How to Use Video for Customer Support, Retention, and Upsell
February 24, 2023·13 min read
Lori Connor
From support tickets, knowledge bases, customer onboarding, or retention and upsell—customer service videos help make the resolution process faster and simpler and can help delight your customers.
A few years ago, I had a full load of laundry to do, but my washing machine wouldn’t start. Faced with the prospect of an expensive professional repair (and wearing dirty clothes for the next few days), I took things into my own hands.
I found a helpful customer support video on YouTube diagnosing the problem. Following the video’s instructions, I was able to fix the machine’s faulty door sensor for the low cost of a single cable tie.
Stories like these are the new normal of customer support. Customers want quick and timely resolutions to their issues—preferably in an easy-to-digest format. Most people have quit a brand because of poor customer service experiences. To keep your customers, you need to provide fantastic support.
And speaking of quitting brands, with current economic forecasts, retaining customers in B2B is becoming more challenging than ever.
Video for customer support is the perfect way to deliver quicker and more effective solutions to customer woes. It speeds up the resolution process. Customers are happier with their support experience. It even boosts customer retention by helping them get more out of your product or service. And can provide the perfect opportunity to upsell them on additional services, products, or solutions that can further help them.
In this guide, we’ll scope out the benefits of customer support videos and using video for customer experience and success. We’ll dive into ways you can weave video into every part of your support framework and customer journey to delight and retain your best customers.
From support tickets to knowledge bases to customer onboarding, video helps make the resolution process faster Sign Up Free - Contents
- The Benefits of Customer Support Videos
- The Stats on How Customer Experience Teams Use Video
- 7 Ways to Put Video to Work for Your Customer Support and Experience
- How to Get Started with Using Video for Customer Support
The Benefits of Customer Support Videos
Marketers and sales professionals have long known how great video is for explaining things. And customer experience teams are catching on too. In fact, 74% of customer success pros report being satisfied with the results they get from video, and nearly 80% agree that video messages have increased their response rates.
The reason video is growing in population with this group is clear; video explains vast quantities of information in very little time and can connect personally in a way that text-based comms often can’t.
“How-to” is one of the top four categories on YouTube. It’s often the first place people go to get answers to all kinds of questions—like troubleshooting an issue or learning how to use a product.
People would rather watch a video to solve a problem with a product or service than contact the business’s support team. And when 42% of consumers are willing to pay as much as 16% more for a product with a friendly, welcoming experience, it’s in your best interest to make your support workflow shine.
And it works! Here at Vidyard, 80% of our customers watch our videos to learn how to use our platform or solve an issue they’re experiencing.
From support tickets to knowledge bases to customer onboarding, video helps make the resolution process faster Sign Up Free What Video Customer Service Can Do for You
- Decrease time-to-resolution by answering questions faster
- Deflect tickets by helping your customers help themselves
- Save on support costs by closing tickets sooner
- Increase customer satisfaction by transforming the support process into an experience
- Drive retention by providing personalized connections and attentive care
- Build relationships from a distance—translating into retention and upsell opportunities
Good customer service videos deliver knowledge in an easily consumed package. The best customer service videos build individual connections between customers and support agents, making users feel heard and cared for.
The Stats on How Customer Experience Teams Use Video
In our State of Sales and Virtual Selling Report, we found the use of custom-recorded video messages for outreach to prospects and customers continues to rise.
68% of customer success pros are using video messaging in their processes. (Translation: Chances are good that at least one of your competitors is already producing their own customer service videos.)
Not only that, customer experience roles are seeing some of the most significant impacts with video—nearly three-quarters are highly satisfied with their results, and 79% report higher response rates with video messaging.
In our survey, customer support and experience pros ranked their top use case for user-generated video:
- Outbound prospecting to uncover new business
- Product and solution demos to educate and troubleshoot
- Follow-ups to initial outreaches to continue to build relationships
In addition to user-generated video, these are the top traditionally produced types of video (usually created by marketing teams):
Ready to learn how to improve customer satisfaction by incorporating video into your support resources? Let’s explore seven surprisingly easy ways to get it done.
7 Ways to Put Video to Work for Your Customer Support and Experience
#1: Build a Video Knowledge Base
Most customers prefer self-service support, making a knowledge-centered service (KCS) methodology a must-have. When a customer asks a question, add it to your publicly-facing knowledge base so other users can quickly and conveniently find the answer.
You may already have a knowledge base, but you can take it to the next level by loading it up with video. Videos are concise ways to replace cumbersome written guides, PDFs, and manuals. Your customers will love how much quicker (and more engaging) it is to watch a video than it is to read a mountain of documentation.
