3 Fundamental Pillars of Technical Support and How Video Can Help

The expectations of customers are changing.

In a 2017 report, Salesforce found that Customer Experience is “the defining line between companies that are struggling and those that are thriving”. What’s more, customers are saying themselves that “their brand loyalty is heavily influenced by the quality of service they receive.”

This is why your service team needs to be staying ahead of the curve and finding ways to provide the best possible experience.

It’s also why they should be using video.

Top support teams are utilizing the power of video to provide a personal touch and engage deeper with customers across the entire lifecycle. In addition to marketing and selling to customers with video, Technical Support has found three key areas to increase customer satisfaction of our services:

1. Personalized Customer Engagement,
2. Knowledge Management, and
3. Troubleshooting and Case Resolution.

Let’s dive into exactly how video can help.

1. Personalized Customer Engagement

How often, as a customer service professional or even consumer have you written or received an email that apologizes for a bad experience or a mistake?

I’d bet at least once.

While apologies are good, apologies over email often sound insincere or lacking in empathy. Let’s face it, there are only so many ways to apologize in writing. If you introduce video, however, you introduce a whole new form of communication: body language. Now your clients will see you empathizing with them. They’ll hear their name spoken and the physical gesture of a hand reaching out to them directly, which shows your team means their issue seriously.

Speaking in short, clear, actionable sentences along with verbal pauses give you the ability to add resolve to your messages and more easily demonstrate commitment to improving. Video also invites a more open dialog with your clients by humanizing your message and opening yourself up to a response.

On a brighter note, video doesn’t only have to be the way you crawl (graciously) back from a mistake. It can also be used for positive outreach! Try replacing automated text-based “thank you” notes with personalized videos. You’ll be guaranteed to stand out in your customer’s inbox as well as make them feel like they’re worthy of your time (always great for that NPS score). Check out an example of one of these that I recorded below:

2. Knowledge Management

Today more than ever, customers expect a seamless experience. Apps for your phone don’t come with manuals and software applications are moving to digital knowledge-bases instead of lengthy PDFs or printed guides.

The easier you can make it for your consumer to use your product, the better. A 2015 McKinsey customer experience survey of 27,000 US consumers across 44 industries found that companies that focus on providing a superior and low effort experience across their customer journeys realized positive business results, including a 10-15% increase in revenue growth and a 20 percent increase in customer satisfaction.

But this trend towards ease of use doesn’t mean that customers don’t need help at all. They do. But when they look for help, they want it in bite-sized chunks. By creating short, polished videos for product overviews and major features, you can onboard more end users and guide them towards successfully using your products in a repeatable and consistent way.

Organizing and structuring searchable video content and embedding that content in a Knowledge Base will give your customers access to branded instructions and best practices to onboard themselves.  With video analytics you are able to tell which of your videos are most or least engaging and how frequently they are being consumed. This leaves the perfect opportunity for optimizing your content. You control the branding and message, and your customers can self-service themselves more easily.

Take a look at an example we created for our own knowledge base for a question we’re regularly asked at Vidyard:

3. Troubleshooting and Case Resolution

Have you ever tried to explain a concept to someone over the phone or email and it just wasn’t getting through?

It happens all the time. For me, I was speaking with a non-technical customer early in my career who had never resized a window within the Windows Operating System. Explaining how to position the mouse pointer over the edge of a window until a double arrow icon appeared was painful. The terms “pointer”, “window”, “double-arrow”, “click-and-hold” and others were all foreign to this user.

Had I had access to video, the process likely would’ve been a lot less painful. Video would’ve easily shown the user exactly how to gesture, where to go, and what it looks like all in a more efficient way than simple text can.

Just think about this: the last time you tried to replace the air filter on your car, use a new recipe, or check out a movie review, where did you turn? Increasingly the answer is YouTube or Facebook channels showing quick 30-60 second videos of how to solve these common problems. Search Engine Island found that searches related to “how-to” on YouTube are growing 70% year over year.

Video engages you in the process of solving your problem. Explaining in text how to remove a hidden bolt, or tell when your curry sauce is ready is more difficult than showing exactly what it looks like.

Enabling your Technical Support Representatives to provide video walkthroughs of complex troubleshooting or implementation techniques will reduce your Average Case Handle Time, engage your customers in a more positive experience and lower your cost per case. By making these videos re-usable, your teams can focus on more critical or less common types of problems, providing the team with more engaging roles and speeding up the average handle time of even the most difficult cases.

Finally, video also humanizes your support team and can reduce escalating tensions by putting a face to the company representative. It removes the anonymity that makes criticism and insult so easy in our text-based connected world.  

Check out an example here:

Increasing customer engagement, improving average close time, and giving your customers the power to self-serve will positively impact your business. Utilizing video ensures your customers are best positioned for success and are more engaged with your brand.  As companies start to ask for higher levels of service and customer experience becomes a larger factor than price in the decision making process, it is vital to find new ways to ensure a consistent, effective method of working with your customers. Video brings the best of your team forward. It is more personal than text and less interruptive than a phone call. Your positive correlation to Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) will be seen and your team will have more energy to focus on the most important cases. This is the power of video within Technical Support.

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