When you think of customer service, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? It’s often a telephone call with some on-hold messaging or a chatbot at the bottom of a website. But customer service has grown to be so much more than that, and a great place where your business can start expanding its customer support is with customer service videos.
Quality customer service helps with key areas of business success like customer retention and brand loyalty, and it can even increase a customer’s lifetime value. The challenge with modern-day customer support, though, is that customers expect immediate responses and it’s hard to keep response times fast enough to keep everyone satisfied.
We’ve all been the busy customer ourselves, so we know what it’s like to want a quick answer to our question in a format that is just a click away. That’s where customer service videos come in.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the benefits of customer service videos and the different types that each bring something different to your customer’s experience.
Why You Should Embrace Customer Service Videos
In 2021, it’s likely that your customers are home much more than they used to be, and with that time spent at home comes increased time spent on the internet. In a recent survey of creative professionals on Voices, we found that internet videos were the fastest-growing content being produced in 2020. Brands are trying to reach their customers at home through internet videos, and you can do the same thing with your customer service.
Videos have the unique ability to explain complex concepts quickly or to show a process that would be difficult to explain over the phone. They also help you engage with your customers by quickly and thoroughly answering their questions on social media, via email, and in your knowledge base. Customer service videos satisfy the customer who would rather source an answer to their question online than call your support team, and they have the added bonus of answering questions for your customers before they know to ask them. According to Wyzowl, 43% of video marketers have seen a decline in support calls since introducing video.
By offering resources such as product tutorials and walkthrough videos, you empower your customers to enhance their interaction with and comprehension of your product. Creating tutorial videos allows you to provide comprehensive assistance, addressing their queries in advance and promoting a better understanding of your business. Moreover, you encourage them to explore your website for troubleshooting instead of immediately resorting to phone calls, thereby driving additional traffic to your website.
The Different Types of Customer Service Videos & Examples
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all customer service video, but rather there are different styles and different content you can produce to meet the needs of your customers. Let’s go through a few of them.
Animated Customer Service Videos
Sometimes animation can communicate a concept much better than a 1,000-word article can. While your marketing team probably does a great job putting animated promotional videos together, the style can also be used to help out your customer support team. You can even combine animation with traditional video recordings and create fun video overlays to keep your customers engaged.
Animation can be a great tool to explain a specific process that is unique to your business, it can bring any concept to life, and it can communicate an abstract idea.
If your company has any characters associated with its brand or even a brand mascot, an animated video is the perfect place to incorporate them. Another benefit of animated videos is that they are easier to dub into another language using a voice generator than a video with on-camera actors.This allows your customer support team to efficiently provide support in multiple languages.
GloriaFood, an online ordering service for restaurants, created an animated customer service video about how to activate online payments. This visual medium is engaging and helps to answer a common question for the company.
Product Tutorial Videos
The internet is the first place consumers tend to go when researching a product, and 80% of people switch from online search to video when doing that research, according to Think with Google. Your product tutorial videos are a key component in your company’s sales cycle.
Think of a product tutorial video as a vehicle to highlight your product’s differentiator. What makes your product stand out from its competitors? These types of videos can also be helpful when you make a change and want to walk your customers through the new ways they can interact with your product. The production value for these videos doesn’t have to be very high, it can be as simple as filming your screen on Zoom and adding voice over.
Screen recordings are great for showing that you have a real, functioning product. Seeing is believing, and these tutorial videos allow customers to watch, learn, pause, rewind, and follow the steps to accomplish the task at hand.
Dropbox used this format to provide a tutorial to explain their desktop integration feature:
FAQ Videos
You can add value for your customers by creating a straightforward video that directly answers their questions. Your customer support team probably already has a list of frequently asked questions handy, but you can also survey your customers to generate the list of questions for an FAQ video.
Whether you hire an actor to create a high-quality video or use your internal team as the on-camera stars, in the end your goal is to both lower support cases and increase brand loyalty.
Personalized Videos from Customer Support
The benefits of customer service videos go beyond closing out your team’s tickets. Producing quality customer service videos actively improves the relationship between customer support and your customers. A quick thank-you video from customer support can turn a negative or neutral exchange into a positive one. That one-to-one, personal video shows that your support team cares for its customers and can actually increase customer satisfaction.
Your customer support team can use personalized videos to thank your customers in many situations. Whether it’s to thank them for their call, their business, or for taking a meeting with you, the main message you’re trying to get across is that you appreciate them.
Expand Your Knowledge Base with Customer Service Videos
Not every customer will reach out directly to customer support when they have a question, which is why a thorough knowledge base is important. According to Zendesk, 91% of customers would opt to use a knowledge base if it meets all of their needs. That’s a lot of customers going online for answers. Adding videos to your knowledge base helps ensure that those answers are found in more than just a written format.
A knowledge base is a collection of questions and answers available on your website that goes over frequently asked questions, common issues, and how-to guides. It exists to help your customers find solutions to their problems and acts as the first step in their information-finding quest when they have a question about your product or service. While a detailed explanation is often warranted in a knowledge base, sometimes adding a video can succinctly communicate in ways that the written word can’t.
Another benefit of including videos in your knowledge base is that you can track engagement. Through a video analytics tool, or simply through YouTube’s analytics dashboard, you can easily see how many people are watching your videos and where they are dropping off, allowing you to use that information for the next video you create.
Final Thoughts
Meet your customers where they already are, which is on the computer, a tablet, or their phones. Incorporating customer service videos into your workflow is an easy way to increase brand loyalty, increase customer retention, increase a customer’s lifetime value, and helps you communicate what’s most important to your brand. We all know the importance of turning customers into brand advocates, and customer service videos are one more tool you have at your disposal to make that happen.
