How to Leverage Video Messages in Customer Success

There's one thing that every Customer Success professional is looking for: more time. More time means more opportunities to help customers and grow our relationships with them.

There's always great work to be done, and we'll never run out of it. So the question is, with so many opportunities to grow our portfolio accounts and nurture relationships, how do we scale our Customer Success teams to leverage the opportunities we know are right in front of us when we’re blocked by the fact that we can't clone ourselves to run multiple meetings at once?

As a Customer Success Manager at Loom, I've been afforded the opportunity to speak with hundreds of users, grow relationships, and nurture teams to help get the most out of quick video messages. Here are a few of the ways I love to use Loom.

Every account you manage will have someone who's calling the shots — will they renew or cancel? In enterprise contracts, it's most likely an executive for the department your product services. An executive sponsor who signs the contract isn't typically in the day-to-day activities of the software, and they might be more removed from the process, wanting to focus on the overall ROI that your product is driving for their department.

Getting meetings with executives is notoriously difficult, and trust and rapport won't develop in 30-60 minutes at a quarterly business review. 

I've used Loom consistently to send executives quick updates, walking them through the great progress their team is having each month. This builds two powerful connections:

• It builds trust with the signing authority, without them having to get on a call with you.

• It builds the relationship you have with your day-to-day contacts as you're praising their success to their boss.

An added bonus: Since this video message is asynchronous, they can watch on their own time and respond when it’s convenient for them, which every executive appreciates.

You want new customers to be up and running as quickly as possible, and live onboardings are always impactful. However, people will undoubtedly have questions afterward and help docs don't always cut it.

What they really want is a "quick how-to" with personalized, strategic advice. That's where your expertise comes in and you prove a ton of value in being a partner versus a vendor. In the past, I've written myriad emails with screenshots and lengthy advice, only to have that consume way too much time and for the advice to fall flat and go unused.

In my previous role, I transitioned to using Loom for sending clients videos with personalized recommendations where I could walk through on-screen workflows and share my advice. It was effective, efficient, and expressive, and it took me about one-tenth of the time to record a quick, minute-long video message than it took to write out a detailed email.

The effects of doing this consistently for customers — both proactively to give them advice and reactively when they have questions — will drastically change the relationship you have over time. When you're asking a customer to do something, you need to make it as easy as possible. Video is the medium that wins almost every time in this case.

When I switched to consistent asynchronous video communication with my accounts, I saw them grow in dollar size over time and my net retention went up quarter over quarter. When we're talking about business goals from a Customer Success team, these are front and center.

We've all had meetings with customers where the net result is another scheduled meeting. On countless occasions, I've spent 30-60 minutes on a call outlining advice for what to do next, only to have that fall flat — nothing happens, and it feels like I missed the mark completely.

The thing is, we have to hold our customers accountable for getting stuff done and moving the needle forward. The solution we're delivering is there to help them achieve their desired outcome, but we have to stay on top of our customer communication to ensure our customers get where they’re trying to go.

After a customer meeting, we'll send a quick follow-up email going through some actionable items and then go over the single most important step that will set them up for success. We create a quick loom for them to watch and act on, which provides two beneficial outcomes for the Customer Success team:

• We can make sure they've watched the video with the engagement notifications feature.

• Recording a Loom video of the most important takeaways brings focus to what's next and makes it easy for them to take action. Rinse and repeat!

There are a couple of scenarios for using Loom to quickly check in. 

First, accounts go dark. Customers don't get back to you. It happens, and sometimes emailing or calling them doesn't get anywhere. Sending a loom that's camera-only (instead of sharing your screen) so they see your face can be an effective way of cutting through the noise to motivate someone to respond.

It's not that you're guilting someone into replying, but you've taken the time to reach out with a personalized video, so they feel the urge to return the same courtesy with a response.

On the other side of things, you can send a friendly check-in video message to a team that is still active, just taking a moment to reach out and mention that they can access you whenever they need it. This is one of the most simple looms that I consistently record, but also the most effective for relationship building.

Sending a quick check-in loom doesn't stop at just letting them know they've got a point of contact, though. I've recorded videos congratulating teams on a round of recent funding or a promotion one of their members got. I could send these messages over email, but with video, they communicate a level of sincerity difficult to replicate in a written message.

One of my favorite things about Loom is our largely distributed client base. We've got teams using video messaging in every single time zone across the world.

For context, I'm remotely based out of Toronto. I've spoken with teams in India, Germany, and Australia, which would typically provide a lot of time zone coordination to set up calls. With a 14-hour time difference, sometimes it can be next to impossible to find a time that doesn't force someone to be online at an inconvenient hour.

Understand what situations call for synchronous vs asynchronous communication. While it's always going to be necessary to have those synchronous calls in certain cases (for kickoff calls or account reviews, for example), I've leaned on Loom to deliver a consistent customer experience regardless of where they are in the world. From quick how-tos, to client check-ins, to strategic advice, it pays dividends to show your face in a quick loom walking customers through information that they can consume on their own schedule.

You're improving the customer experience by not having to set up a call every time they have a question. They appreciate it because watching a video message is quicker for them, and you'll appreciate it because it won't overrun your calendar with meetings. The Customer Success team can move quicker and deliver great experiences to customers regardless of time zones or work schedules.

These are just a handful of the ways I've used Loom, and there are many other opportunities to explore. Never stop testing how to engage with customers. You'll find some delightful opportunities in the process, and video messaging can help you get there faster.