StreamApi
video for customer satisfaction and video for marketing and research, from pre-sales to post-sales
On this blog, we highlight emerging and sometimes innovative uses of video in business. As often, we bounce off articles from the Visionary Marketing blog to talk about applications that have a common thread of “bottom-up” publishing. In other words, it’s about giving employees, customers, subscribers, panelists, visitors, users… the opportunity to communicate with your organization privately and asynchronously via video.
Forget about questionnaires that require you to verbalize your thoughts or to write when you don’t have the time or skill. Forget interviews and consumer meetings that involve a mediator. Forget impersonal chatbots.
For market research (pre-sales), satisfaction surveys (post-sales, customer relations), community consultation (on a product, a service, an electoral program, a communication…), video communication in asynchronous mode is the best way to collect a spontaneous response, without the constraint of verbalization, without influence and without bias. The analysis can be facilitated by the automatic speech transcription. The contributions collected give you direct access to your audience, without filters and without interpretation.
Pre-sales, pre-testing, opinion research, public consultation
As Visionary Marketing demonstrates, video can dramatically improve market research.
Big Data has revolutionized marketing, but at the same time, it has dehumanized data. [..] Every time a professional watches a video of customers expressing their wants and needs, every time they see their customers engaging in conversation, empathy can be established.
Carl Wong, CEO and co-founder of LivingLens
When consumers share their experience or comments in video (or audio), they express themselves more easily, at greater length and with greater precision than in writing, which allows us to identify more issues and detect “weak signals”.
Then comes the moment of analysis. Automatic transcription (“speech-to-text”) and mass indexing (by “tags”) and “deep-linking” solutions make it easy to organize the responses into categories. They can relate to the theme, the attitude (favorable, unfavorable, undecided…), or any socio-demographic or behavioral category of the respondents.
Obviously, another interest of collecting customer videos is to put corporate managers in touch with the reality of the “field”, by creating clips that synthethize the expressions of the respondents.
After-sales and customer relations
In an era of extreme personalization of services, global or automated approaches (such as “chatbots”) are not very suitable. Video chat requires the availability of competent personnel, which can rarely be provided 24/7. Video communication in asynchronous mode is the best way to establish a real personal and “non-aggressive” contact. It is called personalized video and the publishing direction is reversed: it is created by the company for its customer.
For example, an insurer, a financial advisor, a real estate agent or a technician can record a short video in response to a question asked by email or via a form. This personalized video can be accompanied by explanatory videos and documents to download. The impact of such a message is much higher than a simple written answer, while establishing a direct and personal relationship between the seller and his client.
According to the founder of Vidata, personalized videos allow to send 20% more proposals. They allow to solve problematic situations, such as claims, breakdowns or assistance needs.
The top 5 use cases among service providers are:
- Welcome, onboarding, creation of the user account;
- Cross-selling or up-selling, to offer complementary services and increase the average customer basket;
- Sponsorship offers. Getting referrals from friends and family;
- The after-sales service. For example the explanation of invoices or the management of claims;
- Reactivation. For example, seeking to reactivate a credit or restart an interrupted subscription.
Personalized videos can be automatically generated animations in which personal information is inserted, such as the customer’s name, account balance or contract renewal date. This video made by Vidata for Sofinco is a good example:
With the interaction features offered in Streamlike, it is possible to customize all the textual information to be integrated in a video, to make personalized videos.
Personalized videos can also be recorded by a sales or helpdesk agent via his webcam to compose an attractive email. For this particular purpose, Streamlike offers Streamailer, an “off-the-shelf” solution integrated to its basic offer, which can be used as inspiration for custom applications.
Customer reviews, satisfaction and reputation monitoring
Consumers who are preparing a purchase are very curious about the opinions and recommendations of other buyers. Customer reviews have an impact on the choice of a brand or product for 75% of consumers.
In B2B, the importance of customer testimonials is paramount, as evidenced by the verbatims that flourish on company websites or LinkedIn pages.
Ratings, comments or testimonials are used to inform a potential customer and encourage them to make a purchase or contact.
All sectors are concerned by the influence of reviews. Tourism, for which one out of two purchase decisions is influenced by a review, is obviously in mind, but the energy, banking and insurance sectors are not spared, with 15 to 20% of decisions guided by reputation.
When it comes to opinions (favorable or unfavorable) or recommendations (favorable…), a few notes, a few anonymous words or a few well-chosen sentences will never have the efficiency and credibility of an assertive video testimonial, especially in B2B.
The opinion posted as a comment on a website or on a rating platform is a feedback. The satisfaction (or insatifcation) that is expressed in public can also be collected in private, which brings us back to the subject of customer relations. To act pro-actively on its e-reputation, a company will always be well advised to solicit the opinion of its customers. By offering to submit it in video, it gives itself the chance to understand its customers even better.
The contact form: the video question box
The easiest way to collect video feedback is through the drop box on the contact page. The videos received are automatically transcribed as they arrive and a customer care manager is immediately notified by email with the textual content of the message as well as the link to the video.
Each case of use is particular. Do not hesitate to submit yours.
