Concept Academy Masterclass CA-001: How to improve customer support and reduce costs using Video Content.

How to improve customer service using Video Content

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This is one of our masterclasses where we focus on topics that matter to our clients and organisations the world over. Today we're talking about the mistakes businesses make when it comes to customer support. Specifically, we're looking at why you're spending too much, but getting very little in return. And, we've got a solution.

Support is a suboptimal business

Support is a suboptimal business. For organisations that need to administer support in order to sell their product or service, customer service logistics are seen as a necessary evil.

Further, we now very much live in a world where customer experience is everything. Without support, people may fail to understand or properly use the product. At best, those people would return the product to you for a refund. That's one lost sale. At worst, they don't return the product, but instead share bad reviews with your future prospects. Some may do that very publicly. Bad reviews equals many lost sales. You will probably never know how many sales you've lost to your competitor because of that.

Support is often under-resourced, or worse; it takes your valuable resources from new development and new products. A well resourced support service is expensive, it's time consuming and repetitive. In this age of vast availability and price comparison a click or phone screen away, margins to support such a service sufficiently simply don't exist.

Your support teams endlessly deal with the same type of enquiries, until those support issues feed back to product development. But that cycle is a very slow process. In many cases, support issues are a product lifetime issue.

There is a way to save money and improve your customer experience.

There is a way to save money and improve your customer experience. I will introduce a method that we've co-developed with our clients as a way of providing customer support that could substantially reduce your support logistics costs.

It will reduce your human resources requirement and it will reduce your returns costs.

"TL;DR" (Too Long, didn't read) – or – The information is there, but they don't see it.

Your experts may have compiled a detailed set of text-based resources to explain how your customer can deal with the nuances of your product. Your support documents would be presented perhaps in an frequently asked questions (FAQ) format, or a searchable index, or as a troubleshooting section in an online PDF. Quite often these need to be updated, so printed manuals are now obsolete.

But here's a fact – people won't read it. They don't feel like they have time. They might scan read it and miss the critical points needed to achieve resolution. Whilst the internet means that people have access to support information and can share ideas, your customers have become used to immediate resolutions. Very few people will read the information, even though it probably does a good job of solving their problem.

The most important issue is that text-based support is linear. The information is presented in a form that is logical to the writer. And within your support texts, you have to cover many subjects, which at the immediate point of reception by your customer, is mostly irrelevant to their specific issue.

To reiterate, people don't have time. Or rather, given that they have been driven to seek support, already may feel that their free time is now being used to resolve an issue which shouldn't be their problem. This is a negative experience. The more time they have to use to resolve their issue, the more likely they will feel increasingly negative about their experience with your product and your brand.

Here's the answer… indeed, this explanation itself is far too long, and I'm sure many of you reading this, skipped across, reading the opening words to each paragraph to try and determine relevance to your situation before investing the time to read the onward paragraph. It's not just you, your customers are doing it too. And that's why, even though you provide perfectly good support information, they're calling you up, they're DM'ing you (Direct Messaging You) or publicly messaging you on social media. They just want you to tell them how to fix their problem. And human search engines in telephone support are expensive.

Support – you have one job: Get the information in to your customers. Video content does this best.

Good news… there actually is a way to improve the customer experience – dramatically. All you have to do is to make sure the critical information is received by your customer quickly and easily. Keeping the information short, in order and to the point is critical to the success of that process.

And here's how you achieve those goals. You produce video content.

Video is a linear medium. That means people will watch it in the order you present it, unlike text where you can skip through. We know you can skip through a video, but the viewer will have to listen to the content to hear the content they feel is relevant to them. But they'll only do this if the information isn't structured properly. Which well created support videos, your customers won't skip ahead. They won't miss the critical information or the order in which things need to happen to fix their problem.

And the real reason they won't skip ahead – is because they will feel like they are in the right place to get resolution to their problem. Importantly, that will be the start of a very positive experience. And if the onward experience continues, they will remember a positive emotional attribution to the product and the brand. So how do we do this?

