Customer care videos: how to boost your customer services

“For generations, customer service has been a necessary evil in business because there were no financial incentives to be great at it and no financial disincentives to be terrible at it. But now that customer service is increasingly a spectator sport, the ramifications for this have changed a lot. That’s why I say that customer service, in many ways, is the new marketing.” - Jay Baer

So there you have it! In recent years, customer care services have started to coincide, in many ways, with marketing itself.

This concept – first articulated by international bestselling author Jay Baer – is cited by marketers all over the world, and is especially useful when trying to set the coordinates to orient themselves in the new and complex system of relationships between brands and consumers that digital disruption has helped establish.

In fact, in increasingly crowded and competitive markets, the only thing that is certain, apart from economic uncertainty (pun intended), seems to be the ever-increasing centrality assumed by the customer experience, understood as the inevitable test for customer loyalty.

A better Customer Experience? Strengthen your customer care!

A prerequisite for any customer experience that can now be considered positive – and that in the long run contributes to the success of a company – is the ability to create a valuable relationship.

To succeed in what is essentially a business of loyalty – challenging but less expensive than the acquisition of new customers – you must build advanced digital customer care, starting with tools that are able to quickly provide the right solutions to the problems of each user. Only in this way will it be possible to convince and therefore retain (and entertain) customers.

From the point of view of brand loyalty, the data paints a positive picture:

• 74% of customers consider themselves loyal to a brand or company
• 52% of customers admit to trying everything to keep buying their favorite brands (source: Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2020).

Yet, never take this loyalty for granted! Your customers’ loyalty must be cultivated with timely and respectful service actions, both off-line and especially online, starting with targeted investment on onboarding initiatives and ending with extended post-purchase management.

Without properly listening to the variety of voices that cross the brand’s communicative space, without making the effort to reach out to users by questioning them as individuals who are all unique in their own way, loyalty is exhausted and ends up being irretrievably lost.

The result is a loss of competitive advantage and a decline in sales. In other words: there isn’t much of a future without enhanced customer care.

Customer care services: a formidable weapon for keeping customer churn at bay

In addition, loyalty is not something to just be measured by a specific business function, it must be taken into account globally by the organization as a whole. In fact, loyalty impacts every customer contact with the company, every communication that reaches them, even if requested or solicited. Loyalty is more solid, convincing, and authentic if the various departments are committed to providing:

• Personalization of promotions and offers,
• Transparency of pricing models,
• Simplicity of the sales cycle,
• Quality of service,
• Satisfactory user experience of your products or services.

Among these, customer care is assuming strategic importance more and more every day.

The reason? When done well, it accomplishes two tasks that are crucial to the success of the business: it records and clearly describes the status of the brand’s relationship with the consumer and ensures that the customer chooses to stay (instead of switching to a competitor, the customer continues to perceive the relationship with the company as positive).

The alternative is the dreaded and hardly reversible customer churn, a phenomenon that, according to Zendesk, concerns about 50% of customers, who are ready to move on to a competitor after a single inadequate experience. If the negative experiences are more than one, that number soars to nearly 80%.

The factor that determines the destiny of the relationship with the customer is the perception of customer care.

Good customer care boosts customer loyalty. Negative experiences can sink it. In this case, a variety of factors come to bear, among them, the lack of correspondence with customer expectations, for example on response times and in incomplete, ambiguous, or redundant information, the latter, which is a direct consequence of poor (or non-existent) personalization, is decisive.

Another need has then quickly climbed the list of customer desires: the increasingly felt urgency to manage themselves independently, to set up purchasing habits by themselves, to resolve any critical issues without having to turn to operators, in a way that we could define as “self-service.”

Small Consumers Grow: How video enables self-service

While on the customer side, the transition to a self-service mode does indeed take absolute precedence – along with strengthening digital capabilities – this shift is also vividly reflected on the business side.

According to a recent Gartner survey, (conducted in October-November 2020 among more than 80 B2B and B2C customer care executives), 80% of customer service leaders planned to devote the largest share of their budgets to digital channels and skills by 2021.

The priorities that emerged from the report, in addition to the urgency of a rapid and timely update of legacy contacts, highlighted the need to transform the structure of customer care services to adapt them to a new status of user-consumer, who is even more empowered. The investments planned for 2021 should focus on:

• The migration of contact volume from assisted channels to self-service channels,
• The automation of customer service processes.

