Creating Knowledge Base Videos
As customers have greater access to decent broadband internet speeds, video becomes a more practical, appealing, and expected option to get support. Research says that 69% of customers prefer video over text when learning about a product or service. Social media, mobile phones, chat tools, email, and CRM tools are increasingly focused on making video easily embeddable and viewable on their platforms. Using video in your knowledge base can supplement written answers with engaging, visual mini-demonstrations that increase accessibility for all skill levels and across language barriers. Customer experience leader Shep Hyken says: "Video has become one of the most cost-effective ways to promote, train, and support customers... it can both save you money and make you money”.
However, creating video content is more time-consuming than publishing a text article — and it can be harder to maintain — so picking the right places to use video is important. Video is best used when:
- The content is easier to show than to describe. Video can explain steps more naturally and fluidly than text or screenshots can. Lengthy lists of steps or a complex task can be cumbersome for the customer to follow along with. An example is describing how to tie a bowtie; the manual motions are much easier to show than to describe.
- The content is frequently visited. Invest video production time into answering common questions where the effort will pay off many times over, and create space for your team to focus on the more challenging, less-common issues.
- You want to create an emotional reaction to your content. Conveying emotion is easier through video, and creating a positive emotional reaction to your business helps build customer loyalty and trust.
- The content changes infrequently. For cases where a part of your product doesn't change often, a video can provide significant benefit to your users by being referenced and reused regularly.
- You’re documenting frequent changes. Not all video content needs to be highly produced and long-term. Small, easily-replaced, or updated videos can be a powerful tool for illustrating product changes, particularly if you don’t need to update a voiceover at the same time.
(Available at: https://www.helpscout.com/blog/video-knowledge-base/ – text adapted).