How to create customer support videos and reduce customer support costs.

Since 2004, our agency started with production of video content for TV Commercials. The relevance here being that we specialise in taking any subject and conveying the important information within 30 seconds. Indeed this content is part of a much bigger series, but we've cut it down into a reduced longform video for you here. Already, you're aware of the problem and we've set a case. So I'll now explain how we create video content that works and solves this problem.

We also have a strong technical knowledge within the Concept Media Group. So we work closely with your support staff to create micro support videos that you place on the same page as your support text.

We will help you split down the content and make it easily findable, so when your customers need help, they find the content and only the content they need without the workload of searching through other pieces of information.

That means your customers are happier. But more importantly, it means they're not calling you to get these answers. People will listen if a person is giving them directions in a video. They are less likely to miss the instructions and more likely to solve their problem.

We read and decant your support documents into a series of visuals. We then film either your support staff or a hired presenter giving those instructions. And here's where video really stands out. Our camera operators take shots of closeups of your products demonstrating some of the actions from the spoken instructions.

The effect of demonstrations is that your customer feels more confident undertaking tasks. Whilst we look to simplify many of the instructions, using industry-relevant names for parts may be unavoidable. As customers, until we get our hands on the product, how do we familiarise ourselves with what a widget is? Also, text simply cannot convey the twisting hand motion required for a certain action to release the widget, for example. But video does this excellently.

And this works with both domestic and industry support cases. For example, we filmed assembly videos for a range of domestic fitness equipment – in this case, flat pack vibration plates and running machines, as sold by our client in volume through a major well known online retailer. We put quick-scan QR codes on the packaging, directing customers to use their phone to watch the easy assembly videos. With positive language, clear shots of the assembly process, we substantially reduced the number of returns made to the popular online shop. Feedback from customers stated that they felt confident to undertake the flatpack DIY assembly themselves. They felt comfortable using the tools provided to follow the video instruction, identify parts easily and understand how to put them together.

Similarly, we produced technical installation and testing videos for industrial equipment. Our client fed-back that they had dramatically increased the quality of the work their field engineers were undertaking, and more critically, they were achieving near complete levels of compliance on process as required by certain industrial standards.

We've optimised the video production process to operate within your budget. At Concept Media Group, alongside our customers, have developed a Video Production by Subscription service. It breaks down your projects into manageable chunks. It results in better quality video and allows for a steady introduction to the process of creating video libraries.

This means the video content production process won't suddenly impact your business in terms of either cost or staff resourcing. We follow a clear workflow that makes video content production easy.

Aside from a smaller monthly subscription for the video production, you simply need to point us in the direction of your existing support information, and we'll do the rest – leaving you to approve the scripts we prepare and then present the content at our studios or review the content we film with a presenter.

If you or your staff are happy to present the content, we'll make the process easy for them. We enjoy working with real people from industry. One of our clients recently commented after self-presented and we were filming, “You are very good behind the camera, with your prompts and making those filmed feel at ease”. Our studios also include prompting equipment, so you don't need to remember all the content!

Why video is better at support?

In summary, video content will:

Save your organisation's precious resources, both money and people. Build a positive reputation and emotional journey for your customers. Reduce the money spent on, and the waste created by handling returns logistics. Not to mention the potential for increased sales as a result of the boosted confidence you give your distributors, retailers and customers.

Discover more about Concept Academy and Concept Media Group services. For more information and pricing, call 0203 002 92 42 or visit ConceptMedia.Group And, as a thank you for watching, if you fill the form in on this page, we'll give you a free 25% discount voucher against your first Video Production by Subscription. The great news is that this voucher runs for the duration of the subscription. So feel free to ask us for pricing and more information, without obligation, we're happy to provide a quote.

Thank you for watching and reading this class. Register your details at the top of this page next to the video or call 0203 002 92 42 for more information about our services and video content masterclasses for business and organisations.