A 2014 survey published by Deloitte exposed a glaring difference in perception between businesses and customers when it comes to Customer Experience (CX). The survey found that while an overwhelming 80% of businesses believed that they provided ‘superior’ customer experience, only 8% of customers felt the same about these companies. In other words, most businesses get it wrong when it comes to delivering great experience.
Why Businesses Get CX Wrong
One of the main reasons why a lot of businesses deliver poor customer experience is because of faulty assessments. Marketers often measure CX with proxy metrics like conversion rate or customer satisfaction. An increase in conversion rate or the NPS score is often taken as a validation of great customer experience.
This cannot be farther from the truth. Conversion rates could be high due to a multitude of reasons (including the unavailability of a good alternative) while high NPS scores are more indicative of the quality of the product or service rather than the buying experience itself. An improvement in these metrics do not always mean that the business offers great experience.
Why Videos Are Important
Studies show that the human brain processes visuals at nearly 60,000 times the speed of text. Using videos to explain your business offering or to onboard your customer is often much more effective than using text or even images. Videos are also extremely versatile and can be used to improve experience throughout the buyer journey.
Explainer Videos
Explainer videos are one of the best use-cases for videos in improving customer experience. Explainer videos are essentially a couple of minutes long and help the viewer understand the business offering. These videos usually make use of animations to demonstrate a real life problem and how the business solves the challenge with their product or service. Such videos are often more effective than text-based ‘About Us’ or ‘How It Works’ pages. Some businesses have reported an average conversion rate increase of nearly 20% with explainer videos.
Vlogs
Video blogs (or Vlogs, for short) are an effective channel to nurture a lead as well as onboard them after a purchase. Vlogs are often hosted on third party platforms like YouTube and provide the viewer with a dedicated ‘playlist’ of industry related content. Take this video from Oberlo, for example. The video describes the concept of dropshipping to interested viewers . While there are hundreds of text-based blogs explaining the same concept, a video helps explain the concept better. Such videos are often organized into a business’ eLearning modules as well for customer onboarding.
Video Marketing
Video consumption has grown manifold over the past decade. Nearly 500 million people watch videos on Facebook every single day. Nearly one third of all people on internet are YouTube users. Given the scale of video consumption, they make for a fantastic source for marketing your business.
Viral videos that lean on funny or emotional triggers are only one component of it. Video marketing is also used by businesses to provide business updates, product reviews and customer testimonials. In addition to this, businesses may partner with social media influencers to promote video content featuring their product to their followers. These marketing strategies are often non-intrusive and tightly integrate with the consumption patterns of the viewers. They are therefore a better form of marketing outreach compared to ads.
It has been a decade since the iPhone was launched and in this time, smartphones have seen a terrific growth in popularity. The ease of mobile internet access during this period has made video consumption easy and cheap. Given the sheer power that visuals have over text, videos as a business tool is here to stay. Customer experience is one of the top priorities for any business and with videos, businesses can make sure that their consumers get what they want in the visual medium that they prefer.
About the Author
Anand Srinivasan is a marketing consultant. You may reach him at: anand_srinivasan@writerzone.net.
