"We used to spend half a person’s time weekly presenting live webinars without any direct feedback."

How Cloze streamlines training and onboarding across 70+ countries by automating webinars

Client connections are the key to success for real estate agents, but managing those connections can be an organizational challenge in our hyperconnected world which often includes juggling multiple emails, phone numbers, and social media accounts.

Cloze is an AI powered CRM that organizes all emails, business connections, social networks, address books, and archives into a single useful view, allowing agents to search in one place for a complete background profile on every client, making sure they’re up-to-date on everything they need to know.

Jamie Mendelsohn of Cloze spoke to us about how eWebinar has transformed the way her company connects with customers through interactive video content.

Hi, Jamie! Can you start by telling me a little bit about yourself and your company?

Sure. I’m the Vice President of Customer Success and Experience at Cloze, and I've been at the company for about six and a half years. Cloze is a suite of products for real estate that combines CRM, lead management, and marketing. It’s driven almost entirely by AI.

What problems did Cloze struggle with before adopting eWebinar?

We're a small team, so we had relatively few people who could lead webinars. They would take up enormous amounts of our day!

“Before eWebinar, we were running live webinars. Sometimes we would have lots of attendees and sometimes we would just have one or two people – but it still took the same amount of resources from us.” 

Attendance would vary. Sometimes we would have lots of people attend, and other times we'd have one or two people attend. It still took the same amount of resources, whether we were hosting a webinar for one person or 100 people. So it was a big use of our time. Sometimes we had great returns, but other times we didn’t have the returns we’d hoped for.

How do you use eWebinar at Cloze today?

We use eWebinar in two primary ways. One of those is externally, for sales and education. We’ve recorded a series of user-facing videos where customers can learn about the platform, and we also use it for demos. We provide deep dives into specific topics, as well as an overview of Cloze (a “getting started” webinar) for both our current users and people who are not users yet.

“We use eWebinar externally for sales and education, and internally for education and training.”

We also use eWebinar internally for education and training. When we’re training our own support team and people who are joining our company, it’s a good way to communicate the basics of the product without having to walk each person through it individually.

What did Cloze do before eWebinar?

Before eWebinar, we used to lead two live webinars every day of the week. That was about 10 live webinars, sometimes more, that covered the exact same things on rotation. We were doing the same webinar over and over again. Every once in a while, there would be a small change so we’d update one slide in the presentation.

The audience wasn’t allowed to come off mute, so we weren’t able to live answer anyone’s questions; they could only type questions in the chat. So we were doing these webinars where we were presenting without any direct feedback, but we were using tons of time to do it.

“We used to spend up to 20 hours a week preparing and presenting live webinars without any direct feedback.”

For 10 webinars a week, that's probably 15 to 20 hours of work because we had to prep the demo account and get ready, then we had to be on early. Sometimes the webinars would go long if someone was asking questions in the chat. It took an enormous amount of time, so we were looking for a solution that would allow us to not use almost half of a full-time person a week on webinars!

“We needed to stop using almost half of a full-time person each week on webinars.”

Do you remember what the attendance rate was for those live webinars?

It varied dramatically. If we were onboarding a new brokerage where there were a lot of users, we’d have more webinar attendees because they were kind of looking to learn more from us. But even then, having 25 to 50 people show up was considered a lot. In other cases, we’d have only one or two people. Sometimes we’d have none, and then somebody would join 10 minutes in, and then you’d have a wrestling match with yourself about whether you should start at the beginning or start in the middle so that it would seem like other people were also watching!

“We never got so many questions during a live webinar that it felt like live hosting was actually paying off.”

We found there wasn’t a time when we were getting so many questions that it felt like the live element was paying off. We were just going through the motions each time, doing the exact same thing.

What are the benefits you've seen from using eWebinar?

We’ve noticed three main benefits. The first is the obvious time saving factor for our staff. Secondly, it’s time saving for our users. Our users can pick when they want to watch a webinar, everything is on their schedule. We have users all over the world, in brokerages across 70+ countries. Even if you try to be flexible and offer webinars throughout the day, you still can’t hit all the time zones; it’s not possible. So for our users, the timing became a lot easier when we started using eWebinar.

“We have users in more than 70 countries, which is why it’s important for our webinars to be available on-demand. We simply can’t be available for all those time zones!”

The third piece is consistency. You want to make sure that if you’re delivering a webinar to new users to a platform, that you're consistently doing the right things; that the demo works right, you’re following the steps right, that everyone who gives the webinar is going to deliver the same information in a predictable way. Getting the consistency right with live webinars is really hard; you have to find the right people with the right personality, the right tone, the right way to do it. So eWebinar has freed up the time of the specific people who have the skillset to deliver the webinars, and it has made it more convenient for our users.

How have you helped your team and company by implementing eWebinar?

The biggest thing is flexibility. For example, when we introduced our campaign product, we were able to create a webinar focused just on campaigns and we put it up on eWebinar. Anybody who needs to see it across all of the users we have can go see it anytime they want; we don’t have to do a round of training for every brokerage on this new feature. In the past when we’d roll out a big piece of functionality we’d have to go train everyone on it. We were doing this training publicly, but also privately for some of the brokerages. It took an enormous amount of time for us, and for them.

“We were unsure how our users would feel about webinars that weren’t live, but not a single person has expressed concern about it.”

Honestly, I think one of the things that’s really interesting is that going into this, we were unsure how our users would feel, if they would miss the “live” feeling. But we haven’t had a single person express a concern about it. We actually found out about eWebinar because one of our customers was using it for their own education. When we mentioned it, they said “yes, definitely do it!”

