In today’s age, customers expect instantaneous results. Why wouldn’t they? When you can order food to be sent to your office at the click of a button, immediately receive breaking news the second it happens with a push notification or even find a date by swiping on your phone, why would businesses overlook the impact that expedited response times have on building and sustaining customer relationships?
Perhaps the moment customers most expect immediacy is when they require support for a technical issue. Once a customer has dropped the coin and invested in your product or service, hiccups can quickly evolve from speed bumps to all-out frustration. Doing our best to mitigate those moments and keep them at a dull roar can go light years in customer retention.
It’s easy to partition our sales and marketing team separate from support and the technical side, but the reality is that the two are interlocking. A proliferation of customers drives the need for greater support staffs. Consequently, a well-versed support staff satisfies the customer and only betters their relationship with the company, helping the sales and account management side.
This is where video comes in. The added value that video delivers allows support teams to operate at a reduced scale while providing shorter wait times and creating results-driven support that customers will appreciate. Not only that, but it will keep support teams satisfied by not putting them in a position where they’re reiterating the same bits of technical advice 40 hours a week.
Video support can be tutorials. It can also mean more than tutorials; it can recreate scenery and make customers feel as though a support team member is right there in the room with them, guiding them through the troubleshooting process. Here are some ideas to implement video into your support team’s repertoire.
Transcript Service for Support Calls
Humans get distracted. We have a lot on our mind; that’s double and triple true when we’re sitting at work trying to figure out how a new piece of software works. When you consider that the average worker forgets half of what they learned in a training session within the first 30 minutes that follow, it goes without saying that your customers maybe, just maybe, will forget what the support team tells them as soon as the call is over. Now they feel embarrassed to call and ask the same questions again, or the support team gets tired of answering the same questions again, perhaps both at the same exact time.
Avoid this awkward blunder altogether with transcript service on video support calls. Reroute support calls through something like a video content management system (VCMS) that has transcription features. The software can record the support call for the customer, deliver it to the customer and even transcribe what was said to be read as a sort of CliffsNotes to revisit when needed. Long gone are the moments of customers feeling like they’re asking too many questions and not focusing hard enough on the responses. Furthermore, customers will be delighted to receive a follow-up email with access to this archived response. If they’re unfamiliar with this type of feature, they’ll probably pause and think to themselves, “Whoa… that’s really cool.” You’ve just given them another positive way to view your company and think of it as being on the cutting edge.
Use Video Screen Recordings
Let’s face it: it’s tough to visualize software for most of us. If someone is in need of troubleshooting, odds are they won’t necessarily be well-versed enough to to know the in’s and out’s of your product to the level that when a support member describes the fix, they’ll know exactly where to jump to. Add to it that you still hear the phrase, “interweb”, from time to time, and it’s entirely likely that terminology might not always be known or shared.
This is where screen recording can save a ton of time wasted in explaining these terms and describing pull-down tabs and menus. The whole point of screen recording is to give clients an actual look into the process that they’ll need to recreate, guiding them through example rather than hypotheticals.
You can go about it in two ways. The first would be to have your clients send their query direct to a support team via phone call or email. Rather than trying to explain over the phone or by email, the support team can use video capture to record screen guides on how to exactly make their systems work. Throw in a mic and capture audio of the support staff giving some guiding explanation to the screen tutorial, and suddenly your customers are replicating and learning simultaneously.
The other way to use screen record gets at the bigger picture of our next video support tactic…
Creating the Online Knowledge Base
While screen record is an excellent strategy to augment your customer’s support experience, save some time for your support team by setting up a digital archive of knowledge content related to the implementation of your products and services. These knowledge banks can be slowly built out by first recording support calls, creating basic how-to’s and FAQs, and using screen record feedback as your initial content. Add additional content week-by-week as queries come up, and over time you’ll have a one-stop location for your customers to interact with material without having to feel like they’re asking ‘dumb questions’.
You can host the content on a video platform, your website or through the aforementioned VCMS. Some of these platforms extend the range of your knowledge base to be more interactive, with additional search and sort functions, the ability to catalog content into learning modules, or the option to search by content directly within the audio of your videos.
Video is a central resource, and while advertising and training may seem like the classic go-to’s to exercise it’s flexibility, why not make life easier for your support team with a touch of video as well? Your customers will love the options and speed it brings, your support team will feel relieved and your sales will further flourish as your support is streamlined to achieve 100% customer satisfaction.
A version of this post originally appeared here.