For many businesses, 2021 is a year of acceleration, thanks to the challenges that COVID leaves behind us. The fear of buying online decreased, leading to an unprecedented increase in online purchases. This forces many brands to invest in customer service experience to avoid unhappy customers.
This drastic paradigm shift has also forced millions of businesses around the world to mitigate any bad experiences, retain loyal customers, and double the efforts on customer relationship management (also known as CRM). Studies show that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
As online video consumption is multiplying all the forecasts, and marketing personalization becomes a top priority for the majority of marketers (51%), it is important to understand how personalized video marketing can help your organization deliver an out of the box customer service experience.
According to a variety of studies, U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service. Seven out of 10 consumers say they’ve spent more money to do business with a company that delivers great service.
This makes the customer service experience quite urgent.
But it is that even so, an entire company must add innovative and differentiating elements to their marketing experience that allows consuming the content in a simple and particularly relevant way.
For today’s customers, context is key. This is where the use of personalized video messages shines.
What Is Customer Service?
Customer service is the assistance provided to customers before and after they make a purchase.
According to research led by Microsoft, 54% of consumers have higher customer service expectations than they did just one year ago. Therefore, it is important that your organization anticipates any possible bad experiences that your customers may experience.
In fact, around 52% of consumers say they have bought more from a company when they had a positive customer service experience. Guess what happens with customers that had a bad experience?
With more people buying online than ever, products they can’t touch, smell, or even try, brands are positively forced to implement a solid customer service strategy, regardless of the channel.
Customer service focuses on the communication side, in order to solve and anticipate any challenges customers can face.
From automated email marketing interactions to chatbots or personalized videos, customer services become then an essential part of the experience that any brand must deliver.
The difference between the average customer service and a special one is the experience.
What Is Customer Service Experience?
Customer service experience is the experience that a customer has with a brand when the brand delivered a service. There are many different areas implied in the concept. From how UI design improves the experience of how fast customer support responds to a query.
It is related to customer experience. The reason for this is that customer experience looks at the overall impression that customers have when interacting with your organization, no matter the channel.
Customer service experience focuses on one specific area: service.
With this in mind, brands that overperform in the experience delivered to their customers see this as an inherent value of their brands. Not just as a trend. They understand how important it is to become customer advocates.
This affects every department and decision, from investor relations to product management, as offering a top-notch service is a priority and is the way they envision everything they do.
This is why, businesses with a clear understanding of this seek out unique touchpoints to build positive customer experiences across every customer-brand interaction possible, digitally or physically.
Why Customer Service Experience?
To understand how to improve your customer service experience with customer-centric video marketing, let’s start first by remembering why taking the time in the first place.
Taking into account the mindset changes that all social strata are experiencing, as well as the acceleration of trends fueled by COVID-19, customer service experience should be a priority for any organization.
Here is why:
- It is the only way to survive in an aggressive global market.
- It increases customer loyalty and lifetime value
- It helps attract new customers and increases word of mouth
For example, the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has led to increased use of online shopping. This global crisis has also prompted some online-shopping holdouts to make their first digital purchase.
According to a March 2020 consumer survey, 9% of consumers in the United States have bought a product online for the first time. This is due to physical distancing and self-quarantining practices.
Overall, studies show that consumers planned on increasing their spending on goods from online marketplaces because of the coronavirus.
This means that consumers are shifting to digital buying, expecting better prices, and are trying to save more money. At the same time, this is a great opportunity to empower loyal customers. Therefore, avoid bad experiences at all costs.
With more businesses trying to get more eyeballs, marketers, customer experience experts, and business developers are aligning their efforts to consolidate their customers’ experience.
Every individual customer counts. Same as every dollar.
Why Video Plays a Key Role In Customer Service Experience?
Video has played an important role during this market transition becomes audiences need content that is easy to consume, understand, and share.
A report by Marketing Chart showed that users worldwide are predicted to consume up to 100 minutes of video a day in 2021.
With an oversaturated target audience, it becomes imperative for any brand to understand how to keep their customers’ attention.
This also means that businesses need to be more relevant to their particular audiences and invest more resources in segmenting their customer-facing communications.
How To Enhance Customer Service And Customer Experience With Personalized Video Marketing
What Is A Personalized Video?
Personalized videos or data-driven videos are videos that are automatically created at scale from any kind of digital, individualized data.
Let me share an example.
A spreadsheet is the easiest example of structured data
Imagine a spreadsheet with customer data to whom you want to send an email marketing campaign.
Each column in the spreadsheet corresponds to a field that will appear in the video, such as “first name” and “company”. Each row corresponds to a person for whom a video will be created, automatically.