Do you find that you're able to create more content because your team has more time now? What are you doing with that freed up time that you weren’t able to do before?

We can create more content and we can go deeper into specific topics, and the other thing is that we can deliver content in different ways.

“eWebinar has freed up our time to create more content and go deeper into specific topics.”

The content we used to provide in live webinars can now be provided through Cloze University, which is self-paced learning. So we can create paths that make sense for different learning styles. People who love webinars can watch our webinars anytime. People who prefer self-paced learning can use Cloze University, which offers a structure that includes videos and a mix of activities, checklists, and slide-based presentations. Cloze University, which has been a huge benefit for us, was made possible because the person who specializes in learning on our team simply had more free time after we adopted eWebinar.

Outside of having no complaints, how do your customers feel about the hybrid eWebinar format?

They love it because they love the flexibility and the timing. It's on demand. It's not on our time, it's on their time. This is key, because our time and their time doesn’t always line up. If an agent needs to meet with a client when we’re free to do a webinar, they obviously can’t refuse to meet with their client! That’s not very good business.

“Our real estate clients love eWebinar because it’s flexible and on-demand.”

We also have the chat alongside it, where they're getting nearly immediate responses. At times, we have someone doing the live chat, and at times it goes to our Help Center. In that case, they get a reply within an hour. So they're still having the experience of getting their questions answered in real-time or almost real-time, without having to work around our schedule. This is especially important for our customers that are global; we have customers in India, Europe, across the United States. We have all the time zones covered and we couldn't possibly be doing live webinars during all those times!

What do you love most about eWebinar?

It is incredibly easy to use. It’s been something we can “set and forget,” we don’t have to think about these webinars every day and we don’t have to work around having someone available to do live webinars. When we have new updates for our functionality, or new features, we can create a new eWebinar and update the ones we have, and maintain that library without having to think about it every day/week. The library lives on its own until we need to go back and update things.

Who would you recommend eWebinar to?

I would recommend it to anyone who is in the position we were in, where you feel like you have a lot of time that you’re spending on repetitive webinars. If you’re trying to train on software and you want the training to be consistent, eWebinar saves you the time - which is obviously huge - but it also gives you a better result because you can edit the webinar and make sure it’s the one that you want – one with no dogs barking, no kids running through the background.

“eWebinar saves you time and gives you a better result because you can edit the webinar and make sure it’s the one you want to present to your customers.”

It’s important for us to have a webinar where everything works the way we want it to, in a way that we’re proud to share. And I think that if you have a product that you're trying to train on, the product may be evolving, but the core is still the same. So anyone dealing with that situation could benefit from eWebinar, instead of doing those live webinars multiple times a week for just a few people at a time.

Recently, there was a blizzard where I live in Massachusetts, and I was doing a live webinar for a brokerage. I was panicked that my power was going to go out. I couldn’t control that. I literally started that webinar with, “If you lose me, it was me. Not you.” I let them know that they could watch the same webinar recorded on eWebinar. I just happened to be doing it live because this was a particularly big brokerage I was doing it for.

I guess that’s another use case, you create interactive replays from live sessions.

Yes, we do that sometimes. Given the number of things Cloze can do, and how many features it has, we have a really specific way that we try to introduce them. We try to get people onboarded so that they start getting value quickly. And by having recorded eWebinars, we can make sure we have the right information and the right webinar in front of them every single time. That consistency is really important.

That’s the thing that we try to share with our prospects and customers. eWebinar is not replacing a human, but it’s making humans more effective and efficient. It’s a supplement. So keep doing the live things if you want to, do things that make you unique. But turn your webinars into an evergreen asset for the 50% or more of people who don’t show up to the live events.

Yes. What we will often do is have the user watch an eWebinar, use Cloze for a week, and come back for a live companion Q&A.

“We sometimes combine eWebinar with a companion Q&A to provide our users with more value.”

The Q&A is a unique thing that a person such as myself can do. It’s helpful if the users have the foundation beforehand, though, because what I’m being asked upfront is often covered in the eWebinar. If something isn’t covered, I can answer those questions live during the Q&A. That’s value that I can provide that a recording cannot.

We have one real estate software company client that prides itself on doing one-on-one onboarding to start. What they’re doing with eWebinar is they’re creating a pre-onboarding so that people watch that first, and only after they watch that can they book a time for the actual onboarding.

That’s great because it gives a starting point for the conversation and means the company doesn't have to go through the points that could have very easily been talked about beforehand. Then everyone gets more value for their time during the actual onboarding.

They’re also bringing the questions from the pre-boarding into the one-on-one question, which the one-on-one person is enjoying more.

Of course. You know, when you do the same webinar 100 times, you may not be doing it with the same level of energy as you did as first, so it’s good to answer questions and talk to people and connect with people.

“When you do the same webinar for the 100th time, you may not have the same level of energy you had the first time.”

When I talk to agents, owners, and managers, the challenge is that they want to connect with other people. Real estate is a relationship business, so they want that connection. But it’s helpful for them to first understand what the tool is capable of, which they can easily learn from a recorded webinar before we get together. That way, when we talk, we can focus on what they’re trying to achieve and how Cloze can help them achieve it. That’s a much more valuable conversation than me informing them how to tap a button.

Thank you for your time, Jamie! We’re so happy to hear that eWebinar has made a difference for everyone at Cloze!

Are you a real estate professional who wants to say goodbye to juggling dozens of contacts and relying on your memory to remind you of each client’s individual details? Then be sure to check out all of the amazing things that Cloze can offer you!

…And if you’re a business leader looking to offer presentations, training, and onboarding around the clock – all while offering a personalized interactive experience – click here to get started with eWebinar!