One of the biggest issues customers have with modern marketing, advertising, and customer service initiatives is that oftentimes these strategies are selfish in nature. Today’s customer is savvy and understands when a brand is self-serving. With that being said, your biggest objective moving forward should be to find ways to genuinely help customers by satisfying their pain points and needs. Ultimately, this selfless approach is what will produce positive returns.
The Role of Video in Selfless Customer Service
When you look at digital marketing and online customer service in 2016, video is the most powerful medium. The reason is that modern consumers respond to video in ways that aren’t possible with standard text based content.
How are they responding? Well, consider the following statistics:
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Social video generates an impressive 1200 percent more shares than both text and images combined.
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Videos on landing pages may increase conversions by 80 percent or more.
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Brands using video attract 41 percent more web traffic than companies not using video.
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74 percent of millennials find video helpful when comparison shopping between brands.
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“How to” searches on YouTube have increased by 70 percent over the past year.
Hopefully these stats provide you with some context in regards to the value of video. Furthermore, if you want to instigate change, create value, and meet customers where they are, then you need to learn how to leverage video content in an effective way for your specific industry. It’s the most selfless and customer-empowering communication tool you have at your disposal.
3 Brands Putting Customers First
The best way to understand the role of video in customer service is by looking at how some of the leading brands are leveraging it. Let’s take a look at a handful of examples:
The automotive industry is a highly technical one, so it’s imperative those companies are able to provide customers with clear and concise guidance on their vehicles and specific parts needed. There can be dozens of part numbers for any part-type so if representatives aren’t very clear, customer service departments can become overloaded with issues and concerns – which leads to much bigger issues down the road.
One example of how video can enhance the customer experience when technical concepts are involved can be seen in this video on eEuroparts about complicated Mercedes brake parts. This informational video supports a larger article about how the Mercedes-Benz SBC brake-by-wire works. This resource gives customers insightful and actionable material that they can then use to better understand and fix/upgrade their Mercedes’ advanced brake parts accordingly.
eEuroparts.com creates numerous other videos focused on anything from racing entertainment to instructional resources for Mercedes as well as other European brands. The purpose of these instructional videos can range from helping motorsports participants upgrade and install the most popular performance parts in their race cars to even just providing plain and simple DIY tutorials for general parts repairs and maintenance.
When it comes to software, it’s good to attach self-help videos to the various features. This greatly reduces the demand for customer service and gives the customer something to reference at the same moment they have an issue or question.
Zoho understands this concept and posts video demo libraries for any product they sell, showcasing various features and tips. The videos in this example are for the CRM platform, and topics range from “Getting Started” to “Creating Custom Reports.”
Empowering customers to accomplish things on their own can be incredibly effective in strengthening brand image and building trust. Decks.com does a fantastic job of empowering customers in very constructive ways that keep them coming back for more.
This video is just one example of the value “how-to” videos bring. The topic is pretty straightforward – building deck stairs – but is a major pain point among the company’s target market. And as you can see, the video has been a hit with more than 1 million views, and it can be reasonably assumes that when those customers do need expert plans or advice they’ll remember decks.com for being a great resource in their time of need.
How Can You Use Video?
As a brand that values its customers, you also need to consider how you can use video to put customers first and satisfy their pain points and needs. Using these case studies as examples, start to brainstorm ideas and strategies that will help improve your customer service and marketing moving forward. Selfless strategies like these can take a company a long way.
