them looked like a brand. And the other one looked like a cry for help. Don't be afraid to dress things up a bit. It just looks professional. And then in late summer of 2025, we built the studio. Now I want to manage your expectations. Because when I say we built the studio, I don't want you to picture a Hollywood soundstage. I want you to picture a storage room. A specifically an 18 square meter storage room. At our office. That for various reasons, were never going to be useful as an actual office. It had no natural light. It was slightly awkward in shape. But it was also reasonably soundproof. Perfect. We painted the walls dark. Turned it into a black box. Installed proper lighting. Hung sound absorbing curtains as a backdrop. And we brought in monitors that had been quietly retired from other parts of the company. Built a serious workstation. The kind of computer that doesn't flinch when you ask it to livestream in 4K. And we ran a high capacity fiber line directly into the room. Because there's nothing worse than your internet dying 90 seconds into a live broadcast. It is today a dedicated professional grade webinar studio. And it looks like this. With the studio we also decided to use a teleprompter. Which honestly made a bigger difference to how natural we look on camera than almost anything else. It lets you maintain somewhat of an eye contact with the audience. While keeping away from staring slightly off. Which is also the dead giveaway of an amateur broadcast. And of course we streamed through TwentyThree. Now I know there's a question coming. Because I get it all the time. How much did it cost? And now including the renovation of the room. Including the sound absorbing curtains, the lighting, everything. Under 7000 euros. Now that's the whole studio. From empty storage room to working broadcast space. For less than the price of a single trade show booth. Now I should be honest. We got lucky in places. We were able to repurpose some equipment from other parts of the company. Monitors that had been replaced. Desks that weren't being used. Bits and pieces that was already paid for. So your number might be a little higher. But not orders of magnitude higher. This is not an astronomical investment for a mid-sized company. It's a very reasonable one. And here's also where the studio chapter takes a turn. Because the moment we finished it. We also made a decision about how we actually use it. And it's maybe the most important decision that I'll talk about today. Because here's the thing. The studio is not just for webinars. Once you've built a space like this. Suddenly the rest of the company gets options they didn't have before. Marketing can use it to do promotional videos. Customer success can use it to record training sessions. Sales can use it to record short pitches and demos. We can rent it out externally. To other companies. And done well. The studio runs almost every week on something. So if you're going to build a studio. Do not let it sit empty in between your monthly webinar sessions. Just gathering dust and slowly eroding its return on investment. A studio is a platform. Not a cost center. And the more departments use it. The cheaper it gets per minute. And the more consistent your company's video output becomes as well. Suddenly the studio isn't a marketing expense. It's a shared company asset. And this next part comes from painful personal experience. When you choose where to build your studio. Think about the things you can't control on the outside. We soundproofed the room. We picked a location with no traffic noise. We thought we'd consider everything. But trust me when I say that there is no acoustic treatment in the world. That fully solves the problem with the person next door is having the time of their life. So choose your surroundings carefully. And if you can't choose them. At least make friends with your neighbors. Now building the studio was the easy part. The hard part is what happens inside it. Because here's the thing. You can have the best lighting in the world. The best camera. The best microphone. A backdrop that would make a Hollywood set designer weep. And if the content is boring. If it's confusing. Dense. Full of jargon. Then none of it matters. Because people will close the tab. Remember the problem I told you about in the beginning. The people who work for our customers are often given the responsibility for chemical safety without formal chemistry training. They need to understand this stuff. They need to understand it quickly. And they also need to understand it in a way that lets them actually do something with it on Monday morning. So from day one we made a decision about how we'd communicate. Beginner level. Always. Not condescending. Not dumbed down. But always assuming that the person watching doesn't have a chemistry degree. Has not memorized the regulations. And would quite like us to explain what the words actually mean. Which leads me to a few principles I'd like to share with you. And please feel free to adapt these principles to your own organization. Translate legislation. Don't read it. Legal text is written by lawyers for lawyers. It's not designed to be understood by a person who has 30 minutes between meetings to figure out something genuinely consequential. And we're not talking about trivial decisions here. The reason our customers needs to understand the regulation. Is because if they don't. Then somebody might mix the wrong two substances in the storage room. And the consequences isn't