Facilitating a webinar presentation isn’t easy, more so if you’re a beginner. It requires a lot of preparation to successfully present a webinar — from choosing the content, the speaker, picking a time and date, advertising the event, and rehearsals. Additionally, in order to be a good webinar host, not only do you have to know how to properly facilitate a webinar, but you should also be ready to solve or handle sudden issues that may appear before or during a webinar presentation.
Experiencing technical difficulties in a webinar isn’t unusual. Even hosts with years of experience under their belt still encounter issues like these. It can be difficult to deal with and is often very frustrating for everyone involved. Therefore, it’s important to know how to deal with technical problems because, if left alone, you might lose the audience you’ve built. Below are some tips on addressing technical difficulties:
How to Handle Webinar Technical Difficulties
- Avoid dead air at all cost.
Technical issues are a highly situational problem which doesn’t have a generic answer except for one — KEEP TALKING. Letting your audience know that you’re still there while you’re working on fixing things is crucial as dead air can be deadly. In cases where you’re unable to talk with your audience due to lost audio, you can utilize the chat feature to tell them what’s going on.
- Rely on your moderator or technical facilitator.
If you notice a participant having technical problems, remember not to interrupt your whole presentation just to accommodate one person as this will inconvenience the rest of your audience. Leave this problem to your assistant, moderator, or technical facilitator. They can resolve it offline or using a breakout room so the presentation won’t be disrupted.
- Reschedule if necessary.
If the problem is bad enough to make it impossible to continue with your event, make sure not to prolong it for more than two minutes. Avoid holding your audience on the line while you wait and hope that the issue will eventually be taken care of. If you can’t figure out the problem in two minutes, let your audience know that you don’t want to waste their time. Instead, inform them that you’ll reschedule the event and automatically re-register them for the new webinar.
Additional precautions that you should always take is starting at least twenty minutes early so you can test your phone and web components. Make sure to do a tech check for each of your participant as well and for more assurance, have an available moderator that’ll handle technical support, so you can focus on your speakers and audience. If the webinar ends up getting rescheduled, don’t forget to properly apologize to those inconvenienced by the situation and exert more effort in preventing technical difficulties from happening in the future.
Keep in mind that even with various precautions, technical issues can still occur due to circumstances beyond our control. However, as long as you remain calm and keep in mind these multiple tips, you’ll be able to properly deal with the problem and continue with the presentation.