Building video tutorials for customer self-service

Why you should have product videos as a part of your customer self-service

Customers expect videos to be an integral part of customer self-service. Also customer support teams around the world are realizing the impact that videos can have in building customer engagement and offering a personal touch across the customer life cycle. It is much easier and quicker for a customer to watch a video explaining how they can solve their product issue, than through text or images.

Knowledge base videos

Using short and crisp product videos in your knowledge base can go a long way in scaling up the user onboarding process and help them in getting started with your product. Videos help in making the process scalable and repeatable. To make it effective, you need to ensure that your product video is searchable, organized and structured into the right knowledge base topics. More importantly, video analytics allows you to measure the how your product video has performed based on customer engagement and frequency of usage.

Troubleshooting videos

These are the set of product videos that help your customers solve product related issues on their own. Product videos of your customer support agents providing walkthroughs or a product video about installing the product, help your team reduce the average time spent on customer’s and brings down the cost per customer.

Key pointers for building product videos for customer self-service portal

Suitability of topic: Before you start building product videos, fundamental question to answer is the if the topic is suitable, and which part of your knowledge base will the video tutorial add value to. For instance, a video tutorial on installation of your product can go in the “Getting started” category, which also has content on setting up the account, understanding user roles, etc.
Length of the video: Though product videos are much easier to consume than text, the length of the video tutorial is critical. It is advisable to keep the length of your video tutorial under 5 minutes. If your product video is going to be longer, it makes more sense to break it into parts and make it a series.
Simplicity of language: Simplicity is key to a successful video tutorial. You need to make sure that the audio script is crisp and simple.
Quality of visuals and audio: It is not necessary to have professional video equipments to make meaningful product videos, but at the same time it is important that you use a decent microphone to ensure audio quality. So, try to record in a quiet background. Make sure that the visuals are easy on the eye. For instance, if it’s a product demo video, then you need to ensure that your mouse cursor movements are smooth and easy to follow.
Write descriptions thoughtfully: A great product video is not only about how it engages the end user, but it is also about discoverability for search engines. Thoughtful descriptions can make your product videos easily discoverable in search. Clearly state, what is the user likely to learn from the video tutorial and how its content might benefit them.

Next topic - Best practices in building a knowledge base

What next?

Scaling your customer support team

As your organization grows, it’s equally important to scale up your customer support team. And it’s not easy to scale a support team unless you have a set process and the necessary tools to help them across different stages.