a stern email. It's a fire. Or even worse an explosion. Reading legislation aloud is not communication. It's simply recital. And our job is to take a paragraph of regulation. And tell you what it actually means for you. And what it actually means for your Tuesday afternoon. This means that if you have X amount of liters of this substance. You need to do what otherwise said can happen. Done. Move on. The host doesn't need to be the expert. In the beginning as I said. Our hosts were our experts. They presented the topics themselves. And that worked. But it had a ceiling. Because the thing is with experts. That they are brilliant. Experts know everything there is to know. Which means that experts sometimes. Through no fault of their own. Forget what it's like to not know. They might use a term they assume that everyone understands. They skip a step they think is obvious. And they might go a little. Let's be charitable. A little nerdy. And that's where I come in. Because I'm not a chemist. I have no formal training in chemical risk management. Which means that when our consultants. Start to drift into the deep end of the technical pool. Then I can be the person in the room. Who says stop. Sorry. What does that actually mean? And the moment I ask that question. I'm asking it on behalf of every viewer. Who was wondering the same thing. But didn't want to be the only one in the room. Raising their hands. And asking that question. So here's the model we use now. A moderator. Me. And an invited expert. The moderator's job is to keep the conversation moving. To lift the energy. And ask the obvious questions. To translate. The expert's job is to be brilliant. Together we get something. That neither of us could deliver on our own. So if you're just starting out. And you're worrying that. You don't know enough about your topic. To host a webinar. Stop worrying. You don't need to be the expert. You need to find the expert. And bring out the best in them. Now almost all of our webinars. Are 30 minutes long. And you might wonder. Why not 60? You get more depth. Or why not 15? You'd get more reach. Why 30? Because 30 minutes is the sweet spot for the working day. Almost anyone. On almost any working day. Can find 30 minutes. Lunch break. Between two meetings. First thing in the morning. Last thing before the afternoon. 30 minutes is short enough. That it doesn't feel like a commitment. It's exactly long enough. To cover one topic. Properly. On a basic level. Without padding. And it's long enough. To actually teach something. While also leaving the audience. With a feeling. They got value for their time. Not just facts for their inbox. 60 minutes is twice as much content. Yeah. But it's also roughly four times the friction. People look at 60 minutes. And they'll think. Ah. I'll catch the recording. And often. They don't. 15 minutes is too short to do anything serious justice. You either rush. Or you trim until there's nothing left. 30 minutes is the number. For us. You must test your own. But do it. Deliberately. Don't drift into a length. By accident. I mentioned earlier. That our first webinar. Had 300 registrants. Our best performing webinar. Had 1163 registrants. And 75% of them showed up live. That's not because. Chemical risks management suddenly became a sexy topic. Because it didn't. Sadly. It's because over six years. We got better at meeting people where they are. Beginner level. Translated language. Moderator plus expert format. 30 minutes. The format is the message. Right. I also promised you stories of disaster. So I'll deliver on that. If you do 139 webinars. Things will go wrong. Equipment will fail. Case in point. Software will misbehave. Internet connections will choose dramatic moments to die. This is not a hypothetical. It's a guarantee. Now let me go to our biggest broadcast of the year. Months of preparation. Well over a thousand registrants. Multiple guest speakers. We go live. And the audio. Fades. And I don't mean a small glitch here. No no. Complete. Total. Broadcasting into the void. Audio failure. The kind where you suddenly realize. That everything you've prepared for. The last couple of months. Is now technically speaking. A silent film. Then the expulsion. Different webinar. And four of us hosting together. Two. Geographical. Locations. And mid broadcast. With no warning. And no explanation. Well. The platform decides to eject. Three out of four hosts. From the webinar room. Yeah. Leaving one. Extremely surprised. Colleague. Alone. On camera. Live. With the audience. And with the rest of us. Frantically. Trying to get back in. Internet was reset. Browsers. Restarted. Frantic messages. Were exchanged. Meanwhile. Our remaining colleague. To his enormous credit. Kept the audience warm. Kept talking. Kept it together. And eventually. We all got back in. Now. Two lessons. From these stories. Don't. Panic. Work. The problem. When something goes wrong live. The temptation is. To spiral. To get. Flustered. To make. The problem worse. By making. Three more decisions. In thirty seconds. And all of them. Bad. Don't. Have a checklist. Have it printed. Have it next to you. When. Something fails. Work down the checklist. Methodically. Step one. Two. Three. The vast majority. Of problems. Are solved. By going through. The basics. In order. And the basics work. Whether your heart rate. Is sixty. Or a hundred and sixty. Use the chat. Tell the audience. Honestly. We're having a technical issue. We're working on it. Hang tight. Because. People