Workable Used Livestorm to Grow Customer Training by 113%

A fully-equipped recruiting software

Workable is the world’s leading hiring platform. It provides in-house recruiters and hiring teams with more ways to find more qualified candidates. Companies who use Workable get from requisition to the offer letter faster by simplifying decision making and streamlining hiring processes.

Founded in 2012, Workable has since helped more than 20,000 companies hire over one million candidates. Moreover, they boast one of the most comprehensive HR resources in the industry, which includes thousands of templates, insights, tutorials, and conversations on hot trends in recruitment.

Growing with the demand

We interviewed Nick DeSimone, the founding member of Workable’s Customer Education team, to get a better understanding of his responsibilities, challenges, and success criteria. His extensive background in training, outsourcing, and quality assurance transferred seamlessly into his role as Customer Education Lead when he joined Workable in 2017.

Nick’s ultimate goal is to help his customers become better users of their recruiting software, a task that’s a lot more complex than it may sound. To be successful, he has to be able to juggle several different projects at once, such as production of training videos, Workable 101 webinars, email campaigns, content creation for their Help Center, support tickets, and more.

Nick explained that Workable has grown from serving small and medium-sized businesses to a robust platform that can also address the needs of enterprise-level customers. "It has really grown a lot! It has been exciting to see how things have changed for the better and how our product has developed to match the demand," Nick said.

Growing pains

With growth came growing pains. As Workable’s product expanded to attract more enterprise-level customers, the volume of customer education efforts had to substantially increase to match. Nick explained that he had to run a lot of the one-on-one sessions to support customer health, which meant 15-20 hours of training calls each week that were exactly the same each time. In an effort to move onto bigger, more scalable activities, Nick and the Workable team tried switching over from Join.me to Zoom, after deciding against GoToWebinar.

However, they found Zoom’s user experience and marketing features did not measure up to the consistency that they wanted to offer their customers. This was especially true when it came to the webinar landing pages and the time it would take to set them up. Nick said,

Zoom's landing pages didn’t offer the branding and ease of customization that I needed. It wasn’t scalable.

The ability to engage with their customers and measure this impact was equally as important. To Workable, engagement meant the capacity to answer questions in real time while training customers, and impact meant the ability to gather actionable insights at the end of each training session. Unfortunately, Zoom’s platform did not provide an adequate solution for either of these.

That was when Nick realized that Workable needed a better set up. He revealed,

There's a lot of value in the one-on-one’s, but there was a feeling that we could do this at scale and provide the same value by engaging with our customers and answering their questions in a smarter way.

Nick and his team needed an alternative to Zoom. The new platform must offer flexibility so that the team could set it up to fit their specific needs.

Implementing an engaging customer education program at scale

With a solid wishlist in mind, including ease of use for both his teammates and customers, better marketing tools, engagement capabilities, and - most importantly - scalability, Nick’s research for a better video engagement platform led him to a Zoom alternative called Livestorm. He explained,

Livestorm stood out for a really great UX and coming from Workable, our users expect that. It should be simple, you shouldn't have to download anything, and the landing page should look nice. We found all of that aligned with Livestorm.

With the ultimate goal of improving customer health, the team implemented Livestorm to power their onboarding and training sessions. In addition to using the platform for live customer training, Nick also leveraged Livestorm’s automation features to schedule on-demand events across different time zones. He would then organize live support, such as himself or team members from different offices, to moderate and answer customers’ questions and gather feedback.

To make the sign-up process seamless for his customers, Nick embedded the Livestorm widget directly on their help center and in in-app messages, which showed available time slots for upcoming events and allowed people to register without ever leaving the Workable website. After each event, he leveraged the platform’s sidebar feature and customizable emails to collect feedback through surveys. The event data from each webinar was also used to track key metrics like registration and attendance rates.

Successful scaling and more

Nick and the Workable team have come a long way with their customer education program having powered it with Livestorm since 2017. With a video engagement platform that gave them full control over the way they wanted to train customers, they succeeded in expanding to new markets, evolving their customer education program, and, ultimately, scaling their business.

Before Workable started using Livestorm, they were only able to support North American time zones. However, this changed as soon as they started using automation to run on-demand events, which opened their customer education training to 3 more time zones and incremental growth. Nick said,

As soon as we flipped the automation option on for other time zones, we started seeing numbers come in. I estimate an average of 30 to 50 extra registrants from the EU every two weeks while the North American numbers stayed strong.

The automation of on-demand events did not just help Workable expand into different time zones, it also gave them the bandwidth to evolve their customer education program with the launch of a brand new webinar series. Nick explained,

Following the success of our training webinars, we started doing feature-focused webinars, because we saw an appetite for more. These revolved around our users' goals.

The most telling result that came from using Livestorm, and certainly one of the most important points for Nick and his team, was the fact that they were able to scale their business. He told us,

By adjusting the training to better fit a wider audience and by utilizing support experts to moderate a chat and keep users engaged, we scaled the training program tremendously.

Just how much you ask? Nick explained that they grew from 15 sessions a week to about 32, while also freeing up a significant chunk of time internally. That’s a whopping 113% increase in customer education webinars with the time savings reinvested into providing better training content and customer service. In fact, Nick’s department was even recognized as Customer Service Department of the Year by the prestigious Stevie® Awards in April 2021.

Smooth sailing

When asked what features he would like to see in the future, Nick made our day when he said, "you guys are already doing a lot of stuff that we need today". He continued,

Livestorm's automation is big. It helped us expand into European time zones while maintaining existing activities in the US. The way your product has matured has been completely in line with what we've needed, so we haven't had to look elsewhere for another platform.

To get the same results as Workable, create a free account on Livestorm now.