Marg ON24

Webcasts, live webinars, on demand webinars.

Don't, they have a lot of glitches to fix and other webinar platform are just so much easier to use.

None, all it does is botch webinars and waste our time.

The ability customize the view of your individual webcasts or webinars / event sessions was great.

We used on24 webcast elite for our first ever virtual conference in Sept 2020. At the time of signing our agreement, I was sold on access to a dedicated client success rep and the ability to purchase dedicated support for a nominal fee the day of our event.

At the start of our agreement I was introduced to our success rep and met with her one time. We discussed how our event would be hosted and the requirements for tech integrations in order for the data to pull into our Marketing Automation tool. After our initial call, I never heard back from our account rep. This should have been my first red flag.

My very hands on team went through reviewing all the online training for building and launching a live webcast. The widget to build your webcast is not intuitive at all, you will be pushed to watch training videos in order to figure out even minor setup questions. The UX is outdated and clunky and there are a ton of weird limitations. For example, you must duplicate your slide at the start of your session and click through them both in order for the recording to start (even though you pushed the start live button already). For our event we were running each session as its own webcast in order to customize what was on the screen. If you have an all day event and need to run multiple sessions throughout the day, this is the only way to ensure you can customize what the viewer sees matches up properly to your speaker and records all registrants and viewers specific for that presentation. This however also requires that people registered for your broader event have to also individually register for each webcast on its own as well. We had so many issues with people registering using their company emails as well, and the only response was to have them sign up with a personal email (makes no sense).

A few weeks prior to our event, I reached out to our account rep to try and schedule a call to discuss the support I would like to have for our event. I went through a number of hoops and finally got ahold of our sales person only to find out we no longer had an account manager, they had dropped the ball and the person had been let go and no one had been reassigned to us. Then I was introduced to another sales manager who essentially came in and told me that because we had our sessions setup across two days as individual webcasts (30 min each x 15 webcasts). I would have to pay for buckets of 2-4 hours of support time for each webcast min (even though they were only 30 min) and that the time could not be used between webcasts. So 2-4 hours x 15 webcasts.... It was going to cost me thousands and thousands of dollars to have the support available that was originally discussed at the sign of my contract. To satisfy my frustration the only message conveyed to me was that "companies like IBM use them everyday with no problem and we don't need to worry about support, if they can trust them so should we."

The first day of my event rolled around, and the night before I put a contingency in place that in the event we had a webcast error would push everyone over to Zoom. Well thankfully. Half way through the day the entire ON24 platform went completely down. The only response I could get from their team was that they were working on it and they sent me a link to follow to see when it went back up (hopefully that was just as good for IBM).

Our entire experience with this company from support to technology was awful. It seems they are starting to adjust and build their support team differently, but too late for us unfortunately. There are a number of other really amazing platforms out there, that are more user friendly and have a team and support cycle in place for their customers. I suggest you look elsewhere when considering a tool.

Use a different tool.

We were running our first event virtual conference.