Common Use Cases for Video in Your Knowledge Base
- Troubleshooting: Solve customers’ problems with pre-packaged video instructions that are easy to follow and understand.
- Account Setup: Walk customers through getting their accounts up, running, and calibrated to their needs.
- Video FAQs: Compile answers to customers’ most common questions into a video FAQ. Customers can refer to the FAQ for basic queries instead of contacting support. (You can expand these FAQs into full-blown webinars on key support topics.)
Using video for these knowledge base topics (and more) makes them easier to digest. Answering these low-hanging how-to questions upfront increases your deflection rate, saving you time for cases more deserving of support’s attention.
It also improves the overall B2C and B2B customer experience. Wouldn’t you be happier finding a convenient video answer in a knowledge base search instead of waiting for support to get back to you?
Our own Knowledge Base is full of video guidance. This particular video, which covers how to embed videos into emails, lives on the relevant Knowledge Base page alongside text instructions, letting users choose whether they want to read or watch.
How a Video Knowledge Base Boosts Your Video SEO
Search engine algorithms prioritize pages with high-quality content. Video is a great way to increase your site’s level of quality.
But search engine crawlers need a little extra help figuring out what your videos are about. Adding descriptions and tags to your knowledge base videos closes the gap. SEO-optimized videos that live on your site’s URL are a low-effort, high-impact way to give your site an extra search engine boost.
#2: Resolve Support Tickets with Video
Sometimes, a simple how-to just won’t cut it. When your knowledge base can’t solve the problem, customers contact support.
Video shines here too. Where once you would send a text-based response, a video message lets you stand out. Create individually tailored walkthroughs and demonstrations to resolve complex issues quickly. Just record and send.
Save Time with Asynchronous Video Support
Pre-recorded (or “asynchronous”) video can minimize or even eliminate:
- Emails, Calls, and Chat Support: Compress your text novella, marathon call, or endless back-and-forth chat conversation into a video that the user can watch, rewatch, and respond to at their speed.
- Annotated Screenshots and Remote Logins: Directly record your screen to show the user exactly what steps to take on their end. They can replay confusing segments to ensure they’re doing it right.
Video’s precision comes from showing instead of telling. It streamlines support, making it easier for both the agent and the customer. Tickets close earlier in the support process. Support personnel can be more productive. Plus, videos can be repurposed for future support requests or as knowledge base content. It’s a win/win/win.
Save Live Video Support for High-Tier Customers
But sometimes, a pre-recorded video just doesn’t cut it, especially when a one-to-one connection is a key part of your customer experience.
In this use case, synchronous video becomes even more powerful. Video chat customer service lets you link with customers on the other side of the world to provide them with the same level of care they’d receive walking into a brick-and-mortar location.
Premium brands that pride themselves on a concierge experience have the most to gain from this kind of video chat support. Personalized video customer service facilitates purchases with big price tags. It’s also a better way to support tailored product implementations that require more advanced troubleshooting than basic how-tos.
Getting Ahead with Video Customer Service
Video is so much more personal than a text or a phone call. Remember how we said that customers want their support experience to be, well, an experience? Responding to a ticket or reaching out using video is the perfect opportunity.
Customers pay the most attention to your service’s quality when they’re trying to fix an issue with your product. Even if your support staff can’t provide a perfect solution, they can make a personal connection through video to salvage the customer relationship (and maybe salvage future sales, too).
From support tickets to knowledge bases to customer onboarding, video helps make the resolution process faster Sign Up Free #3: Send Thank You Videos
It’s a great move to reach out to users after a support conversation to thank them for their time—especially if they didn’t receive the resolution they wanted.
Replace those dry emails with a personalized video from the support agent. The best thank you videos use the customer’s name and refer to the specific details of their support request. An engaging thumbnail, like your agent waving at the camera or holding up a piece of paper with the customer’s name, catches the viewer’s attention and seals the deal.
When an agent sends a personalized thank-you, a happy customer will be even more pleased with their quality of service. For the customer who didn’t get their issue solved, they will likely appreciate the effort to make amends. Either way, the extra bit of attention propels that net promoter score (NPS) a little higher.
#4: Create Customer Onboarding Videos
Getting started with a new product or service can be confusing. You can smooth this process using video, too.
Before onboarding, consider recording and sending an account hand-off video. Typically this is done by the account manager to introduce the customer success rep to the customer and outline the next steps in the onboarding process.
A video library of customer onboarding videos that you can send to new users makes their first few days or weeks with your product a breeze. Use these videos to take customers through the startup process. Then, you can show them how to use some of the best features your product has to offer.
