Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime. Trite as this age-old adage may seem, its subtle wisdom remains surprisingly relevant – though perhaps not in the way that you might expect.
In the 1960s, Stanford University professor Walter Mischel began conducting the first stages of a now-famous experiment that involved giving young children a choice: Eat one marshmallow right now, or wait 15 minutes and receive two. Over the next decade, Mischel carefully tracked the progress of these children as they grew up and made their way through the world. Those who waited patiently for a pair of treats were statistically much more likely to lead traditionally “successful” lives, while their less patient peers had higher rates of obesity, substance abuse, and poor grades.
Our theoretical hungry man has a similar choice to make: Eat one fish now, or wait, study, and then eat as many he wants later. If we examine our age-old saying from that perspective, the real moral is about how people who can focus on the long-term reap greater rewards. The same is true for modern brands and businesses – look past the instant gratification of a single sale, and there’s so much opportunity for you to discover.
At the core of every long-term brand relationship is customer support. It’s one thing to woo a potential buyer into making a purchase before sending them on their way, never to be heard from again. But if your brand wants to minimize churn and improve overall consumer loyalty, then you need to develop a support system that doesn’t just catch new customers, but keeps them satisfied as well.
Customer Support Meets Video
It’s no secret that video content is one of the most powerful tools that any brand or business has at its disposal. 90% of users already say that video is helpful in the decision stage of their buyer’s journey, while the presence of video increases both dwell-time and click-through rates by as much as 200-300%. Little surprise, then, that video is also an underrated tool for developing an incredible customer support strategy.
One of the biggest challenges of good customer support is also one of the most basic: Finding the time to quickly, effectively engage with every single customer who needs–or thinks that they need–your help. We’ve all had to sit on hold at some point in our lives, waiting for a customer support rep to become available, our phones in hand, grinding our teeth to the stock Vivaldi. Nothing turns potential buyers away from your brand faster than being made to feel impotent and unimportant. The numbers support this assertion: 89% of consumers have switched to doing business with a brand’s competitor following a poor customer service experience.
So how can your brand counteract this trend? Deploying a massive customer support team is financially inefficient, but maintaining only one or two overworked reps is terrible for managing your customers’ needs quickly and efficiently. With that in mind, video is a terrific addendum to the human element of your customer service – and one that can make the experiences of your customers staggeringly better.
As we’ve stated many times before, customers do not buy from brands – they buy from people. So rather than an automated phone line or cut/copy FAQs, why not try organizing key information about your brand (and its various products/services) into a video format instead? While speaking to a rep over the phone is cold and impersonal, video content puts an engaging, agreeable face on the least agreeable part of the customer experience. People would much rather hear about why their computer, or cable service, or vegetable chopper isn’t working from a charming, attractive speaker, as opposed to an unseen, robotic monotone.
Additionally, when both video and text are available, 72% of B2C consumers prefer learning about a business via the video option. This stays true for the world of B2B companies, as 59% of senior executives also prefer watching video to reading text. The vast majority of consumers retain information better when it comes from a video, and stay tuned watching longer than they would otherwise; both statistics that are especially beneficial for customer service. If a consumer absorbs all of the pertinent details they need from a single customer service video, they’ll spare you a frustrated follow-up call.
Personalization and Beyond
While a thorough archive of customer service videos is a great first step, your brand can go even further by pursuing the advent of personalization. Remember what we said about consumers buying from people, not brands? Well, personalized video draws on that connection as well. It makes consumers feel heard and recognized; like their pain points genuinely matter to your brand – which they should. Plus, emails featuring personalized video content have a conversion rate 500% higher than those without. That means just by responding to your customer’s queries through personalized video, your odds of converting them grow exponentially!
Another benefit of video content to consider is its array of analytic features and tools. Most video hosting platforms offer various options to help you figure out what your consumers need the most help with, and why. For example, if you’re a brand that manufacturers furniture, and your consumers keep returning to a video about how to assemble a certain type of chair, maybe that means you need to re-evaluate your chair’s design – which clearly isn’t as intuitive as you intended it to be. Video analytics are an excellent way to examine customer behavior (especially their pain points) at a broad scale and–more importantly–respond to it.
Your brand or business will always need some humans to respond to customers in real-time. For that reason, video content is not meant to entirely replace your existing customer support system, but to work in tandem with it. Through customer support systems, brands are able to examine what works–and what doesn’t–in their business. Video takes that same information, but intuitively streamlines it for all involved. Try collaborating with a company like Lemonlight or creating your own today – and watch your customer satisfaction soar!