Is now the time to consider video for support?

I have spoken to a number of support leaders who have tried video for support without success. The process of creating and maintaining videos is challenging, but is now the right time to reconsider video for support?

When I was a support engineer (many, many years ago), my team leader tasked me with managing our customer-facing knowledge base. Soon enough we started talking about ticket deflection and moving from the 300-page physical manual we used to send our customers, to online help within our knowledge base.

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Over time, we transitioned from email to the creation of tickets online, where we offered knowledge on-demand and ticket creation and tracking within the same system. It also helped us improve our internal tracking and documentation of issues.

The next big thing was online chat. We wanted to reduce our back-and-forth and provide immediate relief for issues that can be resolved quickly. Moving from email communication to live chat helped us understand the customer better. It also helped us clear misunderstandings quickly and solve issues that were taking several days to resolve before.

In the decade+ I've been managing support organizations, the ways to consume support content have evolved from the isolated knowledge base to the customer portal, and now to in-app widgets that provide one shop for all customer support needs within the product.

One area that did not see much innovation over time is how we deliver knowledge to customers. Regardless of the medium and platform (article, email, chat, etc.), the way we share how-to knowledge remains heavily based on text and screenshots.

I've invested significant effort over the years as a manager in ticket deflection, productivity, and scale. Among other efforts, I push my teams to generate customer-facing articles and create canned responses/macros as one of the main team KPIs. It helps to an extent, but the medium has its limitations:

1. Customers don't have the patience to read articles or long macros.
2. Splitting the troubleshooting workflow into smaller chunks leads to lower FCR (First Contact Resolution) leading to a longer time to closure and a lower satisfaction score, and as a result more backlog.
3. It is difficult to keep a consistent look, people use different tools to generate screenshots leading to inconsistencies (screenshots of different sizes, crops, and highlights) - we've tried to combat it with style guides, but the larger the team becomes, the more challenging it is to keep the consistency across all KB articles and macros.

This results in a situation that creates a glass ceiling in terms of how much metrics can be improved. This hinders our ability as customer support leaders to increase scale and enhance the customer experience.

Is Video the Answer?

The video format seemed to be the solution as it presented a level of personalization that text and screenshots cannot reach. Customers loved our marketing videos so why not take support to the next level by utilizing its advantages:

1. For starters, video is much clearer than text, as a user I don’t have to read and then look at screenshots to understand where I need to point and click, even better, unlike an article where I need to search and scroll through and find what I’m looking for (the main issue with documentation of any form or factor), a short video can provide me with just enough information to get what I need to get done as a user.
2. In turn, a clear short video which is easy to follow decreases the number of touches (back-and-forths) with the customer, resulting in faster closure time, higher satisfaction, and overall, more efficiency for the team, as back-and-forth friction is hard on both the reps and the customers.
3. For companies, utilizing video can translate into happier customers, less friction all around, more scale, and efficiency for the team at a low cost. 

I've pushed my team to try it out and send customers videos instead of text and pictures, and it worked as expected. Customers understood the explanation better, and the customer satisfaction score was higher compared to the alternative, but there was one major hurdle. 

The team did not like recording videos, and they had a difficult time adding video creation to their day-to-day workflow.

So what stopped the team from buying into videos:

1. Difficulty in planning the video (e.g. script) -  created a mental block to begin recording.
2. Stage fright took over (e.g. multiple takes)  - The team had issues with recording their voice, they lost their confidence becoming too wrapped up in how they sounded, their accent, and speaking on the spot, the expectation they had was that the recording will be perfect and glitch-free and it was anything but.
3. Ad-hoc usage (e.g. address a specific customer issue) - They didn't record for re-use and used it sparsely as an ad-hoc solution (despite my desire to replace the text and pictures in our macros with videos).

Ultimately, it didn't take with the team and became a habit. Although I'm a huge fan of video, the transition was too challenging for my support team to handle.

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So why now is a good time to reconsider the video format?

One of the main things that attracted me to Guidde when I joined to lead the customer success organization was that the product that we have created is focused on addressing the exact pain points that I've experienced as a manager and that my employees have experienced when recording videos.

We've interviewed a large number of support leaders. We've heard about the challenge of doing more with less. We've heard about knowledge preservation as a result of attrition, and the desire for more ticket deflection.

We've combined the feedback from the wide variety of leaders that we've met with, with our own experiences and conclusions, and as a result have launched our Automated step-by-step video format.

The brand-new format makes video creation easy while keeping the content professional looking (based on the look and feel that our marketing team designed). Removing friction from the process and delivering an engaging format that customers can understand better.

We've tested it on our own support team since the first beta, and we found it easy to create and share. Our system of choice is Intercom, which we use to deliver in-app customer assistance and enablement. We've added our automated videos to our help center, macros, and in customer tickets. The results so far have been very positive: 80% of tickets are closed with the first touch, and looking at our help center reporting, we see customers are consuming our articles and we see a significant improvement in the number of views resulting in tickets. On top of that our satisfaction score has been a constant 5 out of 5 since we started using the format.

I invite you to give it a try and see if it can help your team as well. We welcome your feedback!

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