Does providing customer support feel more like a liability and operational burden for your streaming business? If yes, it’s time to think again. OTT customer support has the potential to be much more than just answering user queries as a part of the streaming service. It is an excellent strategic imperative to enhance a viewer’s overall experience, drive product development, and boost market competitiveness for your DTC streaming offering.
This blog explores how focusing on customer service can be a game changer for your VOD platforms. We also show how Hi5, a modern SaaS solution that leverages AI-powered automation, can simplify support complexities. Leverage it to transform the support function into an advantage for your OTT platform!
Why is innovative and effective support a strategic imperative for your VOD business?
Customer support is an essential function for DTC businesses. It is needed to resolve user queries and help them access a product or service seamlessly. However, its role is more than just that for VOD businesses - it is a strategic business imperative. You need to realize how the market is flowing with streaming options, and given the competition, poor support almost immediately translates into OTT churn.
Here are some reasons summarizing support’s importance in DTC streaming success:
- Efficient support influences user satisfaction with the service, which impacts loyalty.
While streaming on OTT platforms, users often encounter problems such as technical glitches or issues concerning free trial coupons, for which they seek support. In such situations, prompt and relevant responses that resolve queries give them a good experience and mindset. This raises their chances of recurring repurchases - a significant element of subscription-based success. Conversely, poor support leaves a wrong impression, impacts loyalty, and increases churn risk.
80% of customers feel the company's experience is as crucial as its products or services.
83% of customers agree they feel more loyal to brands that respond and resolve their complaints quickly
65% of customers said they have changed to a different brand because of a poor experience.
- Support data presents a goldmine of data to navigate product improvements.
By analyzing customer data from support interactions, broadcasters can unlock insights into common viewer pain points. This presents an excellent starting point for identifying areas for meaningful platform improvements, closing the feedback loop to enhance viewer satisfaction, and staying relevant. Meaningful intervention here impacts loyalty and the customer LTV and affects the potential for future streaming subscriber acquisition.
72% of companies believe they can use analytics reports to improve the customer experience.
80% of companies use customer satisfaction scores to analyze and improve customer experience.
- Raises marketing competitiveness
Providing excellent support raises market competitiveness by building a unique advantage against competition. When customers are happy, recommendations are heavily impacted.
Consumers who rate a company’s service as “good” are 38% more likely to recommend that company.
For 86% of consumers, good customer service turns one-time clients into long-term brand champions.
Bottom Line: Excellent support impacts user satisfaction and operational efficiency for DTC streaming businesses. This enhances the subscriber experience and results in a boost in subscriber loyalty and retention. Retained subscribers mean reduced churn. This is especially important for a subscription-based business like OTT streaming, where the business models demand repeat customers to ensure business continuity and growth.
Unsurprisingly, Bain & Company estimates a potential to easily grow revenues between 4% and 8% above the market when prioritizing better customer service experiences.
Good to know: How RED+ clocked in 504% annual MRR growth.
A part of their strategy was delivering excellent experiences at every touch point, including top-notch support. They kept a close tab on customer support analytics. Some support-related aspects they regularly tracked included why customers reached out and the number of open tickets. These flagged issues required more attention and couldn't be solved immediately. This baseline formed key improvement focus areas to ensure a seamless broadcasting service. This worked brilliantly for them, and currently, their service inquiry rate (complained rate) is only 0.65%, which is quite impressive as the industry benchmark stands at around 3%.
What are the unique support needs of OTT streaming businesses?
When it comes to a streaming service, customers can experience several frustration points. These include technical glitches, billing issues, content-related concerns, etc. As a broadcaster, you need to set up an infrastructure specialized to the needs of this industry. Some of these needs include:
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- Round the clock availability: As streaming services are accessible 24x7, customers can seek support at any time. There’s nothing worse than limited customer support in which working hours are incompatible with service hours!
- Multilingual support: OTT subscribers can be based anywhere in the globe. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure support answers user queries in the local languages where customers are based.
- Multi-device support: OTT users may access the platform on different devices, ranging from mobile to desktop. This makes it essential to provide support that’s compatible with different devices.
- Urgency in resolution: Long wait times, especially during live events; or repetitive troubleshooting steps, or a lack of personalized attention can leave customers feeling unheard and undervalued. Therefore, ensuring promptness is essential.
- Well-trained personnel: Users may be riddled with entitlement issues, technical issues like buffering, or unexpected billing issues. Customer service must be well-trained with in-depth knowledge and skills to resolve these queries and answer inquiries efficiently.
Enter Hi5: The game-changing customer support system that you need for your streaming business
Hi5 is a holistic customer support ecosystem for OTT platforms and their subscribers. Tailormade for the OTT industry, it offers a unique blend of advanced technology and industry expertise. It ensures 24/7 availability, and you can leverage it to cater to a diverse global audience with different cultural needs. Using it, you can outsource responsive and effective customer care to market experts and operate with peace of mind.
Broadcasters using Hi5 have experienced:
- 80% self-serving rate
- Contact rate reduction by 40%
- Chatbot deflection rate at 76%
- Cost reduction by up to 50%
- Increased viewer satisfaction to 85%
- Savings of thousands of hours
By design, Hi5 is highly scalable. It’s also SaaS-based so that you can deploy it quickly and seamlessly with predefined flows and help center structure.
Here are some essential attributes that make it the best solution to extend OTT support:
- Branded Help Center: A user-centric hub featuring FAQs and video tutorials, promoting a high self-service resolution rate of 78%. In other words, this saves thousands of tickets. The industry benchmark cost for tickets is approx 15 USD. This brings the additional benefit of money saving and free head
- Advanced Chatbot Capabilities: Equipped to handle various inquiries, from password resets to content access, supported by a robust knowledge base developed from extensive interactions with major broadcasters.
- Expert OTT Team: Achieving an impressive 80% one-touch resolution rate, our team showcases excellence in ticket handling, backed by years of industry experience, offering assistance in up to 29 languages
- Real-time Analytics: Provides businesses with a 360° view of customer interactions, enabling informed decision-making. This includes insights into transaction history, contact reasons, and more. It’s equipped with an automated inquiry funnel with smart reporting and classification of inquiries. Moreover, the support dashboard also displays real-time patterns which you can watch out for and act quickly to resolve.
- Efficient Refund and Chargeback Management: Works seamlessly with payment providers to minimize chargebacks, ensuring smooth financial operations.
Want to transform your customer support into a retention machine?
We're exhibiting at the NAB Show, where we'll be spilling this secret along with many other tips, tricks, and strategies to boost your D2C streaming ROI.
