Crafting Customer Engagement Part Three
Welcome to article three of four, focusing on how you can use video to create the perfect customer engagement experience. You can find lots more great information in part one, and part two.
Social distancing has focused most sectors of the economy on digital-first sales strategies. This will only amplify the value of video to marketing and customer engagement. The ability to mimic face-to-face interactions at a distance and at scale has never been more important. When it comes to connecting with customers and, increasingly, meeting client demands, video should be front and center. It might be more difficult to provide a decent face-to-face customer experience in current climates, but with video you have the next best thing.
Customer experience is the field of understanding and managing the perception customers have of a brand through how they interact with it. The foundation of customer experience is the recognition that the customer’s subjective experience of a brand constitutes their reality, and the only reality that matters is the reality of the customer.
Every way in which customers interact with a brand forms a part of their experience, beginning with their response to marketing and their engagement with your client’s website, to their use of the product, and how the company follows up. Video can play a leading role in each of these stages.
Person to person — at scale
The personal touch at scale is one of video's greatest assets, and the most important idea in customer experience: that they are ultimately interacting with another person. Anything that reminds the customer of this is good. Depending on the product, target customer, and brand image, it may be more or less appropriate to incorporate humor and entertainment into your videos. In any case, make these interactions feel personal.
How to make customer experience videos
Make a list of the key pain points that customers have using your client’s product: renewing, changing services, finding the answers to their questions, etc. Each of these points can be the subject of one or more videos.
By providing customers with a video for every one of their concerns, you reduce the burden on customer service staff immeasurably. You also conform to the expectations of customers. As we have addressed, 68% of customers would actually rather watch a video than speak with customer service teams. Home Depot, for example, has had tremendous success using video to creatively improve customer experiences.
Stage 1: How to use your product
Make a video demonstrating the customer’s first steps after purchasing your product. The days of printed instructions are numbered, as people often go straight to an instructional video online without even looking at them.
As anyone who has assembled a product from printed instructions knows, a slightly complicated procedure can be extremely difficult to describe in words, even with graphic aids. A video, however, can demonstrate exactly how to do something with no ambiguity, whether it's physical assembly or installation, a process done on a computer, or exactly how to use the product.
A strong approach to the instructional video is to show clear video footage of each individual step, perhaps from multiple different angles in particularly complicated cases, accompanied by narration explaining the action. You should also include asides for additional clarity if needed. This combination of narration and video demonstration is proven to be effective for imparting a thorough understanding of the instruction.
Always present each step in the exact order that your customer would be experiencing them. This should go without saying, but is often overlooked by designers who are experts regarding the product. Assume little to no prior knowledge on the part of the viewer. The bottom line concern must always be that the viewer can follow the instructions to the end with no confusion or unanswered questions.
Example: Asana | How to Asana
Asana’s videos maintain a consistent theme to help create a sense of familiarity. With each video you know you’re going to have the same person instructing you, the same bright and colourful background, the same cheery music, and it will be all wrapped up in 2 minutes or less. This certainty helps to create the online equivalent of going into a cafe when you know your favorite barista is going to have your order queued up before you even say it. You know exactly what sort of experience you’re going to have, and so the barrier for entry seems lower. These branding touches also help to add some additional pep to what could be an otherwise dry video.
Stage 2: Further assistance
Addressing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) is a perfect candidate for the video approach. Many companies now post answers to questions written in by customers as a regular feature of their website. This is a great way to stay in constant touch with customers, as well as impart a sense of your company's responsibility to them — the sense that their questions and concerns will be addressed.
Any questions a customer might have are good topics for a video, including how to find more help if they need it. An affable person simply answering the questions can be perfectly adequate, but you might look for opportunities to add graphics and animation or other visual aids to make the video more engaging.
Having an array of videos that answer questions and demonstrate troubleshooting can drastically cut down the amount of direct support customers require. One video can be used in place of potentially thousands of help calls, allowing your client’s business to vastly scale its customer support.
Example: Experian | #CreditChat Advert
A few years back, Experian ran this successful video campaign. They would get users or potential users to submit questions via Twitter, and then answer them in a recorded live stream. It provided a level of transparency to a historically opaque industry, as well as showing a more human side to the company, while leaving viewers more informed. It’s the video equivalent of a great customer service experience.
Stage 3: The next level
Another topic particularly suitable for regular video posts is business and product information that goes beyond the standard details. Features of a product that are not immediately apparent, or uses for it that are not obvious, are great subjects for 'next level' or 'power user' videos.
Then there are informative, 'did you know' style videos. These could be in the form of factoids, history, or anecdotes relating to your company or product. Interesting details can appeal to people's desire to learn new things, and stories about your company and products go a long way to help customers relate to your client’s brand. The key, in any case, is to focus on people above all else.
This kind of video content is not only great for new customers, but can also be a valuable asset within a customer loyalty program. If you make quality, helpful content, you can use that to stay in touch with customers and add value to that interaction.
Example: Benefit Cosmetics | Tips & Tricks
Consumers will seek out how-to videos when they’re either considering a purchase, or have made a purchase and need some post-purchase support with it. Power-users are a different breed, however. Rather than being a one and done visitor to your content, they will continue to come back for more - sometimes when they’re not even considering a purchase. This is where brands like Benefit Cosmetics shine. Their videos position them as less of a product, and more of a way of life. Their dedicated customer base will check back in for regular content updates, and so when it comes time to consider a purchase, Benefit Cosmetics will already be the first company on their mind.
Using your video library to deliver
The key to quickly churning out a large number of customer experience videos is to have a substantial library of material to draw from. These videos will normally be very short, and can often utilize some of the same material. With enough footage in your back catalog, it will be possible to address customers’ concerns as they become apparent to you without having to shoot anything new at all.
Having your current video repository and archives be transparent and easily searchable is necessary for this. You’ll also want your archives to be fully integrated with your editing software. Your ability to do this will be impacted by some of the technical choices you make, and how these impact the workflows you can build. Specifically, you need to make sure you invest in a quality MAM system — something we’re going to address in detail in the next section.
Remember, as an agency, you need to keep the archive material for your different clients separate. Your clients own the rights to the footage, so you can’t repurpose between clients. But, the more you can put to use any given client archive, the better results you will be able to achieve.
Speaking of results, we recently sat down with four of the world’s largest creative agencies - FCB, Wavemaker, GMR and Mustache - to learn how they’ve adapted to the new realities of producing video content. Thanks to the incredible insight each gave us into their remote video production workflows and customer successes, we've been able to create the go-to playbook and report for any creatives producing video right now;
The Future of Video for Creative Agencies, by the World's Largest Creative Agencies
Click here to head back to the main hub and read the rest of our customer engagement series. Or book some time below with Gabrielle to find out how Curator can streamline your production workflow and increase your ability to move, manage, and monetize your assets, leaving you free to spend more time creating. 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼
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