It’s always wonderful to see how ScreenFlow-ers around the world use ScreenFlow! Our friends at Wistia wanted to prove that screencasts and a bit of personality can go a long way in connecting with your customers and offering support. Check out what they have to say about leveraging video in a tech support environment! Thanks Wistia!
Author — Jeff Vincent is Director of Customer Happiness at Wistia. His tweets have been described as nonsensical at best.
Wistia Support Team
At Wistia, we believe that even if your company is based on the web, building a business still requires a healthy dose of caring and real human connection. We interact with our customers on a daily basis, and this helps us to better understand and anticipate their future needs.
As our customer base has grown, our support inbox has turned into a bustling hub of conversations. With more than 80,000 businesses using Wistia in a wide variety of ways, it can be tricky to handle the volume and complexity of customer issues. Our team of five has increasingly turned to static resources, especially video, to scale our support abilities, show our personalities, and make sure customers never have to wait for an answer to a simple question.
Screencasts are the best way to tie your app’s interface to the instructions you are providing. Images are great, but nothing approaches the fidelity of being able to follow a patient, helpful expert as they lead you through the workflow. Videos are super easy to digest. In just a few minutes, your customers can learn the skills they need to accomplish what they came to do. It’s the closest we can get to downloading skills like they do in The Matrix!
Once you have a process and some practice for recording new screencasts, you’ll start noticing lots of places where a quick video would help your customers. We use videos all over our documentation, as part of the onboarding experience, and as a way to walk users through particularly tricky workflows.
Here’s an example of a screencast that led to some extremely positive results. Our Video SEO functionality can provide great results for our customers, but it’s sometimes tricky to set up. This short screencast took us less than an hour to script and shoot, but resulted in 80% fewer emails related to setting up this feature.
I’d love to hear how others are using screencasts in support or anywhere else in your business. What has worked for you and what hasn’t?
I use them a lot for my clients. Main use is in tutorial form as an instructional guide on how to use the administration part of their custom WordPress website I have built for them. In the past this use to be a PDF instructional manual but that had its flaws and was a bit dry. With the screencast clients pick up what they need to do quiet quickly and have it as a good reference for later use if need be. It also allows for me to customise around thier specific needs. I have also used screencasts to present concepts when not being able to do a face to face which has been successful too.
In an educational setting where funding for support is very limited, we rely on short, modular screencasts to provide us with maximum flexibility in responding to our constituencies. Of course, we prefer preemptive use of our support screencasts but even where responding to email queries, it’s a major timesaver to be able to cite the appropriate tutorial with a URL or link in the email reply.