[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here isn’t a business out there that can afford to have bad customer service, but keeping clients happy is about more than just delivering your product or service promptly. After all, a happy client will be your key to repeat purchases, and that means a higher average value per customer as well.
For any business that has an online presence, video is the key to great customer service. It’s estimated that video will drive 80% of traffic by 2019, and your business can use video in a variety of different ways. Here are five of the best ways that you can improve your customer service using video.
Live Video Chat
Customers are increasingly tech savvy, and they’ve moved far beyond asking for a simple text chat or, even worse, email based chat with their customer support teams. Those methods are fine, and definitely better than nothing, but video chat is definitely the way to go. Not only is it what your customers want, but 31% of buyers report that they’re more likely to make a purchase following a live chat.
How-To Videos
Using video doesn’t always have to be in real-time either. Creating a set of how-to videos is a great way to instruct your customers on how to better use your product, and it can have the additional benefit of lowering the number of customer support inquiries. No matter your margins, an increase in your customer retention rate is always a good thing for your business. In fact, according to a study by Bain, even a 5% increase in customer retention can improve your profitability by 75%.
FAQ Videos
While how-to videos might be useful to introduce your customer to your product or to show them how to use a set of features, these videos can sometimes be too long to be useful to customers that are just trying to solve a particular problem quickly. In addition to how-to videos, you should also prepare some short videos that tackle specific problems that customers may have with your product or service. For example, if your business sells a piece of software, you might want to have how-to videos showing how businesses can utilize different parts of the software more efficiently, but you can use 1-2 minute FAQ videos to help customers fix specific problems that they’ve had with the software.
The best way to do this is by looking through your past customer support inquiries, and making short FAQ videos to answer the most common questions that your customers have had. While it can be good to do some brainstorming in-house as well, answering your customers’ actual questions can be far more impactful.
Customer Video Reviews
On the flip side, your customers can also use video to help you sell your products. This can be done in a few different ways, but one of the easiest is by having your customers’ record videos for you. There are a few different ways that you can go about this, from using publicly available website like YouTube or by taking them (with permission) from customers’ social media posts. Alternatively, you could solicit customer feedback and use their feedback in your own videos, either as a text overlay or by using an actor as a stand-in for the customer. The ultimate goal is simple, to show potential customers that other people have benefitted from your product or service in the past.
Webinars
For businesses that have a longer sales process, one of the most crucial parts of the sales process is making sure that customers have the right information in order to get comfortable with making the purchase is important. If you can’t be in the room with your customer, then using a webinar is a great idea. If you’re going to go through the trouble of hosting a webinar, then you’re doing a serious disservice by not using video. Video will allow you to show off the benefits of your product in far greater detail, and it’s a much more interactive method of selling as well.
Using video doesn’t have to be difficult, and today there are plenty of solutions for implementing streaming video quickly and easily. Video chat software development kits like Agora.io allow you to easily implement real time video and audio streaming, and there are a whole host of social media options like YouTube that can be used to store video for later playback on your website. No matter what, video is the future, and you need to make sure that your business is ready for it.
Is your business using video yet? If not, then what’s stopping you? Let us know in the comments.
