By Luís Barbosa
A picture is worth more than a thousand words. Well, a video worth a lot more.
In the era of remote working where distributed teams perform their jobs at different paces and apart from each other, communicating asynchronously is something we should all be able to do.
Now that many of us are working from home, we end up having more meetings than usual because all the casual chats we used to have at the office don’t exist anymore and companies feel the need to substitute them with conference-calls.
Communicating asynchronously is not only useful among our teammates, but it also applies to our customers. You probably end up using email for that, but when things are hard to explain through text or a private message, you end up scheduling a meeting to demonstrate how to complete a certain action or process, or explain how to use a specific feature properly.
If this resonates with you, you know you’re not as efficient as you can be at delivering an excellent experience to your customer since you’re consuming their precious time with a non-essential meetings.
How many calls did you have just to explain a simple process or feature that was too difficult or time consuming to write down in an email?
So, that’s where video tutorials come in. By using tools like Loom, you can communicate asynchronously with short and beautiful videos.
I can tell you by experience that an email that would have taken me half an hour to write, detailing step by step how to perform a task or how to use a specific feature in the software, now takes me less than 5 minutes (Or 10 if I need to fix my hair…) by sharing my screen in a video while narrating the required steps.
The latter contributes to my overall efficiency and time management and improves my ability to provide a solid customer experience. The customer can watch the video when he gets a chance and rewatch it as many times as they need instead of reading a long and not always straightforward email. Moreover, they don’t need to feel forced to attend the meeting.
You can use them with your team too. Record a video for your daily or weekly stand-up. Record a video to share with the product team a bug or feature request or start an asynchronous discussion about a certain topic.
Besides tutorials, video messages could be a powerful engagement tactic for your outbound sales team or a good way to follow up after meetings.
If you have a hard time getting all the stakeholders involved in your next QBR meeting, try sending them a video invitation highlighting the agenda and why it’s important to attend. If they miss the meeting, send them a short video debriefing the meeting and the next steps. It’s a lot easier to build rapport with the video message instead of the traditional email.
Liked the idea? If you’d like to know more about recording beautiful and thoughtful video tutorials, check out these suggestions written by my teammate Inês – How to Record a Tutorial.