Digital Acceleration is the drive to improve the online customer experience… rapidly. Before COVID-19 changed the business landscape, about 50% of companies said they were prioritizing digital transformation. But after stay-at-home restrictions and social distancing suddenly forced more collaboration and commerce online, over 80% of companies now indicate that accelerating their digital transformation is a strategic necessity.1
Personalized video has emerged as one of the most pragmatic and impactful ways to achieve digital acceleration. The technology’s ability to create a unique video for each customer or prospect on-the-spot, explaining how products and services will work in their specific case, has upped the digital bar. It has the ability to make it easier for customers to get the information they need to make informed decisions online. But while pretty much every company wants to improve their online customer experience, the question remains – does personalized video generate a positive return on investment?
As a company specializing in personalized video through our IndiVideo platform, we have seen data on the engagement and conversion of personalized video in detail and up close. These have been the primary ways we measure success. But about 6 months ago, we developed and integrated a new dashboard view set into our analytics – ROI. We had never measured and displayed ROI specifically in our dashboards, although like others we had tried to calculate ROI based primarily on conversion. The result was that ROI was difficult to know with any real precision, and was at best a broad estimate.
Looking at the graphic below, you can see a variety of use cases, mainly in the financial services industry, and running across different products and points in the customer journey. What we see through detailed ROI measurement on the IndiVideo platform is a range of 4x to over 40x ROI. It took a while for that to sink in… even for us. In the vast majority of deployments, the ability to engage and convert directly in the digital channel was clear. As is the payoff.
As someone who started experimenting with personalized video well over a decade ago, I have always felt that the rationale behind this technology, and now proof of positive outcomes is simple; the bar is set low. What I mean by that is in the online channel, customers are expected to do a lot of work to get the information they need. While attention spans are measured in a handful of seconds, the information required to make informed decisions requires diligence, perseverance and strong literacy skills to find, read and process. The customer is on their own, there is nobody there to help them. Think of how much harder that is compared to having a human ask us a few questions and then explain how that product will work in our case, based on my specific situation. That is what you get with human assistance, and to a fair degree also with personalized video. A critical customer assistance gap is the elephant in the room for digital transformation, and personalized video technology is helping fill it.
Can customers also use chat or other human assistance features? Sure. But the ability to help every customer at each juncture of the digital experience with human intervention is costly, impractical, and often not what customers want as part of the digital experience. Humans should help with the more sophisticated customer interactions that best leverages their skills. Filling the online customer assistance gap is possible, and as we now know highly profitable, with personalized video technology.
1BCG Digital Strategy Roadmap 2020 Global Study
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