As the concept of digital engagement continues to evolve and webinars, meetings, and events continue to mesh together, Robert Petrossian, Founder, and CEO of Engagez sits down with Maddie to talk about the brand-new product from Engagez called EZ Live, that will help event professionals to create memorable audience experiences!
Video Transcript
Maddie: Welcome everyone to our next episode of Engaging Voices. We’re so excited that you continue to watch us and join us. I’m Maddie. I’ll be our host again today, and we’re joined today by a really exciting person. I’m so glad we were able to make it work out with him. He is gonna tell us about a game-changing new update from Engagez.
I continue to be impressed with everything Engagez, puts out that can really help all of us in our digital engagement needs. Robert is joining us today I’m gonna have him introduce himself in a moment, but Robert is gonna tell us the brand new exciting update from Engagez called EZ Live.
Robert, if you can go ahead and tell us who you are that would be great.
Robert: Hi, I am Robert Petrossian, thank you so much for having me here. I’m so happy to be here and talk about Engagez and the EZ Live product.
I’m the founder, CEO of Engagez. I’ve been working within the virtual event space for several years now, and as the industry matures, it’s exciting to see how it’s going from a virtual event solution into a much more unified comprehensive platform that really allows digital marketers and event planners to tackle various aspects of their engagement with their audience all on one single platform.
And EZ Live is a critical component of it. And again, I’m very happy to answer any questions you might have on this new, exciting product we have.
Maddie: Yes. And I am really looking forward to learning more about Easy Live. As our viewers have learned about me over the past couple of episodes, I am a previous customer of Engagez. A lot of the new things that you guys continue to come out with, I’m always like, oh, I needed that for my event. And EZ Live is one of those things that I think really could have elevated my event, and I could have done additional things with it. So why don’t you tell us what is EZ Live?
Robert: Sure. So we were looking, as we work closely with hundreds of customers, we keep on getting feedback requests on new tools and capabilities.
And one of the things that was very clear and obvious to us that there is a need for. Being able to offer a meeting solution that could also act as a webinar. So a lot of companies the, the line between what’s a meeting, what’s a small size meeting, large size meeting what’s a virtual event is all getting muddied, it all becomes one continuum.
So it was very important for us to be able to address the needs of this continuum. So EZ Live is our unique solution that offers collaborative group meetings and webinar capabilities all in one.
Maddie: Absolutely, I think you’re so right everything is starting to jumble together and I love that, you have a solution that is all in one. So tell me, how does EZ Live elevate the session experience?
Robert: Yeah, so first of all, part of the platform’s uniqueness has been the fact that it allows an event planner create an agenda of a program and have each line item in the agenda. You utilize potentially different technologies depending on where the speakers are, what type of event they are. So EZ Live adds on that capability. So when you’re building up an agenda, let’s say you have a 9:00 CEO welcoming session, the CEO might be at a physical event. That 9:00 program could just be a live stream directly coming from a show floor. Then your 9:30 program could be an EZ Live program. So you enable EZ Live for that one session. You conduct your 45 minute EZ Live session, and then the subsequent session again could be a live stream from a show floor, from a corporate studio.
So probably number one thing to remember that EZ Live within our virtual event platform, digital engagement platform is just one option that you can turn on to conduct your program. Now, when you enter the EZ Live session, you have the ability of having up to 50 people joining with their audio and video. Everybody can be online. You could mute unmute people as a producer, but essentially you have a space that people collaboratively meet, brainstorm, discuss and conduct business. At the same time you also have producer features that allows you to use the same space more as a webinar. You identify who the speakers are and you identify everybody else to go off stage. You can have up to 40 people participating in panels. Meanwhile, thousands of people is a highly scalable solution could be offstage viewing that discuss. With the raise off hand, you can bring people from offstage, allow ’em to ask their questions with their audio video and then pull them back on offstage and continue the discussion.
Meanwhile, the EZ Live as part of that session offers a lot of the engagement capabilities that already our customers are familiar. We have more than 10 sets of things you can enable as an engagement opportunity for the audience from chat to q and a, to ability to take private notes, to have surveys, poll capabilities all of that are all available with reactions.
Overall, you’re creating a highly engaging, interactive and powerful, such an experience for your attendees utilizing the flexibility and the power of EZ Live.
Maddie: No, absolutely. I know just from, being able to practice using EZ Live and see everything it does, the attendee interaction tools that are available, I think that can really be a game changer for people who are needing to engage their audience in different ways. . And I love that it’s just built right into this session.
Robert: Yeah. I’m glad you have a particularly interesting perspective having been customer, so it just very valuable to hear that from you as well.
Maddie: So I am curious. Because, Engagez as a whole is very customizable. But is EZ Live equally customizable?
Robert: Yeah. That’s really been one of the key aspects of the design requirements. A lot of our customers come to us, not because they don’t have a Zoom license or teams license or WebEx license but they really come to us because they wanna be able to deliver an experience to their audience. That’s their experience, their branded experience versus what they call a Zoom experience. So the whole customizability, configurability of the session within which you’re conducting the sessions is extremely important to our customers, and that’s where we’ve invested A lot of our effort in making sure that you can make those pages to be as configurable and branded as you’d like. This extends this, basically the customizability extends from ability for you to change colors and button images and stuff, all the way to adding additional panels, depending if you want your salespeople to be easily identifiable in a panel or you want additional related content to be available. You can basically change the layout as well as the aesthetics of that page and deliver a highly configurable and customized experience. And what’s also important to mention, all that work is preserved and is compatible across all devices. So the same experience with certain limitations that’s applicable to mobile [00:08:00] is also then becomes available for your mobile.
