Video as a way to humanize the customer experience

We all know video is necessary to market your company to prospective clients, but how do you use it to

keep the customers you already have?

Way back in 2008 Paula Berg of Southwest Airlines did something a little unorthodox when her company

received negative press. After an incident involving two unruly but media-savvy customers, every news

station from coast to coast was touting Southwest Airlines as discriminatory against attractive people.

Berg wanted to communicate directly with Southwest customers; she posted a video on YouTube of

spokesperson Brandy King responding, in a very un-rehearsed way, to the accusations. With a simple,

message “We would be out of business if we banned pretty people from flying Southwest Airlines” the

spokesperson comes across as reasonable and fair; customers were able to put themselves in her shoes

and responded well to this video.

This video was the 8th most visited YouTube video that day behind only Barack Obama and Hillary

Clinton videos, during a busy presidential primary season. Internally not everyone agreed it was the right

approach initially, but in hindsight the entire PR team agreed it was the most appropriate response to

the situation – it showed a human face behind “Big Business”.

With a simple video, Southwest was able to dramatically increase its likeability with both current and

potential customers. What is important to note too, is that Berg saw this opportunity as not an

extraneous addition to their PR campaign – but as a necessary element to what was essentially a “visual

story”. Using video along with their more traditional PR Southwest was able to both reach customers

and humanize their response in as one blogger stated a very “un-lawyerly” way.

Video has grown up since then…

That was four years ago, and now that Southwest response video is still on YouTube with only about

40,000 more views. Not very exciting, however it was a great first step in marketing evolution. What is

the next step in that evolution? Interactivity. Recently social media evangelist Gary Vaynerchuck

complained about companies that use video for viral marketing, but then drop the ball when it comes to

customer interaction. He describes last year’s Old Spice YouTube campaign as the social media

campaign that “doesn’t exist” and explains that Old Spice did everything right except leaving their

community of tens of thousands of social media followers hanging. Describing the campaign as a “one

night stand”, he emphasizes that companies need to instead “marry” their customers by “giving a crap

and being human”.

Most likely if you’re reading this you have a YouTube page and a couple well-produced videos. But are

you using video to marry your customers, or simply creating one night stands? At Chadwick we partner

with some of the leading technology providers in their field to make sure you are taking every

opportunity to build and enrich your customer relationships. Our partner Terradin for example will allow

your customers the ability to upload their own videos, react to videos and connect with each other

around the content that inspires them - essentially becoming your customer evangelists.

There are so many more benefits to video besides “free advertising”. One of our clients Mibitech has

actually helped the company Haver-Moore limit up to 50% of costly customer returns and reduce the

load on their technical support team.

We are just beginning to realize the enormous benefits of video on customer retention; so far the

numbers are pretty striking. Want to know more? Watch this video now to see how Chadwick continues

to create innovative, cost-reducing means of customer interaction for their clients.