Within a video, any element can be personalized: images, videos, audios, texts, and even complete scenes.
Really, the limit is in the imagination. Here you’ll find some personalized video examples from different industries and use cases.
Make sure to check this tutorial where I share how to make personalized videos from spreadsheets.
Why Personalized Videos Help Businesses Improve Customer Service Experience?
Humans find videos more engaging, memorable, and easy to consume than any other type of content. Personalized video marketing makes these videos unique to each individual, at scale.
Research by the Journal of Consumer Research has found that more than 50% of an experience is based on an emotion as emotions shape the attitudes that drive decisions.
At the same time, Gartner predicts that organizations that excel in personalization will outsell companies that don’t by 20%.
Why does personalization work so well? A massive 58% of consumers say that a personalized experience is very important when purchasing from a company, according to Salesforce.
As an example, in the hospitality industry, guest experience has a massive impact on the pricing strategy..
This is heavily related to how marketers are now investing more time in segmenting their audiences.
Marketing automation example with individualized videos
Personalized marketing helps marketers craft customer-specific messages. Marketing automation helps organizations deliver these messages at the right time, to the right individual.
Segmentation is when you divide prospects, leads, clients, or customers into sub-groups of people based on shared characteristics. When creating personalized videos, most organizations use textual characteristics like “name” or “product name”.
In the following video, I share 7 practical ways to segment your audience, which you can apply to find creative, human ways to increase customer happiness.
Personalized content marketing has taken leaps and bounds with the advancement of technology. As content becomes more personalized and people gravitate towards video content, creating customized video content will remain one of the best content marketing strategies for many years to come.
Video Marketing Automation Tips For An Outstanding Experience
Video Storytelling And Personalization
Stories are one of the most effective ways to capture the human being’s attention. Thanks to marketing automation, these video stories can be automatically adapted to each person’s unique context.
Since the dawn of civilization, and most likely, even before, we have been drawn to great storytelling. When making a video, it’s important to have a clear storyline.
Now imagine what you can do with dynamic information. For example, a personalized explainer video, which can empower any story with videos, images, audios, and texts that are unique, specific, contextualized.
To do this, create a flow that tells one singular string of events or thoughts that helps people understand the video’s message.
This flow needs to be led by personalized, customer-centric data.
You can do this with audience personas. And audience persona is a short description of the person your video is speaking to. An easy way to do this is to answer the following questions:
- Who are they?
- What demographic do they belong to?
- What’s valuable to them?
When creating a video, it’s good to start with knowing who you would want to speak to and crafting your content on their insights and preferences.
Here you will find an overview of several personalized video marketing case studies from a variety of firms, from online travel agencies to financial services and relationship marketing for car brands.
Video Personalization and Buyer Personas
The next step to build a robust video personalization strategy to truly engage with customers is to go a bit more granular. This what personalized marketing is all about.
Working with buyer personas is even better. With buyer personas, you start with people you already know a lot about.
If your dynamic videos are crucial marketing automation and customer service experience strategies, make sure to wow your customers with more than just their name on the videos.
Augmented Buyer Personas To Create Deep Emotional Connections With Customers
To do this, I recommend a simple and creative approach that you can also use in your customer-centric advertising campaigns. Use what I call augmented buyer personas. Augmented buyer personas help increase the brand-customer emotional connection.
What is an augmented buyer persona?
An augmented buyer persona is the profile of an individual comprised by all the interrelated information gathered about that individual provided by one or many data sources and the individual’s buyer persona, taking into consideration the individual’s particular context to create products, services and, most commonly, marketing messages that fit the individual’s needs, objections, desires, and interests, aligned with the objectives set by the organization.
With this approach, brands can improve customer satisfaction. Happy customers spend more. In fact, 74% of consumers say they have spent more with a company because of a history of positive customer service experiences.
If personalization is the rock, segmentation is the lighthouse of any great marketing personalization strategy. It is also one of the main reasons why personalized video marketing works so well when it is done based on personas.
Marketing segmentation connects all the dots to perform an outstanding customer experience. It supports your strategy with targeted messages sent at the right time without leaving aside the personal touch. It brings back creativity in advertising.
With audience segmentation, you can accompany individuals based on their specific characteristics in the different stages of the customer journey. This allows you to make real-time digital marketing decisions and messages powered by your customers’ desires, needs, and objections and to create long-lasting relationships.
Personalized Calls-to-action Increase Click Through Rate
One of the main advantages of personalized video marketing is that customers interact a lot more with video content.
This represents one of the best opportunities to make customers click on targeted calls-to-action added to segmented video campaigns.
