Video as an essential part of a B2B customer engagement strategy

Research confirms time and time again why customer engagement remains one of the most important C-suite priorities.

An essential part of customer engagement is customer experience. Companies that value CX outpace their peers in terms of revenue twice as much as those who don’t. Recent shifts in consumer behaviors and expectations brought about by COVID-19 are forcing companies to change their approach to CX:

• B2B video interactions are up 69% since the beginning of the pandemic
• The B2B video interaction trend will continue once we’re cleared to travel again: in the US at least, only 20–30% of B2B buyers want to interact with reps in person once the crisis is over.
  

As far as business communication goes, video chat is here to stay. In this type of environment, two things are essential: one, that businesses are training reps so that they’re prepared for video. Two, that companies take every opportunity to integrate video into their sales pipeline and customer journey maps.

Below, we look at typical customer journeys, the various types of video technology out there, and how these can be included in a customer engagement strategy that wins customer loyalty and sets your business apart.

Integrate video calling with chat apps to boost sales and support

Connecting with prospective customers via video can be particularly fruitful in the earliest stages of the customer journey — high-performing sales reps spend 22% more time with customers. Interestingly, more customers prefer that time to be spent remotely.

Using the Daily API, it’s incredibly easy to integrate video chat with your existing tech stack, workflow, and customer engagement processes. Video chat can easily be integrated with chat widgets, including the third-party Intercom platform, as well as custom solutions.

Integrate video with other customer information for personalized service

You can heighten the effectiveness of video calling by integrating it with customer characteristics. Greet customers personally, know their needs, make recommendations. This can have a particular impact when it comes to providing sales and support by video chat —  customers across the globe rate “not having to repeat myself” as one of the most important parts of a customer service experience.

Leveraging customer information and personalizing your service is possible even at the earliest stage of the funnel: if you’re a SaaS company, returning visitors who spend a lot of time on the pricing page might be prospective customers. Customers on your docs might need help.

Buyer personas are complicated, and so is connecting with an individual at an organization, but leveraging the data at your disposal makes it easier. Behind every company is a multi-layered hierarchy of decision-makers with overlapping interests — chances are, you often have the information you need to connect with the right person. Video just allows you to make that a more personal connection.

Deliver the right messaging, and consider the funnel

The easiest way to connect with customers by video call is to let them know that it’s an option, especially at the most critical points of the user journey. Funnel analysis will show the strengths and weaknesses of your current UX set up, and show where you might need better messaging to meet customer needs. What are the drop off points? Where are customers bouncing? Integrate video chat at those points to connect reps with customers when they might need support.

The Daily API makes video calling so easy to integrate that you can play around with the formula until you discover what works. McKinsey research shows that user-centric companies “rapidly iterate as they design new experiences, ensuring they prototype and test them with consumers to increase their chances of success.” Dropping video chat into your site or app with a few lines of code makes it incredibly easy to iterate your customers’ video chat experience.

Host webinars and tutorials — and gain insight from your customers’ experience

Sure, you can throw up a recorded video that walks customers through your platform — and it’s always good, for posterity, to include links to previous webinars. But hosting a live event gives people a sense of accountability and pushes people to actually attend, it gives customers a chance to participate and ask questions, and carries some of the dynamism and accountability of a live event.

Setting up a live webinar hosted on your own site is easy with the Daily API — it’s essentially one large group call and you can set it up in minutes, with just a few lines of code. Hosting your own webinar with Daily gives you insight into your own users’ experience of your webinar, in terms of their call experience. Having direct insight into your customers’ call experience is much more actionable than relying on anecdotal feedback, or the type of limited insight you recieve when you host a webinar on a third-party platform.

Make this data work for you: if you plan to organize a series of webinars — and you probably should! — these numbers allow you to rate your webinars against each other, so you can see what content is most engaging customers, and what needs tweaking.

Host virtual conferences, or push your webinars to broader platforms

For large webinars, you can use live-streaming technology to broadcast a real-time call to your streaming platform. There’s a reason Apple’s keynote events and Tesla’s Battery Day focus on live streaming — it fuses the excitement of a real-time event with the benefits of a digital one.

If you’re wondering about the difference between a live-streamed event and the type of webinar we describe in the previous example, it’s partly in the definition of the word “live”: live streaming can be a combination of several different camera streams and there’s typically 5-20 seconds latency (compared to an imperceptible 20 ms for a large group call). We’ve dedicated a blog post to getting started with live streaming, which you can read here.

Meet customer needs with empathy

It’s still important to train employees so that they’re good on video. At a time where many of us are still struggling with the right email greetings, tone is difficult. Video makes it easier to connect by hearing someone’s voice and seeing their face. At a time of crisis, when people are suffering physically, financially, or in terms of isolation, a key part of customer experience will be how businesses meet customer needs with care, concern, and empathy.

Back in April, McKinsey identified four practices that should frame responses to customer experience in response to the pandemic — and these continue to hold true as we plan out strategies for connecting with customers beyond this time of crisis:

• focusing on care and connection
• meeting customers where they are today
• reimagining CX for a post-COVID-19 world
• building capabilities for a fast-changing environment.
  

Interested in learning more about using Daily for B2B sales or support?

Contact us — we love to chat.