Today, every customer is a critic-in-waiting. Through the “word of mouth” effect brought on by social media, any individual with a smartphone and a Twitter account now has the potential to become your brand’s most vocal fan — or worst nightmare. When every customer is a critic, every employee in your organization becomes a brand manager.

In an age where few businesses can succeed on the power of their distribution network, manufacturing prowess, or access to technology alone, companies in every industry are stepping up efforts across their organizations to ensure that every customer has a great experience. They are becoming customer-obsessed companies and it requires the work of every person in the organization.

Customer experience is no longer the sole purview of help desk representatives and brick-and-mortar sales associates. From marketing and sales, to product development and the C-suite, everyone has a role to play in keeping the company on-brand and customer-oriented.

The professionals dedicated to managing customer experience (often called “CX”) have an enormous task in front of them, one that is only getting bigger and more complex. In order to deliver on sweeping customer experience strategies, CX professionals look to ever more effective processes and tools to span departmental silos and unite their workforce behind a common mission.

Video helps to create customer-obsessed companies

For leading customer-obsessed organizations, video is emerging as a high-impact, high-touch communications channel to record and share:

• Executive and internal communications
• Training materials for every employee
• Peer-to-peer best practices (social learning)
• Employee coaching and manager feedback
• Customer interaction research

As organizations evolve beyond the old top-down models, communications no longer come from a single source. Employees look to the executive team, their managers, and their peers to understand how their individual roles impact customer perceptions.

As individuals grow and learn in their roles, they will develop a wealth of knowledge about supporting the customer experience. By making the ability to record video — as well as consume it — the privilege of every employee, customer experience professionals can not only communicate in one direction more effectively, but they can curate a library of best practices, recorded on video, that has been shared by their employees.

Increasingly, the video content management system (video CMS) is becoming a hub for social learning, accessible by all employees at each level and across departments.

Training materials for every employee

Customer experience training is an ongoing effort and takes place at every level of the organization. Executing a customer experience strategy can require a massive update of training materials across dozens of departments. If your company is delivering that training via classroom, it can take months to coordinate hundreds of training sessions, not to mention untold dollars. What’s more is that even if everyone assembles in a single location for a weekend or a weekend, these events can be so overwhelming that little is retained — both in memory and enthusiasm.

Regular, bite-sized training that is clearly relevant to your employees is the best way to ensure the success of your CX strategy. If your organization already delivers training content via online video, it’s a much simpler process to simply edit existing training regimens. Customer experience designers can review the training material currently offered and make edits by recording new segments. The on-demand and low-cost nature of delivering the content through a video CMS, means that employees can review content piece by piece over time, and on-demand when they need to learn something hyper-relevant to their current work.

Executive communications

In truly customer-obsessed companies, executives take an active role in setting goals and expectations, and helping all employees understand the importance of great customer service to the company’s bottom line. While there may be a place for CEO keynote presentations, employees also benefit from hearing from leadership on a regular basis in informal videos that apply to their daily work. Putting the power in the hands of executives to record and publish simple video is a great way for customer experience professionals to ensure that employees at every level and department in the company know that leadership is deeply invested in the role that they play in advancing the company’s interests.

 

 

Peer-to-peer best practices

Customer experience strategies may be developed by a handful of CX professionals at the home office, but it’s carried out by a limitless number of frontline employees every day. Expertise is not only developed by the CX professional, but by the representatives at the service center, the associates on the retail floor, and by the support personnel at the call center help desk.

Research has shown that social learning is responsible for twice as much of the actual learning that formal training materials provide. Employees learn by exchanging stories and by witnessing the actions and consequences of others’ actions. In this way, your employees’ knowledge becomes valuable not only to the market researchers trying to better understand the customer at-large, but also to one another.

While social learning is nothing new — it’s been happening organically in workplaces for centuries — the ability to share best practices online and across physical boundaries via social learning software is. While most social learning software focuses on text updates resembling popular social networking applications, video is emerging as a better way for companies to manage the knowledge of their entire workforce.

With webcams and simple desktop and mobile recording software, anyone in your organization can share the story of a successful service interaction, customer feedback, or lesson learned. Integrated into enterprise social, like Jive or Chatter, employees have a straightforward way to share their stories with their colleagues down the hall or across the country.

Employee coaching and manager feedback

Through roleplaying, customer service professionals can practice interacting with customers before hitting the field. By recording these roleplaying sessions, managers can better understand and help coach their employees. Beyond simulation of in-person interactions, managers can review documents, deliver messages, and record performance evaluations, all for the employee’s future benefit.

Video offers the highest-fidelity to real life and a high-touch experience that employees appreciate. A video CMS helps managers and employees archive real-time web conference video as well as communicate asynchronously when schedules are too packed to meet.

Documented standards and expectations

For the CX and training professionals back at the home office, video offers them a wealth of employee-submitted best practices and successful role-play examples. Through the process of knowledge management, CX professionals can curate a library of content that can then be shared back to the entire workforce.

 

 

Customer interaction research

For many companies, video recording has replaced one-way mirrored test labs and mystery shoppers. With video everywhere, deployed at low cost, companies can test the usability of their software products, footfalls in their stores, and customer interactions at their service desks. With multisource desktop video recording, customer experience professionals can study every part of how their company engages with their employees.

Put the power of video to work to optimize your customer experience, by focusing on your employees.

With so much video being produced in companies today, it’s important for employees to have the ability to record at their fingertips, for managers to be able to curate best practices, and for customer experience professionals to share training and reinforce mission.

From social learning to executive communications, Panopto manages it all in a single solution. And with a simple, predictable per-user licensing model, it’s easy for trainers and IT departments to rapidly deploy video recorders across the enterprise to get employees started quickly.

To learn more about how to unite your workforce around the customer experience with video, contact a member of our team today to request a free trial.