Personalized calls-to-action deliver a higher click-through rate or CTR. In fact, a personalized call-to-action or CTA is about 202% more effective than a generic one.
Take a look at the following personalized call-to-action example:
This means that personalized video marketing doesn’t stop with the video itself. In fact, the video file that a personalized video platform like Pirsonal creates is just one of the assets that markets can use to engage with individuals at scale.
Through an interactive video player, you can display user-specific CTAs based on CRM data. Personalized video marketing becomes then an interactivity machine.
With today’s technology and marketing platforms, marketers can truly engage with unique audiences. One at a time.
For instance, Boston University reported that its emails with personalized videos had a 49% open rate. This more than doubles the average for the education sector.
This is one of the key benefits of using personalized videos, especially to target audiences with a certain level of engagement.
By analyzing your customer’s data and buyer persona, you can align your value proposition to the customer’s needs, expectations, and objections. Based on this, you can increase customer success by displaying the call-to-action that better responds to the customer intent.
Get Ahead Of Customer Needs With Personalized Emails With Personalized Video
One-to-one personal messaging platforms are now mainstream. However, email marketing is still the most effective way to engage customers and prospects at scale.
Check the following personalized email. As the email channel is today saturated, it is important to look for creative ways to attract consumers’ attention in order to increase response rates. Here is a good example:
The majority of organizations deliver their personalized videos through email.
A study by Email Monks says that personalized video message results in 280% higher returns than standard, traditional emails.
Videos are easier to watch and understand than plain text emails. 93% of millennials prefer watching a video to reading a newsletter.
Using a personalized video thumbnail can increase your email click-through rate. When your leads or clients know that the content of the email is a video, the open rate goes up.
Key Benefits Of Personalized Video Marketing To Delight Customers
These are some of the key benefits of adding video personalization within the customer journey to improve the experience
- Videos that are personalized increase email marketing open rates and improve clickthrough rate (CTR).
- 92% of marketers report using personalization in some way but most of them do basic personalization – Which gives you an opportunity to stand out from the crowd
- For example, Gartner predicts that organizations that excel in personalization will outsell companies that don’t by 20%.
- Personalized videos accelerate sales processes -An insurance company found that customers who watched personalized videos renewed at a rate of 12% higher than those who didn’t.
- Around 80% of the personalized video messages individual viewers also see their personalized call-to-action.
- 95% of customers from an insurance company reported that they preferred analyzing their personal status information through personalized videos.
- A leading financial services and automotive brand increased after-sales engagement by 20% during the customer journey with individualized videos.
Challenges Brands Face To Deliver A Lasting Positive Experience
Organizations often use customer relationship management tools. At the same time, they also have other marketing tools for marketing automation, customer support management, and data analysis.
Commonly, these tools do not communicate with each other. This makes it extremely difficult to deliver a consistent experience to each customer.
On one hand, maybe the sales or business development team has more structured and contextualized information on the accounts they are tracking. This is common in account-based marketing (also known as ABM).
On the other hand, marketing teams know more and better information about potential customers. This happens because these departments naturally focus on attracting new customers.
And likewise, those that manage the experience know better how to build better brand-customer relationships, thus their obsession is customer retention.
However, to maximize a good relationship with clients, it is vital that all these efforts towards potential and current clients are on the same page.
If they are not aligned, the customer service experience will be negative, sooner or later. This can be detrimental to lifetime value.
Ultimately, not only will the clientele be harmed, so customer leakages will occur in the medium term, but also the profit of the organization will decrease cyclically.
If organizations adopt a more comprehensive approach, they can centralize or share all the information about each lead and customer among all the tools.
From those tools used for customer support to those used for inbound marketing and even for call-center management.
Why? Because in the end, we are talking about people. The more we know our clients, the more effective we are when it comes to maintaining a fluid relationship that grows in knowledge and long-term connection ties.
The Bottom Line
The best personalized video marketing strategies focus on knowledge. Customer service experience also focuses on that knowledge. In the context of the person. To be able to anticipate wishes and customer objections. To surprise them with a message that they remember and that leads them to act for their benefit and for the benefit of the organization.
It’s not one department’s job. It’s the entire organization’s mission. For example, looking at churn rates by customer segment illuminates which types of customers are at risk and which may require an intervention. Seems simple, but it’s time-consuming and challenging.
Customer service experience it’s also about that anticipation. Personalized video strategies are about communication to create deep connections that make people react. One at a time.
If you want to explore this option to improve your customer service experience, you can start today with Pirsonal’s personalized video software, or rely on our specialized personalized video production agency. We’ll be happy to help you.
