How We Leverage Video in Customer Support Strategy

Before I joined Loom, my experience with video communication was purely recreational. I had never recorded a video message to document workflows for my team, and taking time away from writing an email to a customer to record a video just didn’t seem productive. Plus, all the editing and uploading required was a process that simply didn’t scale.

Now, the Customer Support team and I record an average of 250 videos per month using Loom. You wouldn’t know it by the number of tickets we get through each week, but we’re a small team; video messaging helps us answer and troubleshoot support tickets faster. These videos are sent to our customers externally, but they’re also kept internally as training resources for our growing team.

When you support hundreds or thousands of your customers through email or live chat, you want to be as efficient as possible while still delivering a world-class customer experience that is both fast and personal.

To maintain that balance, there are a couple of questions to ask first: 

• Do your customers feel like they are speaking to a human when they contact your support team?

• Does your support team have access to the information needed to properly support your customer base?

Here at Loom, properly documenting information is crucial to our success as a team. We’re not always working at the same time, but we need to communicate constantly to make sure everyone is on the same page. We communicate the difference between synchronous vs asynchronous communication to all new Loommates.

We found a great way to set ourselves up for success: quick, asynchronous videos. And with our customer satisfaction rating climbing, it’s safe to say our video content is positively impacting the way the team works.

We’re sharing how we use quick videos to support our customers and help our team access the information they need in hopes that this also helps other teams become more efficient while scaling their customer operations.

Explaining and troubleshooting

When my team needs to explain a more complex topic to a customer, we send a quick loom instead of a lengthy email. Walking the customer through the information in a visual way is more effective than writing a long essay on the subject — and the customer will appreciate being saved from a long read.

CSAT can fluctuate due to product launches, massive user growth, and server stability issues, and the proactive approach of using video for customer support positively impacts our team’s CSAT.

In April and May, after our response to COVID-19 announcing that Loom is free for educators and students, our user volume expanded quickly, and our support ticket volume increased 300%. As a result, our response time went up dramatically, which lowered our CSAT. I recorded a video to address and explain why it was taking us a long time to get back to users.

This video was sent in 3,803 tickets and watched 981 times 🤯 Here are some of the responses to the video: 

In response, we doubled down on recording even more videos to help our customers.

We immediately saw the impact. Our support requests took less time to close, and our satisfaction rating went up. We’re well on our way to getting our CSAT back to pre-pandemic numbers (93%).

By recording videos, we remove ambiguity with visually engaging content that helps customers navigate our video messaging platform.

Recording bug reports 

Quick videos help replace the cumbersome task of taking screenshots and annotating instructions when reporting bugs to the development team. This way, our developers can watch a quick video to assess what is not working correctly within the experience, instead of spending time trying to reproduce the bug.

Video messages have proven an especially helpful method when the bug is tricky to describe with just words –– and they’ve saved our team countless hours of work.

Document workflows and training videos for your team

Giving your team access to the information they need to successfully do their job is essential to providing a world-class experience to your customers. Planning and documenting your team workflows with videos is an invaluable resource, not only for new hires, but also for existing team members.

We use video to document processes so our entire team can easily find and learn important information whenever they need to. Investing time into creating evergreen training videos will empower your team with knowledge so your support reps feel confident in the information they’re providing to customers.

Sending a video to de-escalate a frustrated customer

Short replies, text in all capital letters, and some heavy sighs are all we need to sense our customer is getting frustrated. At this stage, we like to send a quick, personal video reply to de-escalate the situation. 

For the customer, seeing a friendly face and hearing an empathetic response can instantly change the tone of the conversation. We find that sending a video to clarify the situation helps both parties work toward a solution, instead of going back and forth for a while and risking misinterpretations that can happen with text communication alone.

Asking our users to record a quick video to demonstrate their issue or question

With millions of customers all over the world, we have a diverse user base. One thing we all have in common is our belief in customer communication through the power of video. 

When our customers are dealing with an issue and request support assistance, we ask them to record a quick loom showing us what they see. This video divulges far more context than written text or a few screenshots, which allows us to quickly identify the issue and provide a faster solution. Tickets solved on the first reply go up, response time goes down — it’s a win-win for everyone involved!

Before joining Loom, I would have told you video messaging was too much work and probably not the best choice for customer support. Loom removed that friction. I can now record and upload a video instantly and move on to the next task without getting stuck.

Video has proven to be an invaluable tool when scaling our Customer Support team. One of the best use cases for video messaging is as an asynchronous complement to other  information, especially when it’s complex and visual in nature. 

Start recording videos for your customers and team.