Maddie: Yeah. That’s really important too, ’cause not everyone may be on a computer, right? They may be on their tablet or their phone, and so that being able to just configure it across the different channels is great.
I’m curious, we’ve talked a little bit about how digital engagement, things are meshing together, right? We’ve got webinars, we’ve got virtual events, hybrid events ,online classes, and I come from a nonprofit space where webinars, they were our go-to method of connecting with people.
And I know so many organizations utilize webinars is EZ Live something that would be really helpful for a webinar?
Robert: Yeah, definitely EZ Live, one of the key design objectives of EZ Live was to enable a producer to essentially conduct a webinar as good as any other solution that they could have utilized to conduct the webinar, yet be highly customizable and configurable. Having said that, from our perspective, as we engage with our audience one of the trends that we see is that the distinction between a webinar solution and a virtual event has been a little made up. It’s really been a concept. These have been two independent concepts that through different genesis, have stayed as two separate, have captured two different spaces within organizations and what we’re seeing more and more is that there is actually a continuum between a traditional webinar all the way to a virtual event, and having it been able to be conducted on one platform is extremely critical. So on the Engagez you can use EZ Live to conduct a webinar just like you do today. But again, configure customized registration, the page look and feel as you like to deliver the best experience you consider for your attendees. Then over time you can actually take that webinar and add slightly more programming to it. So let’s say, in a two months time, you wanna have a sponsor online. You wanna have their salespeople available for book a meeting, for demos, for those who staying after the webinar. All these incremental programming, you can now add to our webinar capabilities and program so you can actually start stretching the engagement possible. Also, within the same environment, we can run more than one webinar at any given time. . So if people come in, they find one webinar, not exactly what they were looking for, they can go next door, they can participate in the topic that’s more interesting to them, and that way you’re keeping your audiences that you work so hard to bring to the platform highly.
So absolutely you can use for a webinar, but the future is, extremely dynamic and you’ll be able to a lot more with this, as you grow the webinar programs that you run.
Maddie: I think that idea of having a webinar series where they can all be housed in the same space is really fantastic. That can be really helpful for so many people who are like, oh, go to this page for this webinar, this page for this webinar. Having them all in a central location can really help.
Robert: We actually have additional features, capabilities that we’re also announcing along with EZ Live, that specifically help you conduct webinar series on the platform and the difference between just the webinar and webinar series. You wanna be able to have a master place to control your webinars, but also when your attendees are invited, you want your attendees to have visibility of what other webinars might be coming up, what webinars they might have missed, but the on-demand versions available, while each webinar could have its own registration page and its own program, completely separate. The ability to run webinar series on the platform. Is another very key important capability that we’re now offering along with EZ Live.
Maddie: That is awesome. For anyone who’s interested in learning more about the webinar series and more features that you can maybe tap into, we’ll make sure to put information on how to contact us about that so you can get started in the text down below. I’m wondering of with EZ Live one thing that, that I’ve seen a lot of times is that we are short staffed and sometimes it is, one person who’s tasked with doing all of this . Uhhuh
Is EZ Live something that’s easy to use for one single presenter, or do we need multiple people to help produce an EZ Live session?
Robert: Great question. Great question. So that’s been another major design requirement. To be able to straddle these two worlds, to be able to create a tool that’s easy enough to use, where a single person can act as the speaker and producer with almost no training, minimal training, they can come and conduct a meeting on the platform.
As well as adding capabilities and offering that really allows high end features for professional producers to come and generate, different class of program all using that one tool. And today we have programs where, People come who’ve never used a platform. They have a scheduled meeting time. They come, they run their own EZ Live program. Again, having never experienced it before. They meet with tons of people, they collaborate together and they leave, and that’s a wonderful testament to the easy use of the EZ Live on the low end. Meanwhile, we get used for professional producers who are used to very high end tools who come and help their customers create high-end programs using EZ Live as well.
Maddie: I think that’s one thing I really like about Engagez is that not just EZ Live, but with a lot of things that you guys have out there. I don’t need to have a doctorate degree in navigating digital platforms, Uhhuh to set up a really great, customized, branded, high quality event or webinar.
And I love the EZ Live just continues that message that you guys have started that anyone can use it.
Robert: Yeah. And I appreciate that point you’re making. It’s really critical to everything we do. So really appreciate that.
Maddie: So before we wrap up I just wanted to maybe get your final thoughts on what makes EZ Live different from other digital streaming platforms?
Robert: I think we’ve already probably addressed it. What I’ll just maybe do is I’ll just try to summarize in no particular order, what really makes us, makes it different from some other streaming tool.
I think that the fact that it combines collaborative meeting and webinar capabilities all into one solution is very unique. The way it does it, it’s very unique. The fact that it runs on all devices the same, it’s browser based. No download required. Once you design it, it’ll work on mobile, your tablets, as well as desktop. The webinar series capability that we built into the program is very significant. The ability to have a single person using it versus high-end professionals using it, or as well as high-end professional using it is also very significant. And again, probably the most important part is really it’s a tool that enables our customers deliver their experience with their audience. There’s a lot of fatigue of delivering Zoom experiences, standardized template based experience with the audience, with EZ Live we’re really enabling them to experience, to really create memorable experiences for their audience, so the audiences are engage, remain engaged, and come back again and again.
Maddie: Absolutely. I love all of this. I am really excited to finally see the launch of EZ Live so that everyone can start to use it to engage with their customers and their audiences.
Thank you so much Robert, for taking time to chat with us a little bit more in depth about EZ Live and we’ll make sure to put information for anyone who’s wanting to get started setting up their EZ Live sessions we’ll put information about getting you scheduled for a demo so that way you can start that process!
Again. Thank you, Robert.
Robert: Thank you so much, Maddie. Thank you so much for having me.
