Level Up Customer Support With Video Replies

It stands to reason that at Loom, video plays a huge role in the support we provide to our customers.

We make heavy use of video in our customer support workflows, whether we’re explaining complex issues, or walking a customer through some suggested troubleshooting steps. 

Using Loom in our customer support interactions has helped us maintain an industry-leading CSAT.

Here's exactly how we use it.

Replying to support inquiries with video messages elevates the customer experience in a personal, scalable way.

1. Injecting humanity and empathy: Recording your own face and screen humanizes what’s otherwise often a more transactional experience. Your customer will feel more at ease — special, even — when they know they’re being assisted by a real person. 

2. Being understood: Video messages are a great way to walk the recipient through a series of troubleshooting steps or product workflows in a much less daunting way than sending them plain-text instructions. People learn far more quickly and retain much more information when they can hear and see instructions, versus when they only read them.

3. Filling the gap: Video support hits that sweet spot between phone support (which can be expensive and inefficient) and email support (which can lack personality if not done well).

These video replies were all super quick and easy to record, and saved us and our customers lots of needless back-and-forth!

This user needed to go through a few troubleshooting steps that may not be familiar to the average user. Text instructions would have been daunting, but the video walk-through removes any ambiguity and feels much more approachable. 

We’ll sometimes ask customers to record their screens and the behavior they’re seeing — this leads to quicker resolution times, as it’s easier to identify the issue and provide a solution once you’re seeing what they’re seeing. 

I shared this next video with a customer who was having trouble with the app. I wasn’t sure where exactly she was getting hung up, so I walked her through how to send a video to me.

Responding with a video is a great way to reply to a customer when you’re sharing any kind of news you anticipate they won’t be 100% happy to hear — for example, when a customer requests a feature your product doesn’t have, and that you have no current plans to build. Instead of replying via plain text, you can convey with your face and voice that you feel for them, and share any potential workarounds that they may find useful.

In addition, sending a video to deescalate a frustrated or upset customer can be extremely effective. Seeing the face behind the brand, and hearing the empathy in that real person’s voice, can instantly change the course of a support interaction. A previously frustrated customer will feel heard. 

Recording a video message shows the customer you’re both working toward a common goal, in a way email alone cannot.

Recording one-off video messages is useful and can still be faster than typing out email or chat replies … but what about when your team often receives the same kinds of questions over and over?

Loom for Teams is in beta, and soon, any team on Business or Enterprise plans will be able to create a Team Library where you and your whole team can record, watch, and collaborate on videos in a shared Workspace.

That way, any time a support agent records a video, they can drop it into the Team Library — meaning you’ll have an evergreen, growing repository of videos that answer your customers’ most complex questions.

Pro tip: If your team uses TextExpander to insert snippets of frequently used text into your emails and chats, you can save Loom links in those snippets for any videos you reference over and over!

You can also leverage your help desk’s saved reply feature to include these videos in the email replies you most commonly send.

Loom links display as animated previews in Gmail when you have the Chrome extension installed, or you can do the same in any email client by sharing your Loom via the Linked GIF options.

If your team uses Zendesk for customer support, you can add Loom videos to your Zendesk Guide knowledge base, and they’ll automatically embed. Likewise with Intercom, and a growing list of your other favorite platforms! 

Try adding video messaging to the channels you use to serve your customers, and let us know how it goes!‍

Read more about how video helped us improve customer satisfaction to 96%.