Customer Empowerment Through Scaled Support
Overview
NWEA’s support team was created to support its customer base through one on one interactions via phone, email, and chat. As the organization grew and trends in customer needs evolved additional approaches to support the customers needed to be implemented. With trends in video increasing due to social media and its ability to share highly specific information in short segments we started to build a library of short-form videos on common support interactions and share them via our Community site.
The Approach
Research was done by evaluating customer feedback from support requests. There was a question asked during each survey on what other forms of support would our customers like to receive and one of the primary requests was better self-help materials. Additionally, a review of industry trends in support and service groups showed video was becoming increasingly popular and effective. Once video was determined as our next scalable solution we evaluated what makes an effective video and implemented those strategies.
A single topic per video.
Include the person to humanize the support team.
Upbeat, concise, and friendly format to create connection.
Try to keep the videos to less than 5 minutes - some content requires more time but should be rare (2-3 minutes is ideal).
Have a dedicated development team to create storyboards, high-quality scripts, record audio/video, consistency, and edit content.
Biggest Challenge
The project started in 2019 and was quickly complicated by the impacts of COVID-19 and our workforce moving to a fully remote environment. This required the team to become even more creative in how they tackled the work. With no in-person workforce, we needed to pivot away from the highly personal introduction. Instead, we went with a small placeholder image at the start with the person’s name and role. As the work went further there were additional videos where the staff did not want to be identified for personal reasons so additional videos were created without the personal components. Overall, the largest challenge was to remain agile and adjust to the evolving work environment and individual team needs.
Outcomes
The impact was quite positive in empowering customers to answer their own questions when they wanted, providing the support team work that was different than the daily one-to-one interactions, and resulting in annual cost savings from case deflection. Lastly, as the body of work matured newer tools such as AI helped enhance the overall process by reducing efforts in script creation and voiceover.
Initiative Lead: Austin Christian
Creative Direction: Austin Christian, Ike Graul, David Ramer, Brian Jones
Development Team: Ike Graul, David Ramer, Zaid Badaruddin, Ike Graul, Bobby Edwards
Talent: Monterae Hill, Caleb Phillips, Ike Graul, Justin Latham-Light, Jonathan Batalas, Thomas Wells, Zaid Badaruddin