How to Improve B2B SaaS Customer Support Using Videos
In a world where companies have evolved into siloed functional units in providing services, it becomes more and more important to know that what’s better than acquiring one new customer is not acquiring two new customers but rather retaining an existing customer.
It is both easier and more valuable to understand your current customers and retain them rather than keep finding new ones who drop out after a while. While there’s a certain allure that comes with capturing new customers, keeping customers coming back will continually result in a greater ROI — and it costs 5-25X less.
Your customers are the source of your revenue. Without them, you don’t have much of a business so it’s important to keep them happy.
With the average ticket volume risen by 16% (Zendesk, 2021) since the pandemic and the impossibility of direct customer support or even remote ones turning out to be a difficult choice – we’re here to help.
Your customers have high expectations and if your business can’t meet them, they’re going to leave you for your competitors.The one thing that the majority of customers will remember in all likelihood is the direct interaction they had with your business. So it is imperative that you resolve their issues in the fastest and most efficient manner.
Often, complaints are the result of problems that need to be solved. Asking the right questions helps you get to the root of the complaint. A knowledgeable representative is always a customer’s favourite since they would be able to not only understand the customers problem easily, but resolve them soon as well.
The core value of outstanding customer service is centralized around attending to the needs and expectations of your customers through careful listening. In addition to getting a product or service that works for them, they want to buy from companies that make it easy to get help when they need it.
Getting their issues resolved without having to explain their problem in detail means they have to spend less time worrying about using your product and more time enabling themselves with it.
Customers today expect communication with service departments to be instant. In fact, they want immediate resolution of their concerns and this can be done way faster through text, graphics, faq’s and videos. Customers prefer to have their problem solved themselves without having to wait, interact and hope for a solution soon.
The best way to beat customer churn would be to develop content based on support ticket trends.
The average number of support tickets that one technician can handle per day is 21 and according to Zendesk’s recent benchmark report, sophisticated companies see upwards of 20,000 support tickets per month, with TSIA reporting that 48% of these support inquiries are “how-to” in nature.
| Channel | Advantage | Disadvantage |
|---|---|---|
| Customer Support |
1. The user gets a personal specialist assist them. 2. The specialist will be knowledgeable and would provide the best solution 3. Minimal effort spent by the user |
1. Customer support specialists can handle a very limited number of calls in a day. 2. They have to have great product knowledge so as so solve these queries best. |
| Allow Users to Raise Tickets |
1. Allows the user to spend no effort other than raising their issue 2. It gives your specialists some more time to answer these queries |
1. It may take a while to answer tickets and hence queries are not solved immediately. 2. Missed out tickets can be a major issue leading to the user dropping out. |
| Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) |
1. Can help users solve problems then and there 2. Involves a with a simple search. 3. They are most commonly occurring problems and hence have detailed answers on solving them |
1. It requires a lot of research and well thought out answers to FAQ's so as to explain the solution in the best possible way |
| Communities |
1. Communities, once well set can grow by themselves. 2. You can enable your own expert users to answer queries 3. Makes your query database always updated with the latest answers. 4. Can easily pinpoint common user queries by analysing community threads. |
1. You require a specialist to build and nurture the community. 2. Not all user's would want to respond to questions from other users. 3. Community moderation might also be required |
| Automate Workflows |
1. User's can see and follow steps live. 2. Shares a clear understanding of the whole tool without having to move out of your website at all. |
1. This would force the user, no matter their skillset, to sit through the whole workflow which may actually annoy a busy user who does not have the time for a basic walkthrough that he is already aware of. |
| How-To Videos |
1. They can visually explain the whole process 2. Can be targeted towards a multitude of problems 3. Can reach hundreds of customers without using any manpower. 4. They can be shared which really helps when working in teams. 5. They are direct, easy to understand and allow the user to solve problems by themselves 6. Do not waste much time. |
1. They have to be well thought out and cover all aspects. 2. They should be engaging very clear so that the user understands well. 3. These videos might not be able to cover every single topic and really niche problems may still persist |
Your customer support team works as a traditional safety net for your clients. Customers reach out for help and your support agents assist them with their needs. Customer support acts as a sense of physical assurance that your issue will be resolved without you having to search for anything or worry further.
Allowing customers to raise tickets is very beneficial since you can now use your product documentation to respond to repeated requests from different users while also giving you a small timeframe to understand the problem and answer them.
However, you should be careful when dealing with tickets. tickets need to be answered asap. Respond and let the customer know the case is being handled. Constantly update them on the progress and try to close it as soon as possible in order to let them have a great experience.
A series of faq’s or self-service support portal empowers customers to find help on their own terms. This not only allows users to find and resolve issues by themselves, but also helps you guage customer behaviour, product hotspots and a lot more!
Zach Hendrix of GreenPal said that they used a combination of contextual and personalized automation to scale customer support while reducing average response time by 77%.
Workflow automation is not only about eliminating the tedious parts of your job. Automation rules allow you to stay on top of incoming requests, ensure tickets are assigned to the right person or category, while sending out notifications as soon as a ticket becomes overdue.It minimizes human error.
