Using a Custom Video Platform for Customer Experience Enhancement
Delivering a great customer experience (CX) is a core concern for any business. In today’s marketplace, CX is constantly evolving. Thanks to technology, companies can connect with their customers innovatively, even during challenging and uncertain times. For example, businesses had to shift and revamp the customer experience during the pandemic, when the flow of life became uncertain.
What is Customer Experience Enhancement?
Customer experience may seem similar to customer service; however, that’s just one aspect of an entire experience. Customer service refers to specific touchpoints where consumers request, then receive assistance — for example, calling a customer service agent to request a refund or interacting with a company via email or chatbot. Customer experience enhancement means looking at each step in the CX process and determining how to manage the experience at each customer touchpoint. Just as important, it means evaluating the transitions between touchpoints.
Customer experience enhancement is a detailed and ongoing process. It challenges businesses to look at CX from the 50,000-foot view as a way to improve and produce tangible results. It includes every touchpoint a customer ever has with a company, from the moment they first hear about a product or business through to the time they call a customer service team with questions.
How important is enhancing your customer experience? Benefits of delivering a great CX include:
- Increased customer loyalty
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Better word-of-mouth marketing and recommendations
- Higher client retention
- Increased sales
Negative customer service experiences can have a serious impact on the overall health of your business. In the short term, it can affect sales; in the long term, it can affect your business in many ways, including:
- Financial costs
- Reputation and brand image costs
- Loss of employees
- Loss of customers (both current and future)
What is customer experience enhancement? Customer Experience Enhancement takes a detailed look at a customer’s journey to purchase to identify each opportunity to help the customer move toward conversion. Identifying the touchpoints during the journey allows you to optimize the CX to create a happy and loyal customer.
Customer Experience Enhancement with Video
Studies show that the human brain processes visuals at nearly 60,000 times the speed of text. Using video to highlight your business or onboard customers is more effective than text images. Videos are versatile and can improve CX throughout the customer journey and provide a great enhancement to CX. A compelling video content strategy improves CX through:
- Consistent messaging: Video provides a consistent and optimized form of messaging. When your messages are clear, customers feel cared for, well-informed, and connected.
- Targeted content: An effective video strategy ensures the right people are getting the right message. Creating targeted content around specific personas and value drivers shows customers that you “get it.”
- Advocacy of brand: An effective video strategy allows you to cultivate, promote, and nourish brand advocates. Customers want to hear from others, and they want to know that you’re paying attention to their wants and needs.
- Video assets can be reusable as they engage with new customers.
What is a CX Map and How to Create One?
Before utilizing video to enhance CX, think about creating a customer experience map (or CX map). A CX map allows you to walk in your customer’s shoes and evaluate the path a customer takes through your business, from their initial interaction to when they might interact with another aspect of your business (such as a customer service department) sometime later.
Additionally, a CX map gives valuable insights into how your customers engage with your organization, products, or services. By following the customer journey, you can learn where you’re successfully meeting needs and expectations and where you might need to improve. To create a CX map, use the following steps:
- Review goals: Consider the purpose of the CX journey mapping process, as well as the goals of your business.
- Gather research: Conduct research based on relevant resources, including both qualitative and quantitative findings.
- Generate channels and touchpoints: Work on determining channels and touchpoints where your customer will interact with your business.
- Create an empathy map: To understand your customer’s emotional landscape, focus on what they are thinking, feeling, acting, and reacting as they move through a customer journey.
- Look at it from different perspectives: Generating problem-solving ideas by looking at possible scenarios from different perspectives.
- Create an affinity diagram: Organize your ideas visually, and classify and categorize them to align with your business.
- Draw the customer journey: Sketch out the CX journey map to make it understandable for your team.
Now, you’re ready to take a journey through the eyes of your customer.
What is a CX map? A CX map identifies all the touchpoints during a customer’s journey through your organization and explores the interactions that take place at each touchpoint. The CX map allows you to visualize the journey and how to optimize the CX for increased sales.
Create emotional connections with your customers
After creating a CX map, you’ll be better informed about how to connect with customers emotionally. Emotions are the driving force behind many buying decisions. Solid emotional connections build a bond between your customers and your business and strengthen your brand.
Customers have better information, more choices, and higher expectations than ever before. For them, the overall customer experience is a key-value differentiator – great experiences lead to loyal customers. You can build emotional connections with customers in several ways. One of the most important is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes to determine what’s important to them and how you can speak their language.
Video is an increasingly important element of CX. According to Oberlo, 85% of Internet users in the United States watch online video content monthly. Not only do videos keep users more engaged, but they also play an essential role in their decision-making process. According to Optinmonster, video marketers get 66% more qualified leads per year (Optinmonster, 2019). In addition, 93% of marketers say they’ve landed a new customer thanks to a video on social media. This means video content earns higher engagement and drives customer actions better than other mediums.
CX Strategy
Additionally, the CX map is a framework for a successful CX strategy. It’s essential to have a plan for several reasons, including customer retention, collecting real-time data, learning effective customer crisis management, and focusing on the user experience (UX) to deliver to be “human.”
When defining your customer experience strategy, include all departments, not just customer-facing roles. By incorporating feedback and insight across the company, it’s easier to align the organization around the intended goal: enhancing the CX elements of a strategy include:
- Review customer service strategy: What is your company’s current approach to customer support? Determining what’s working well for your business and where improvements are helpful is a worthwhile first step.
- Assess customer education: What do you want your customers to learn about your business that will be valuable for them so they’ll do business with you?
- Assess gaps and customer needs: Identify where your CX needs the most improvement directly drives CX strategy.
How Video Can Set Your CX Apart from Your Competition
Using personalized video to enhance your CX is effective. A focus on customer education and empowerment reflects more choices, higher expectations and provides more information available to potential customers than ever before. Videos offer flexible and customized solutions to support customer needs and expectations, keep communications channels open, and provide a great customer experience. You can also use videos to:
- Leverage relationships with customers by providing personalized engagement videos that customers will appreciate.
- Deliver a personalized video experience, so new customers appreciate the value of your business from the beginning of their journey.
- Create an interactive video experience with real-time video that drives engagement and builds a customer relationship.
- Improve the customer experience with robust self-service assets: How-to videos or troubleshooting videos can be a tremendous asset to your business and put the power of learning in your customers’ hands.
SundaySky’s innovative personalization technology process features marketers, CX professionals, and advertisers who utilize tools to define, build, deploy, measure, and optimize videos. No matter the industry, the future of business innovation goes hand-in-hand with video and customer experience enhancement. SundaySky’s custom video platform engages customers by using personalized information and data-driven content to meet the unique needs of your business, including customer experience enhancement.