Over the past ten years, customer support has evolved at warp speed. In highly competitive markets, with distracted, time-pressed customers, excellent customer service can make or break a company. It’s imperative for businesses, no matter distance or size or budget, to make each and every customer feel as if they are the only one.
In this post, learn how to turn customer support into an asset for your business by using video to drive engagement, utilization, and retention.
Engagement
Great customer support isn’t just about answering technical questions or solving specific problems. It’s also about ensuring your customers are engaged with your product and services.
Video can drive engagement by helping customers get to know your company on a personal level, enhancing product knowledge, and inspiring them with new ways to get the most out of your offering.
Here are just a few ways to do this:
Introduce the Team
Use video to introduce your team members, especially your customer support staff. Highlight their skills, but also allow their personalities to shine through.
For example, Starbucks really nails it with this video about their scholarship program for baristas:
You get to know the people making your coffee, while also gaining an appreciation for the ways in which Starbucks supports its employees. A heart-warming video like that does double-duty: creating a personal connection, and driving brand affinity.
For your purposes, you might consider introducing your head of customer support or success. Chances are, your customers will interact with this person, or a member of their team, at some point.
Putting a face to a name adds a very personal touch. When customers hear how passionate this person is about providing great customer service, they’ll be more inclined to reach out for help when they need it.
FAQ
Use video to answer questions that seem to come up over and again. This shows you are listening, paying attention and eager to assist.
Starbucks has an excellent example of an FAQ video on their 1912 Pike blog. It walks you through all the steps to make cold brew coffee using their products at home:
By positioning your company as an expert, these FAQ videos help drive engagement because viewers will turn to you first when they have other relevant questions.
Make sure you also monitor your social media pages and relevant discussion boards for inspiration as well. As it just so happens, these are also great places to share your FAQ videos.
Not only will this set you apart from your competitors, it will often prompt discussions with potential customers, and new opportunities to highlight your offerings.
Reviews
Use video to allow your customers to leave a review on verified purchases. You can then share their reviews if they include useful information for other potential customers. They may even come up with ideas or product hacks your company overlooked.
Amazon supports video reviews on its products, and we think this will become more common over time. Here’s an example of what a video review looks like on Amazon:
They often get buried by other reviews, however. Since video can have a large impact on customer purchase decisions, that probably isn’t ideal.
Depending on how you plan to use them, you may want to feature video reviews prominently on your product page, or make them easy to find.
If you aren’t getting a lot of videos from customers, or they aren’t quite on the mark, try asking a few pointed questions or providing guidelines to ensure a useful response. Here is a guide with more details on leveraging user-generated content for business.
By allowing customers to help each other make better decisions, you increase engagement by building a sense of community. This can be incredibly empowering to customers, new and old.
Utilization
Once your engaged prospects become customers, there are still plenty of reasons to continue adding video – starting with the moment they sign up.
On-boarding is an excellent opportunity to use video. When new customers signup, most companies rely heavily on email and text to get them up to speed. That might be adequate for some, but it could be putting new users to sleep. And, anyone skimming the emails might miss important information.
Sharing a charismatic, succinct video offering a clear visual guide to using your product is a highly effective alternative. Not to mention it will help you stand out from your competitors.
This example from Canva walks you through their design platform in under a minute. It still manages to touch on nearly every step you’d need to take to make a beautiful custom image using their platform:
This makes the on-boarding process much less cumbersome for the customer. It can even serve as a sales tool by making it clear how quick and easy it is to put an attractive design together.
On-boarding videos can also help you better understand the customer journey since you can review engagement heatmap reports for individual viewers. This reporting allows you to see which parts of the video the customer is engaging with in particular.
Read this article to learn more about how video can be leveraged beyond on-boarding for growth marketing.
New Features
Using video to update your customers on new features and developments is yet another way to drive utilization. New features or upgrades are exciting, and a perfect subject for an engaging video.
Rather than letting them get lost in email inboxes, surface your feature release videos prominently on your website. Consider adding them to your help site, specific product pages, or featuring them on your blog. Our customizable video embed codes are perfect for sharing these types of videos.
Real Customer Stories
Go a step further by showcasing how other customers are already using or benefitting from your product or service. This could include just one of your features, or a new development that improves the product over all. Importantly, you don’t have to get everything in one video.
Invision – a collaborative design product – achieves this by featuring snippets of interviews with several of their customers. The video is placed prominently on their homepage, and allows you to quickly get a sense of the main benefits of using their product. Here’s an extended version featuring MailChimp:
By sharing stories from real customers, you’ll engage prospects and users in multiple ways. This approach has the benefit of a human touch, inspiring ideas, and ramping up your engagement potential online.
Retention
New sales are exciting, and tend to get most of the focus when it comes to video campaigns. However, repeat customers and loyal users deserve plenty of attention too. After all, high churn rates can kill your business.
Leveraging video for retention can help engage your customers and drive repeat sales. Here are some examples of ways to do that.
Personalized Videos
Use a video to respond to a question about your product or service. If an existing customer emails customer support with a question, send them a video with a short response, including their name. This is a powerful and personal touch where you can really show your customers how much they mean to you.
It doesn’t have to be polished, and it’s ok if it’s off-the-cuff. It’s really the direct connection that counts.
This video from TD Bank involves much bigger stunts than what we’re really suggesting in this section. However, it’s such a great illustration of the delight a personalized surprise can bring to a customer, that we had to include it here.
A Big Thanks
In the same vein as the TD Bank video above, customers should feel important, not like another number. This is a great opportunity for a really personal and human touch.
Try just saying “thank you”. Create a short clip to thank your customers, by name if you can.
This example from Asha House is a perfect example of a more general thank you to all of their supporters after achieving their goal.
Asha House THANK YOU from The Sound of Hope.
By keeping the focus on their customers, rather than their products or the company, the message comes across as genuine.
If you are struggling to find an occasion to send this type of message, think about what you know about your customers. Celebrate milestones, like the anniversary of when they became a customer, or their birthday, if you have that information. Consider offering a loyalty reward if they’ve been around for a while.
The main goal is to continue building an authentic connection with individuals. Still, there are some benefits. Your customer is far less likely to go elsewhere for the same product or service if their loyalty is appreciated and rewarded by a friendly, human face.
In short, we think video is the ideal medium to cultivate a feeling of human connectivity between a company and a customer online. Have you implemented video for customer support? How did it go? Let’s discuss in the comments below.
