Sometimes we make things really hard don’t we?
One of the things we’ve been trying to do is to capture success stories from customers that minimised the to and fro that goes with planning interview times, recording, editing and approving.
To share stories of how you go through a process or how you overcame some difficulty; or sharing the results of your latest work project can sometimes be difficult especially when you need people to record these in some way – whether asking them for a written testimonial or a recording with a video. For some time, this specific aspect of capturing customer stories was not exactly a bug bear but it was more difficult than usual.
To be fair, I was taking a back seat to it all just observing how we could be doing our stories but offering no suggestions initially because I wanted to suss out what the problem was.
My thinking was that the success (or even failure) stories aren’t really the issue.
In my experience, everyone is more than happy to help to share their story with you and commit to having some time to dedicate to being interviewed.
What is hardest is that like anything, when you ask for people to support your idea, it does require time and effort on their part to make time and commit to your request. So you try and minimise as much as you can, this time for them.
Last week, I decided to undertake a bit of personal learning time. My work as Community Manager for Adopt & Embrace involves me having to use WordPress and MemberPress. There’s always something new to learn so I delved into the MemberPress Academy and started exploring. I’m never one to do the course they lay out from start to finish, so I decided to cherry pick the topics that filled certain performance gaps.
One of them was ‘capturing community stories’.
While doing the module, they offered a site called Video Ask so naturally I found it and started dabbling. I took video of these dabbles to explain how it all works.
Well all my Christmases had come at once.
If you want a tutorial on it, (trust me, it’s really basic to use) here’s one I found on YouTube:
Well, the moment I got in there and started creating a video, all the jigsaw pieces fell into place.
VideoAsk is driven by TypeForm. It enables you to create a video of questions and send a link so people can respond with another video, audio or written format and so you’re able to capture video testimonials simply and easily.
When people receive a link from you, they tap the link, watch and listen to your video request and then they can click on ‘Record Your Response’ and it fires up the camera on your phone and they can record their message. You get an instant confirmation they’ve submitted their response and you can download or share that video.
The beauty of this tool is that it allows for asynchronous video responses so in fact you can create branched video stories depending on how people answer (there’s conditional logic). Also, in the settings you can have captions and also an ‘approval’ disclaimer that people can tap their approval/non-approval for use. This way, it saves you time emailing back and forth for permission to use the video.
Once I saw this tool, I immediately shared it to my colleagues as the potential of it meant that it would solve our problems we had about capturing video testimonials and success stories for all our project work.
The applications for such a tool are many and varied. Already I’m seeing it as potential for:
- Engaging participants around aspects of project work
- Performance reviews and feedback
- Learning and development
- Induction and recruitment
- Customer Satisfaction Surveys and Responses
- Story Collecting and Sharing
- Workshop, Event or Meeting Evaluations
- Video Submissions for Training Workshops
- Personalised Frequently Asked Questions
- Social Media and Website story – testimonials!! (Why not ask for video testimonials from people you have worked for and have these directly uploaded or embedded into your website?)
The tool itself also has some integrations (not yet with Microsoft Teams which I hope it does soon) but you can download the files directly to OneDrive if need be. There’s a sophisticated back end to get data such as conversations as well as calendar integrations and custom workflows (to date, not with Power Automate).
If capturing video responses from people is a niggly task for you then check out VideoAsk. It’s a quick, easy, seamless way to create video testimonials that people will love for its simplicity.