A high-quality onboarding experience makes it easier for customers to start using your product. It also reduces the number of onboarding-related tickets they send to support. Plus, it makes it more likely that users will get invested in using the product, use it to its full potential, and ultimately become promoters of your brand.
Vidyard’s Close-Up video series details key features of our platform. We send these videos to new signups as part of the customer onboarding process. They help them better understand everything they can do with Vidyard.
#5: Optimize Support with CRM Integration and Video Analytics
Video integration is an amazing chance to increase the efficiency of your entire customer support org. Tools like video CRM integration and video analytics make your workflows cleaner and improve support outcomes.
Support CRM Integration
By integrating video right into your customer support software (CSS) or customer relationship management (CRM) system, you can connect users with the videos that can solve their problems most easily and directly.
Agents can create and share videos from support responses, automatically tie videos to customer case records, and trigger further actions. For example, if a customer only watches a part of a support video, agents can be notified to reach out to provide further help. Alternatively, if a customer watches a support video and indicates that it resolved their issue, they can provide feedback without leaving the video and automatically close the support ticket.
Video Analytics for Customer Experience
Video analytics gives you a look into what is and isn’t working for your support strategy.
With emails, portals, and PDFs, you send the content to the user and hope for the best. But with the right video analytics solution, you can see how much of each video a user views and where they’re pausing and rewatching.
Analytics also lets you continually optimize your entire team’s performance. As agents create, send, and save videos, your team can review what worked and what didn’t and see where they can improve.
Analytics is an excellent resource for insights to fuel training and coaching to make your customer experience the best it can be.
Here are a few examples:
- If viewers often skip a long intro sequence, you know to trim it down
- If one agent’s videos lead to drastically lower handling times, you can analyze what they’re doing differently and pass it on to the rest of your team
- If your customers consistently access a support video on Feature A but rarely on Feature B, you know to prioritize more content and agent training around that feature
#6: Leverage Video for Customer Retention and Upsell
Economic uncertainty and budget constraints are top concerns among sales organizations, so customer and revenue retention will continue to be a priority across the board. When retaining and upselling customers, customer success reps can follow traditional video prospecting tactics to stay connected with customers and share renewal or upgrade paths.
The benefit for customer experience teams using video for outreach is the relationship is already established. Unlike traditional cold prospecting, sales reps often have difficulty connecting with prospects and booking meetings.
Since using Vidyard, Pipedrive’s Growth team has experienced a 2x increase in upsell monthly recurring revenue. The reps using video messaging to engage with accounts have a 62% higher engagement rate and a 25% higher close rate.
Read the full story to learn more and hear from customer success rep Stacey Clarke on her success with the video below.
#7: Train Your Customer Service and Experience Teams with Video
The power of video for support and experience teams doesn’t only lie in external video. Video for corporate communications and collaboration can help scale training and onboard new hires effectively. It’s also a creative way for remote teams to collaborate more efficiently than always hoping on a live meeting.
Upskill Reps Efficiently with Customer Service Training Videos
Showing someone how to do something using a visual aid makes the process so much easier. (That’s basically what customer support is, right?)
The same goes for training reps. Customer service training videos help learners easily grasp complex topics or workflows by seeing them in action on screen.
Best of all, they’re a snap to put together. Just record a video once, then re-use it forever.
New hires can progress through your library of customer service training videos at their own pace or review modules they’re struggling with. Training videos also make great quick references for your existing employees: They’re ideal for introducing new tools or approaches to your reps, and they get way more engagement than a multi-page Word document.
Onboarding Remote Customer Support Hires with Video
If you’re working with a hybrid or fully remote customer support team, you already know how difficult it can be to bring them up to speed.
This is where customer service training videos come in. Getting videos from your manager is way more personal than faceless emails or PDFs. They help remote employees feel more connected with their team and the overall corporate culture.
For a little extra insight, check out the 13 things our own team learned from onboarding remote employees.
How to Get Started with Using Video for Customer Support
Now you know all the different ways that video can be used to enhance the experience for your customers, how do you get started? When recording personalized videos to communicate and troubleshoot with your customers, with a tool like Vidyard, you can get started for free.
Then it’s a good idea to work with your documentation and marketing teams to create the right mix of how-to content and organize it in a video library, so it’s easily manageable. Check out the Vidyard Knowledge Base for inspiration on how you can incorporate video into your support streams.
From support tickets to knowledge bases to customer onboarding, video helps make the resolution process faster Sign Up Free This post was originally published on October 21, 2020. It was updated on February 24, 2023.