Thoughtfully designed training modules can help proactively address these common issues, thereby reducing support ticket volume. And the best way to do this would be to create a series of How-To videos.
How-To videos are widely considered one of the best modes of resolving issues because they have a wide outreach and you can both textually and visually explain the process, making it much easier for the customer to understand their issue and how to resolve it.
While there is a debate around which is more effective text or video-based support content it’s generally best to combine both. People learn in different ways some prefer to read, while some prefer to watch.
What’s important here is not just understanding the power of How-To Videos, but also understanding where to use them. They should be easy to find and access, simple to sort and find your particular issue as well as gain enough traction and visibility to help you reduce tickets at a higher rate.
Now these videos can be used on your website, blogs, emails, community, social media or even right on your website soon after signing up, but you have to put some thought into it.
Which channel is most used by my customers to resolve their current issues? It may be your website (Customer Service), It may be communities on stack overflow, reddit, quora etc. It could also just be google or youtube. Accordingly try to analyse your customers and where they head so that you can post the most relevant videos there, hence resolving issues much faster.
You can also analyse any communities or groups where your ideal customers would be active to actively share helpful how-to videos there, to help users gauge your product as well as understand it.
| Where can you use your How-To Videos | Value |
|---|---|
| Soon after onboarding |
1. Usually the videos used here explain the basic steps for setup and to get your user started. 2. They make user onboarding much smoother as the user now already knows a lot about how to use your product |
| Emails |
1. These can be used best when solving customer tickets. 2. The customer support specialist knows the exact problem faced by the customer and can share the right video |
| QnA | 1. This allows you to solve the most common problems with ease directly on your website |
| Blogs |
1. Customer support blogs go into detail and it can get monotonous sometimes. 2. Videos in these blogs can summarise, share tips and tricks or even just educate people, enriching the article along the way. |
| Directly post on YouTube or other social channels |
1. This allows the user to directly search for their queries and have them solved immediately. 2. These can easily be consumed, shared and are of great value |
A video enabled knowledge base allows you to reach a wider audience while reducing confusion of complex steps. It allows you to bridge language barriers, knowledge/skill level barriers, as well as some accessibility barriers.
Video removes these barriers by showing and not telling. Research has shown that searches related to “how-to” on YouTube are growing 70% year over year.
– Craig Stoss, Vidyard
Today, people prefer to answer any questions they have on their own and as soon as possible. They’re more likely to check a website’s frequently asked questions before contacting customer support directly. And hence why most customers expect multichannel support and become frustrated if their preferred method isn’t available, “how to” videos can be channeled into various platforms from text to online social media.
The speed of today’s business means some issues can’t wait until the next day. Real-time support is imperative, so you need to reduce multiple barriers and help in real time, swiftly.
Analysis:
Conclusion: The video basically guides you through the step-by-step process effectively because of the visual element of the UI mixed with the voiceover for an added benefit of understanding better.
Analysis:
Conclusion: Keep it simple. Your customer just needs some help understanding your product, and not an extremely creative and visual video. Make it interesting, show some real footage of the service/tool so the customer can easily grasp the concepts.
Analysis:
Conclusion: What may have been a complex, lengthy and incoherent conversation has been represented in a two minute “How to” video without a hitch. Using smart techniques to boost your video can really help you and are cost effective as well.
Analysis:
Conclusion: The idea of having a real person, makes it feel more realistic and the whole experience is then enhanced. Sharing tips makes the customer use your software better, in turn making it a very valuable tool for them since it is saving a lot of time.
Analysis:
Conclusion: What may have been a complex, lengthy and incoherent conversation has been represented in a two minute “How to” video without a hitch.
Statistically, how to videos have proven to be one of the most powerful ways to solve problems and reduce customer tickets, but if you want your video to perform well, here are some tips:
It would be impossible to go through all of this in the form of a tele conversation, because the video can be paused and played back whenever, can be referred to again and you can comment under the video where anyone can get back to you.
Moreover, one video can help hundreds of people and does not need any manual caretaking thereafter. So to me, it seems like a no brainer!
B2B brands use different types of strategies to reduce customer support tickets such as releasing a string of bitesize digestible videos explaining the features of their product, creating a chatbot on their website, circulating FAQ videos in newsletters, starting a YouTube channel or creating customer support videos to address doubts and questions through videos, and publishing an online user manual.
The most important part is providing a feedback loop and a communication channel. Companies that are highly successful are always the ones that invest in nurturing their relationship with the customer. Most companies make decisions after studying their competition. Some of the basics are providing chatbots on websites, addressing customer tickets through mails, and providing video courses for training.
Customer support is crucial in retaining new users and reducing churn. It includes providing help by answering customer questions, talking about upgrades on the product, helping with product adoption, and creating onboarding videos to better explain the UI.
A great way of reducing customer support tickets for any B2B SaaS companies is to invest in creating well-structured and in-depth video academy training courses that the users can easily find and referred to, as and when needed during the onboarding process. Other methods include setting up a strong customer support team to prioritize tickets based on urgency, publishing FAQ pages, and creating a YouTube channel that would provide knowledge for all basic features of the product.
