Much research confirms that OTT customers desire helpful, efficient, standardized support operations across channels and platforms.
- Gartner highlights that customers who perceive value during service interactions have an 82% probability of repurchasing or renewing, even with opportunities to switch.
- An Omdia Survey reveals that over 25% of respondents identify support as pivotal in subscriber retention and churn reduction.
- According to HubSpot's Annual State of Service in 2022, over 82% of customers reported receiving value during a service experience, which makes them more likely to repurchase even when they can switch to a competitor.
What about the costs of providing this, though? Ensuring support expenses are sustainable as the user base expands is critical to retaining profitability as a broadcaster. In this blog, we cover the unique needs of OTT support, deconstruct its costs, and explore how to meet these needs economically.
Would you prefer a deeper dive into the costs? Download our detailed ebook on Revolutionizing OTT Customer Support Costs with a Tailor-made Solution.
What are the unique needs of ensuring stellar OTT support?
OTT support has several unique needs and mighty subscriber expectations:
- Immediacy: Streaming subscribers' support needs are time-sensitive, and they expect immediate resolution, such as if they encounter hiccups during live streaming.
- Service across time zones: Viewers stream content around the clock, and broadcasters operate across time zones. Therefore, a system for round-the-clock support is essential.
- Multi-linguistic abilities: Given the nature of the multilingual content available on most platforms worldwide, ensuring support is available in local languages is essential to maintaining a frictionless viewing experience.
- Trained personnel: Viewers tend to stream content across devices, from mobiles to tablets, the web, or their smart TVs. Their needs can vary from various issues like payments and technical glitches to support using varied devices. A trained support team is necessary to provide quick and helpful resolution.
As a broadcaster, extending support encompassing these attributes is essential; leading ones acknowledge this. “We realized we need a future-proof SaaS solution to deliver excellence in the current market. Customers today want a top-tier user experience that goes beyond just interesting content. Our goal is to make sure we provide that extra layer." says James Walmsley, Director of Product, Technology, and Analytics at TOD. It's vital to note that providing such a service requires a solid setup with significant ongoing expenses.
What are the different costs?
Some of the significant expenses include:
- Upfront capital investments to custom create a specialized support infrastructure for media and entertainment needs.
- Fees for multiple licenses to address different support functionalities like help center, chatbot, ticketing, and reporting.
- Headcount expenses to provide quick and seamless support.
- Operational expenses including extensive office space and hardware.
- Ongoing training costs to ensure the team is well-equipped to support clients efficiently.
Adding these all up, providing support can become a significant cost center. What’s the way out?
Enter: AI-based customer support
A strategic approach to providing excellent support lies in leveraging the capabilities of AI. Specialized OTT customer support tools such as Hi5 are built to deliver exceptional support while economizing costs.
Hi5 allows you to set up well-structured help centers with a vast knowledge base specific to OTT streaming. With that, it enables intelligent chatbot workflows to help customers find automated answers to common customer issues. For example, password resets, entitlement queries, and streaming problems. This significantly reduces the volume of incoming inquiries, addressing the costliest factor in customer support. It also leaves more team bandwidth to offer personalized support and reach out to those needing it. This blend of AI efficiency and human empathy ensures comprehensive coverage of all support needs.
Interesting fact: Hi5 boasts an impressive average self-solving resolution rate of 80%, which reduces ticket volume.
In addition, Hi5 is also designed to optimize costs. It comes with instant SaaS implementation and supports quick setup. The substantial capital investments needed to develop a support platform are eliminated for a small fee, along with significant operational overheads. The chat agents are always well-trained and can provide multilingual support across 29 languages. This ensures comprehensive global coverage across time zones and reduces ongoing costs. It’s also scalable on demand during peak periods.
Want to know how the cost advantage alongside support excellence works out in concrete numbers?
Check out our eBook to explore how Hi5, an all-encompassing solution, empowers you to deliver stellar support while optimizing your TCO.
