How do you support customers when they (and you) suddenly need to work in a new way? That was the question the innovative minds at the beloved customer support brand, Zendesk, faced in March 2020.
Not only did Zendesk need to figure out how their own customer experience worked 100% remotely, they also needed to help their 170,000+ global clients navigate their customer experience in the new living-room-slash-office normal. And so, the Zendesk Morning Show was born: a 20-minute brew of piping hot customer experience insights streaming live on Tuesday mornings.
“The idea was to answer the challenges that our customers and prospects were facing during the lockdown,” notes Alvin Mudun, Senior Web Product Manager for Zendesk in EMEA and part of the original morning show team. “We knew people needed more than one webinar could do.”
Fourteen episodes and loads of viewers later, Zendesk has built a powerful series that sets a fresh precedent for the new normal of corporate comms. Through it all, Zendesk relied on Vimeo to beam their streams into the homes (and home offices) of their millions of users around the world. Here’s how they made it happen, in three languages and in nearly as many weeks.
Go live worldwide.
Ready, set, live series (in lockdown)
According to Alvin, the idea for the innovative series originated with Zendesk’s VP of Marketing in EMEA, Prelini Udayan-Chiechi, during Europe’s first 2020 lockdown. The pandemic was radically changing the way Zendesk’s customers (and their customers’ customers) worked.
The team knew they needed to equip their clients with fresh CX insights and agile thought leadership — and they needed to do it fast. “We wanted to create something different for our clients and prospects,” Alvin explains. “Something in the morning so they could start the day with a fresh bunch of news.”
In just a few weeks, the Zendesk Morning Show went from concept to content. On such a truncated timeline, Zendesk turned to Vimeo to streamline their collaboration process, utilizing review tools and unlisted links to share and workshop early versions of the show with the team. “We had people from different areas and different expertise, but they all came together to provide a great show.”
“With Vimeo, we launched a bi-weekly live show for global customers, during a pandemic, in just weeks, not months. We managed the whole process on the Vimeo platform, collaborating remotely with our team and agency, and going live multiple times a week, in several languages.”
High-quality tools for high-quality streams
To beam this speedy and ambitious project into homes across the globe, Zendesk knew they needed a turnkey live solution that was simple to set up and easy to operate. That’s where we came in.
“We looked at different platforms,” Mudun said. “But what we liked about Vimeo was that it was really easy to use in terms of publishing the content. The quality of the video was also key for us. We wanted to produce something high quality, and with Vimeo we could produce that kind of content.”
Alvin had never worked with live streaming before, but notes he was impressed with Vimeo’s user-friendly tools. After prepping their visuals and branded graphics ahead of the stream, Zendesk used Vimeo to boost viewer engagement with live audience Q&A, while simulcasting the HD broadcast to interested eyeballs on LinkedIn Live.
Inspired to create your own live event or webinar series?
- Check out our intro to webinars blog post
- Get gear and tech recos for live streaming from home
- Throw a virtual event (that’s actually engaging)
Global reach for a work-from-home team
The end result looks so polished, you can almost forget that the Zendesk team orchestrated it all from their living rooms, home offices, and closets-turned-workspaces. “When I saw the end result, I was really happy about it,” said Alvin. “I didn’t have to leave my home to create something with my team that went worldwide.”
Plus, it wasn’t just easy — their content made a real impact. “We saw strong engagement with customers from the first season, and we just wrapped season two of what is now an ongoing series,” explained Alvin.
Start streaming now
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