According to Jacob Joseph-David, senior principal of the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice, while the focus on broader digital and self-service product development has remained consistent in 2021 despite the dramatic situation caused by the pandemic, to deliver on the promise of a necessary evolution into digital, consumer service operators will need to continue to empower user autonomy and independence by adding “new channels and capabilities to make the functional transformation into a self-service-dominant organization.”

Personalization and interactivity: the key to success for customer care video

Among the tools designed to promote this profound renewal of customer care services – the other side of the coin of consumer legitimacy – a position of absolute prominence is occupied by video content, and in particular personalized videos, such as those created thanks to Babelee technology.

Starting from the collection, analysis, and interpretation of so-called smart data, which focuses on the subjects that make up the reference audience, Babelee allows companies to create the most suitable videos for their communication campaigns: scenes selected based on the data of each recipient, personalized and dynamic texts and banners, ad hoc chosen images, personalized voice thanks to text-to-speech technologies, personalized calls to action, pop-ups for in-depth analysis, and ad hoc paths for upselling and cross-selling actions.

It is also an integral part of Babelee’s data storytelling philosophy to enable video analytics, which makes it possible to measure the success of your video initiatives (in relation, for example, to ROI).

The personalization and interactivity of Babelee videos help improve engagement and rates for conversion and loyalty. And they lead to increased revenue.

But let’s explore: what goals can you achieve by using customer care videos?

Three reasons customer care needs video

Contacting customer care (via phone or via chat) with all the hassle of waiting, requests for information, and repetition is often experienced with a certain amount of frustration. The (precious) time that passes waiting for an answer, the annoyance of having to be “bounced” from operator to operator and from office to office before being able to talk to the “right” person, the feeling that the brand, despite the countless opportunities for knowledge offered by digital technology, continues to know nothing about our tastes and preferences…

The reasons that customers may abandon you are many, but we can trace them to two broad categories:

• The customer feels neglected, misunderstood, treated poorly
• The customer’s problem is not resolved in a timely manner

To neutralize these two classes of risk, customer care videos can make a substantial contribution, because they save time, engage the customer in ways previously unthinkable, and provide solutions (and information) quickly.

1. Save time

Whenever customers encounter problems with your product or service, support videos allow them to help themselves. Video gives the user the feeling of finally being in control, and it takes up less time than the more classic call to the call center (which, ican go on for several minutes depending on the severity of the issue).

It’s no wonder then that 68% of customers prefer to watch a video to try to solve the problem rather than calling the company’s support team, and that the number of calls received tends to plummet in the presence of a video marketing strategy designed for support services (source: Wyzowl).

In order to create customer care videos that are truly effective, you first need to review previous support requests so you can determine the most common problems your customers encounter. From there, you can create content (even in a series, to delve into certain aspects of troubleshooting) that is made available to watch over and over again, at the customer’s leisure.

2. Engaging the customer

Videos also do well when it comes to customer engagement. In an incredibly congested media ecosystem, they succeed better than other content not only in gaining the attention of potential customers but in keeping it for the time necessary to build and strengthen their relationship with the brand.

Video is the digital object that guarantees the best results in terms of involvement, for a rather limited investment. Even more effective are personalized videos, which are built according to the characteristics of the recipients, their recurring choices, and their preferences.

3. Provide solutions (as personalized and interactive as possible)

Selling a product or a service without a clear and comprehensive description and without a space dedicated to possible criticalities is a short-sighted choice in the long run. Video can provide tremendous support, also in this case.

An explanatory video that takes into account the customer’s history (previous acquisitions, interactions with other touchpoints, any feedback, etc.) and that can accurately outline the main advantages of the product or service is able, more than other tools, to better respond to the specific customers needs (and, ultimately, to create greater satisfaction).

If this overview is combined with interactive features, as is the case with Babelee videos, users can even take part in a real conversation with the brand, they can be called by name, and they can feel memorable.

To keep up with the needs of increasingly savvy consumers, companies have no choice but to enrich their support basket: contemporary customer care must be fluid and create engagement across all available channels and formats. The support team can no longer limit itself to giving information after being directly contacted, but must offer attentive, continuous listening, and answers in real time (or as close to real time as possible).

Alongside the traditional telephone call center, new channels of interaction are therefore appearing, among which, as we have seen, videos have carved out a privileged space: a catalyst element made by technological innovation and narrative richness. Today, videos represent the boost that customer care needs most.