In the past few years, building relationships with customers has become one of the most important steps toward commercial success.

Companies usually build these relationships in two ways: by listening to customer feedback and responding to their needs, or by creating better customer experiences through personalized offers and content.

Today we want to focus on personalized customer service videos, and how this particular type of content can help you deliver better customer experiences on both levels. As you’re about to see, these videos aren’t nearly as hard to make as you might think, but their results could be well worth your time.

Let’s learn more about customer service videos and their best use cases.

The importance of customer service

Focusing on customer service to achieve better sales results and improve brand perception is by no means a new tactic.

Everywhere you look, there is personalized content and tailored offers. Moreover, smart brands keep investing in chatbots, live chats, and other advanced technologies that improve user experience and streamline the process of asking for help.

It seems that companies all over the world have realized that making customers happy is one of the keys to sustained success. This is backed up by research: more than 80% of companies who place a high priority on customer happiness also experience revenue growth. CEOs also recognize this fact, as 90% of them agree that customers have the most significant impact on their business strategies.

Even if we disregard what companies and their CEOs believe, we can arrive at similar conclusions. A lot of customer service research has been focused on the customers themselves: what do they need and what are they looking for in their perfect service provider? Most of these studies found that users place a high value on their shopping experiences.

For example, this Global State of Customer Service report by Microsoft found that 77% of users favor brands that seek out feedback from customers and then apply that feedback to improve their processes.

You can find a dozen stats online that all point to the simple fact that customers are more empowered today than they have ever been before. They have a larger choice, higher expectations when it comes to service quality, and more options to damage your reputation if presented with a bad experience.

Why should you engage customers with personalized videos?

So, how do personalized videos fit into this?

It’s no secret that video is one of the most popular content formats worldwide. People love to watch videos, especially on their smartphones – which is a trend that has been growing steadily in the past decade.

On the other hand, personalization also seems to be a trend that is here to stay. People prefer personalized content and tend to get frustrated when they receive an email or see a social media post that has nothing to do with their interests.

Personalized videos are a perfect marriage between these two marketing trends. They can help you engage customers at various points of the purchasing process and instantly grab their attention. When used properly, they can help you achieve amazing results in brand metrics like awareness, positioning, and brand love, as well as performance metrics like email open rates, clickthrough rates, and even sales.

Customer service videos: which ones can you use?

You can use a customer service video to persuade hesitant customers, give special thanks to returning ones, explain certain aspects of your offer, and various other things. And, if you have the right tools, they aren’t even that hard to make.

Here are the videos we’ll be covering in this article.

Onboarding videos

When users sign up for your service, it can be nice to give them a warm welcome and introduce them to key features. You can also introduce yourself if your service relies on your expertise and personal brand.

Tutorial and technical support videos

If your product/service requires a little time to figure out (say it’s a software solution), it could be useful to create a short tutorial for all users that covers the basic functions.

Teaser and product demo videos

You might want to use personalized videos to provide potential customers with a brief overview of its key features, a teaser of sorts.

“Thank you” videos

Repeating and long-term customers deserve special attention. Thanking them with an honest, personalized video will likely make them feel valued and could increase the chance of them staying your customer for years to come.

Outreach videos

Your outreach efforts can always use an edge. You can infuse your outbound sales emails with a personal touch by creating a personalized video for your most relevant leads.

Special occasion videos

Birthdays, holidays, and other important dates are great occasions for you to give special attention to important customers and clients. Nothing says you care as much as a video you created specifically for one user.

Now, let’s get into each of these and check out some use cases.

1. Onboarding videos

Onboarding videos are a great opportunity to give your brand a more personal touch.

Someone believed in you, found your sales pitch appealing, and trusted you enough to spend money on your services. Sending them a welcome video that shows them the person behind the brand is a nice touch that most of your customers will appreciate. It also serves a more practical purpose – you can use it to let your customers know what they can expect and what their first steps should be.

For example, the fitness trainers at Luxe Fitness used personalized videos to onboard new clients and make them feel like a part of the team from day one:

In just one month, they improved their trial conversion rates by more than 28 percent!

Onboarding videos are perfect when your customers can benefit from direct interaction with you, like in the example above. If you’re a fitness instructor, course teacher, or if you sell any service based on your personal brand, consider this technique for improving sales and retention rates.

