How we’re using video to deliver better support to our customers

Our company, Everbridge, was founded after 9/11 to help improve the way people communicate and locate each other in a time of crisis. Our SaaS-based emergency communications platform is used by over 4,200 enterprise customers. It reaches over 500 million people in more than 200 countries

The technical support team at Everbridge is made up of three distinct teams and about 30 agents. We help our customers navigate our solutions and troubleshoot problems, some of which become quite complex and situational. On an average week, we field about 7,000 inquiries. If there’s a major disaster or weather event—for instance a hurricane—support calls can double in volume to 15,000 a week.

Video as a new touchpoint for support

We’ve always used traditional means of support (typically phone or email) to connect with our customers. But about a year ago, my boss came to me and asked me to explore using video as another channel for customer support.

Back then I didn’t know there was such a thing as Vidyard, so I researched and purchased a video recording suite and set up my own in-house digital recording studio. I also set up a YouTube channel and figured out how to get our support videos to play within our support environment so customers didn’t have to leave to get all the information they needed.

While it was fun, the cobbled-together approach was a huge time sink. We have more than 600 knowledge base articles that people use all the time and that had the potential to become videos. I managed to get about 12 videos done.

At the same time, my workload was expanding. So my boss and I started to look at ways to continue producing video content at scale. We set a goal to get about 50 done in a year. We also wanted to find a way to make our support videos more personal. The ones we were creating were canned. They couldn’t really reflect context or help a customer who had a specific or unique issue.

Vidyard solves the personalization problem

Around this time, my boss asked me to sit in on a webinar from a company called Vidyard where I was introduced to the platform. I then sat in on a demo of the product and got my hands on a demo environment so I could really kick the tires and see how we might be able to use the platform for support.

Working with our dev team I was able to get our support environment to query videos located in Vidyard. I was also able to integrate Vidyard into Salesforce so support reps could insert a personal video or playlist into their communications. I took what I built to our year-end business review and received glowing feedback.

We find video to be a terrific tool for explaining particularly complex things to customers. Expediency and accuracy are paramount for our customers, who are using our product in emergency situations. People don’t have time to be hunting around our support system trying to figure out how to do something.

I always say it’s a bit like using YouTube to replace the side mirror on your car. You might find videos that are close. But they don’t exactly solve your problem. There are so many variables with part numbers and makes and models and the like, that you’d spend forever hunting for the answers.

Personal video that exactly answers a customer’s question

What Vidyard has allowed our support team to do is create a custom video that exactly answers a customer’s question in as detailed a way as possible. It is like we’re reaching out through the computer screen to hold our customer’s hand and guide them immediately to the answer. And It feels different for the customer. When someone is answering your question 100% of the way, it increases a customer’s success using our product and creates product stickiness.

Support delivered via personal video is even better than a one-on-one discussion, because the whole thing is recorded. Our customers can go back to that video and replay it at any time. They can pause it. Rewind it. And on our end, we have the Vidyard analytics to immediately alert us when our customers are struggling.

Now, every person who joins our team is given a Vidyard license. They are using video to handle complex support questions and interact with customers in more personal ways.

Video has become a standard tool in our support arsenal. It allows us to build a video that nails a customer’s challenge right out of the gate. In my opinion, that’s truly a priceless capability.

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