are. Extraordinarily. Understanding. when you're honest with them. But at the same time, they're extraordinarily unforgiving when you pretend nothing is happening while everything is clearly on fire. Lean into it. When you come back from a problem, don't pretend it didn't happen. Acknowledge it, smile about it. We had some technical issues, we're back. Thank you so much for sticking with us. Let's pick up from where we left off. People remember much more how you handle problems more than they remember the problems themselves. A composed, honest and slightly self-deprecating recovery actually builds trust. It says these are real humans and they care enough to show up. Better done than perfect. If I can only give you one sentence today, that might be it. Better done than perfect. Don't wait for the perfect setup, the perfect host, the perfect script, the perfect platform. Go on with it. Be brave. Your audience would rather watch you slightly imperfect than not watch you at all. And there's one more thing I want to talk about before we land this plane. And that's something I think a lot of marketing teams quietly struggle with. Getting the rest of the organization to care. Because here's a familiar story. Marketing decides to run webinars. Marketing produces them, marketing promotes them, marketing watches them, marketing reports on them and the rest of the company barely notices. And that's a very lonely way to run a webinar program. And it's also, I'd argue, the wrong way. We were lucky at InterSolia because our webinar started as a partnership between marketing and customer success. So cross-departmental involvement was baked in from the start. But we've also worked deliberately over the years to widen that circle further. And I want to share what's worked. Show the rest of the company what's in it for them. For customer success and support, webinars drive customer retention and reduce how do I do this support tickets. I mean, we literally run webinars about how to use our system and watch certain categories of topics from the support go down. We ask, what are the most questions? We take those questions and turn them into webinar topics. The webinar then reduces the load on the entire support team. It's a circle of life. But it's also a very practical circle of life. On to product. When we launch something, the webinar is one of the channels. So the product team has a stake in the broadcast going well also. For sales, webinar generates leads. We can offer. Special promotions to live attendees. And we capture interest from people who would never have booked a sales call cold. That said, though, we never turn our webinars into one big sales pitch. Because people will buy from you when you have earned their trust, not when you've pushed them into a corner. On to the consultants. They're the experts. The webinar is their stage. It's their stage. Done well, it raises their personal profile and the company's expert positioning at the same time. Once everyone can see what's in it for them, getting their input becomes easy. And it also turns it all to a webinar. It's not a marketing project. It's a company project. Right? Right. Make a big deal out of it. Internally. Make webinar day an event. Watch it together, send it to customers, talk about it on Teams, celebrate the numbers afterwards. It might feel a little theatrical. But do it anyway. Because visibility creates support. Support creates resources. Resources create better webinars. And better webinars create more visibility. And yes, occasionally the content manager wants the spotlight on his own work. Guilty. But also celebrating the work isn't vanity. That's how you protect the budget for next year. One thing we genuinely didn't see coming was that university professors started recommending our webinars to their students. Students studying chemistry, environmental science, and science. And workplace safety. Which means by the time these students enter the job market, InterSolia is already a known name. They've heard our consultants explain things. They associate us with expertise in the field. And some of them tell their new employers that we should be working with InterSolia. Some of them apply to work for us directly. We didn't set out to build a recruitment channel. But that's what consistent, accessible, expert content does over six years at scale. It builds reputation in places you didn't know were watching. Build the webinar program into the company. Not just because it makes work easier. But because the second order effects are surprising. And they're often the most valuable. I want to take what I said about making a big deal out of it and make it even more concrete. Because at InterSolia, we don't just make a big deal out of webinars in general. Once a year, we make a really big deal out of one specific day. We call it simply InterSolia Webinar Day. And it might be my favorite working day of the entire year. It's been running since 2022. And the format is simple. Four webinars all in a single day. Two in the morning. Twenty minutes break in between. Lunch break. Then two more webinars in the afternoon. Same pattern. This is incidentally the one day of the year where we break our own 30 minute rule. Each session on InterSolia Webinar Day runs about 40 minutes. Because we leave more room for live questions from the audience. The audience on this day is a bit more like you. Like a conference audience. They've cleared time in their calendar. And they want to engage. We pick a theme for the day. A common