2. Tutorial and technical support videos

There’s nothing more frustrating than signing up for an online service, getting all excited about it, and realizing that it takes far too long to set everything up.

Serious companies that are aware of the fact that their product/service needs some time and skill to set up use tutorials to quickly explain this process to customers. Tutorials come in many forms – you can host them on your website or YouTube, you can print them and hand them out with the product, or you can send them to your new customers along with a welcome message.

Whatever you do, make sure they’re simple but elaborate enough that they cover as many aspects of the product as possible. Take a look at the PlayStation VR setup tutorial.

Source: PlayStation YouTube

It’s fun, useful, and not too long. It also goes to great lengths to answer all the questions a user might have. This makes everything easier for the customer and eliminates the need for them to contact your customer service, saving your agents’ time as well.

3. “Thank you” videos

You can thank your customers for different things: subscription, first purchase, continuous support, etc.

The previous year has shown us how important customer loyalty is: people who have stuck with your brand through 2020 are the ones you need to thank for keeping your business alive. But, why stop there? Each loyal customer deserves a “thank you” for trusting your vision and making it possible for your company to thrive.

The Good Company, an eCommerce business with a focus on sustainability did just that – they had one of their employees thanking each customer for ordering and being conscious, like this:

According to the business owners themselves, this had a strong impact on their results in many ways, but we find these two most interesting: reply rates and return customers. They had hundreds of people replying to their emails and, after a while, their repeat customer sales increased by 32 percent.

Show your customers how much you value them and spend some time creating personalized “thank you” videos – it will likely pay off in the end!

4. Teaser and product demo videos

If you work in sales, you’re probably aware of how a good product demo can be one of the more effective techniques to close a deal.

Giving your potential users a chance to get a taste of the product is much better than trying to explain everything using only words. That’s where product demo videos can come in handy. You can use screen recording to perfectly capture what your tool/app does and combine it with voiceovers or any other type of content that would help you demonstrate as many use cases as possible.

Here’s how Airtable did it:

Source: Airtable YouTube

They covered several use cases and combined screen recording with animation to make everything interesting and useful.

Product demo videos are especially important now that conducting demos in person is limited. And, while you can schedule Zoom and Skype calls, your prospects will have to be incredibly interested in your product to give you the time of day.

It might be better to send those videos through email and allow your prospects to take a look at them when they feel like it.

6. Outreach videos

The way you reach out to your prospects can be a great indicator of the service you’d provide them if they were to become a customer.

An outreach email with a personalized video can help you in several ways.

• It shows the prospect you care about. Unlike generic emails that may only personalize the name of the prospect, a truly personal video message will likely elicit a reaction from your leads. Even if they aren’t too interested in your product, there is a big chance they’ll be impressed by your refreshing approach.
  

• It lets you go into detail. Long emails aren’t nearly as effective in grabbing someone’s attention as a one-minute video. Such a video allows you to explain your product/service in more depth, especially if you use screen recordings or product demos we already mentioned.
  

• It helps you get more personal. Seeing your name written in an email subject line is one thing, but hearing someone say it while looking into the camera – that feels like they’re talking to you. We love to talk about personalization and we believe that these videos are one of the best examples of personalization in practice.

7. Special occasion videos

The best customer service videos put the customer at the center of attention. And, what better way to do this than to make the whole video about them – their birthday, anniversary of their account, etc.

You can get creative with your messages, and your offers should follow. So, if you’re making a video for your long-term customer’s birthday, make sure you include a birthday discount. If you’ve ever received a birthday message/email from one of the brands whose services you’re using, you know that it has the potential to make you feel special. Now, imagine that the message you received was a personalized video from the company founder!

Even the more simple special occasion videos like holiday greetings can be a nice touch that brings you closer to your customers.

Conclusion

Everyone’s focusing on customer service: companies are trying to build more personal relationships with their customers, they’re offering personalized content, and starting to open up for feedback.

That’s why you need to take the next step and think bigger. What is the next trend in customer service that you can jump on before the competition realizes it’s taking place?

We believe that trend is personalized video campaigns.

If you want to create great customer service videos, register for Bonjoro and try it. Believe us, it’s easy, fun, and it delivers awesome results!