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They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but when it comes to explaining a complex topic, nothing beats video. It’s much easier to show how to use a feature or the steps to reproduce a bug with video than writing long, boring articles. Plus, it’s a great way to build connection with your customers and avoid misunderstandings.
There are several reasons to include video in your customer support strategy. In this article, we’re going to cover the top 4 and explain why Claap is the best companion to any customer-facing team.
Learn how to use Claap to engage with your prospects and customers →
Help your customers find the answers (and cut down on support tickets)
Your customers don’t want to contact your support team. They are busy, concerned about response times, and afraid to be caught in endless threads. Most of us prefer to look up the answers by ourselves, so it’s critical to have access to a rich and easy to use Help Center. But the problem with most knowledge-bases? They are a dull repository of long, technical articles. The moment your customers land on an article and see a long wall of text, they are immediately encouraged to click on the contact support button. Not because they didn’t find their answer, but because they didn’t even want to try.
The truth is, we all have preferences when it comes to learning styles. While some of us prefer descriptive how-to instructions, others assimilate quicker with infographics, gifs, and video walkthroughs. The best customer support teams know this, incorporate different teaching methods in their Help Center, and offer different ways when teaching people how to use their product.
And the best part? A well designed, engaging knowledge base is equally helpful to onboard new team members. From customer support representatives, to account executives or customer success managers, your go-to-market teams can learn all the ins and outs about your product with the information available in the Help Center.
How to use video to optimize self-serve content
- Product education: Create short videos tutorials that walk new users through account set up, how to use key features, integrate your product with other platforms, and more.
- Showcase best practices: video is great to quickly show your best tips and tricks to optimize results with your tool.
- Troubleshooting: explain the instructions to solve common issues with instructive, easy-to-digest videos.
How can Claap help?
Our biggest differentiator is the ability to annotate the video. Both your support team and your users can pin-point a specific part of the screen during a video to make a comment, as if you’re pointing at it. This enables async Q&A and avoids asking questions in email without the context of the video.
Offer a better support experience (and retain customers for life)
While your Help Center should address common questions your users have, it doesn’t replace your customer support team. There are situations when contacting support is the best option, from reporting bugs and issues with the product to ask for advice on a complex workflow. Video is still powerful in these cases and can greatly improve your customer experience
Why video is your support team's best friend
- Make it easier to report and fix bugs: avoid the back-and-forth of emails or chat messages by asking your customers to record the problem instead. If not possible but you can reproduce it, record the issue so it’s easier for your engineers to see exactly what’s happening.
- Clear misunderstandings: your users might still have the need to contact support after reading the Help Center. While this is a sign to improve its content, don’t miss the opportunity to wow your customers. Complement your written answer with a short walkthrough video. You avoid a long text exchange and meet your customer’s learning preferences.
- Ease customer concerns: We all know how text messages can be misinterpreted. So if you sense frustration and even anger when reading a customer message, reply with video. You will be able to use your tone of voice and facial expressions to better control how your words are perceived.
How can Claap help?
With the possibility to select an area of the screen to add comments, you can bring further attention to specific steps, leaving no room for doubts or misunderstandings. And if there are questions left, your users can ask them directly in the video, without the need to jump back and forth between the video and email/chat.
Accelerate your team onboarding (and reduce rump-up time)
When joining a remote or distributed company, new hires face a new set of challenges. They can’t take advantage of the quick chats in the hallways or conversations during lunch to ask questions and meet their colleagues. So to avoid constant interruptions in Slack or requests for quick meetings, managers need to ensure most the training is as async as possible. Most importantly, showing how to do something isn’t enough. It’s also important to enable new joiners to ask questions async as well, boosting a true async collaboration.
Learn more in the onboarding playbook→
How to use async video collaboration to onboard new hires
- Complement written instructions with video: like your users, your team also has different learning styles. So ensure you can help them ramp up quickly by embedding videos in your documentation.
- Enable the creation of ad-hoc tutorials: Internal processes evolve really fast, as does the speed of releasing new product features. Your entire customer support team—both new comers and existing team members—needs to have quick access to updated instructions. Video is one of the fastest ways to share knowledge and show the changes before the team time to update the documentation.
- Facilitate 1/1 coaching: while it’s critical to hold live 1/1s, that is not nearly enough time between a manager and a new team member. To avoid wasting that time with product or process questions, build the habit of asking for a video when questions pop-up and send your answers with a video too. Not only it will be faster when compared to waiting for the 1/1, you will also build a repository that your team can go back to at any time.
How can Claap help?
As a recorder, you can use our video annotation feature to note important steps in the training. This ensures the recording will automatically stop, forcing your team to pay extra attention and ask questions if they have doubts.
On the other hand, your team can use the same feature to ask questions. And because your whole team has access to the topic, anyone can jump in to answer questions that pop-up and even mention senior team members to address specific points.
Humanize your support team
Last but not least, add a human touch to your customer interactions. With the proliferation of chat bots, canned responses, and automated answers, both your users and your customer support team might feel a bit disconnected from each other. Which is ironic, since that’s probably the team your customers interact with the most. So while you need to use automation and AI to optimize response times and cover a 24/7 operation, encourage your team to use video when relevant to make space for these personalised interactions.