thread that ties our sessions together. And then each session goes deep into a different angle within that theme. Four different topics. Four different experts. one coherent narrative, and here's the part that took us a while to fully appreciate. It gives us a really good reason to bring in external guests. In 2025, for example, we had the global sustainability leader from IKEA Industries in one session talking about preventing the unforeseen. In another session, we had the head of R&D for the Nordics from Henkel talking about environmental assessment in practice, basically how you actually choose the right chemicals. Now, these are not small companies. These are not small names. And the question I get asked every single time I mention it is, how on earth did you manage to get them to do that? And the honest answer is, we asked. Sure, we'd had previous contact with both companies, and we didn't email them out of the blue. But fundamentally, we sat down, decided who we wanted, and we asked them. The worst thing they could say was no, and they didn't. The companies and people you'd love to have on your stage. are often more willing than you think. They just need to be asked clearly, with a clear value exchange, and with enough lead time. Because there is value exchange. It's not us doing them a favor, not them doing us a favor. We get two new experts speaking to our audience, from companies our audience respects, which raises our customer satisfaction. They, more than visibility, get the chance to showcase what their organization does, and what they have to contribute to their topic. Win-win. Webinar Day matters for a few reasons beyond content. It gives the whole program a focal point. Something to build towards. To market around, to celebrate afterwards. It's the keystone of the year. The audience size on these days is huge. In 2025, we had over a thousand registrants for each individual session. Some people watch the whole day like it's a conference. Others drop in for the one or two sessions that interest them the most. Both are absolutely fine. Either way, we see a significant engagement around the day. It gives the rest of the company permission to take webinars seriously. When the entire organization knows that Webinar Day is coming, when sales is offering Webinar Day promotions, support is spreading the word, consultants are preparing for it, you've heard it before. Webinars stop being a thing the marketing team does, and become a thing the company does. A few practical notes, in case any of you are tempted to try this. Start planning early. We start planning the next Webinar Day 10-11 months before the event. That's not because it takes 10 months to organize. It's because the people we want as guests have calendars that fill up that far ahead. Always have a backup. External guests have lives, illnesses, surprise board meetings. So always know who you'd swap in. If someone has to cancel two weeks before. Expect to be exhausted. On the day itself, like in my role with my small but mighty webinar team, you're juggling four experts, four tech rehearsals, four webinar rooms, and you're also trying to find some time to eat in between sessions. And if you're really lucky, a quick trip to the bathroom. Now you'll feel like a wrung out dishcloth afterwards. But you'll also feel fantastic. And I suspect that the wonderful people who organized TwentyThree Summit might know exactly what I'm talking about. One more thing about InterSolia Webinar Day. The format has changed over the years. The first time we ran it, we hired an entire TV studio with full production crew. Because we thought that that was what taking it seriously actually meant. In hindsight, that was a bit overkill. These days, we run the whole thing from our own storage room studio. With our own team. The output for us is better than the TV studio version ever was. The lesson again is the same I keep coming back to. You don't need the maximum setup. You need the right setup. And the right setup is the one that you can run well year after year. So here's one idea. Once a year, do something bigger than your usual webinar. Pick a theme. Invite a guest you've been too nervous to ask. Make a day out of it. Tell the whole company. The amplification effect, internally and externally, is bigger than you actually think. Let me bring us back to where we started. Late 2019. An office desk. A basic headset. A laptop. And a topic that, on paper, is so dry it could double as kindling. And one person trying to explain safety data sheets to 300 strangers on the internet. Six years later. The desk has become a studio. The laptop became a workstation. The headset has become a microphone you'd find in a radio station. The 300 has become, on a good day, well over a thousand. What hasn't changed in six years is the why. We still believe that the hard topics deserve to be made accessible. We still believe that the person on the other end of the screen, the safety manager who didn't ask for the responsibility, the student trying to learn, the consultant trying to keep up, they deserve 30 minutes of clear, honest, useful information. The desk became a studio. The equipment got better. The audience got bigger. And the lessons got sharper. But the mission is exactly the same as it was by that desk in 2019. Now, if you're standing where we were six years ago, at your own desk or kitchen table, with a laptop and an idea, my honest advice is this. Don't wait for the studio. Just start where you are. Thank you very much.