After a year like 2020, we all could use a little more good news. So we’re starting 2021 on a high note and shining a BRIGHT light on a few of our amazing customers who are using video for good. These customers all know that there are some stories that can only be told with the power of video.

The Prince’s Trust: Good for those who could use a little help 

The Prince’s Trust exists to lend a hand to disadvantaged young people, many of whom are unemployed, struggling at school, or facing homelessness. By equipping them with the confidence and skills they need to live, learn, and earn, the Trust has made a difference for more than one million people in the United Kingdom. The Prince’s Trust has also unlocked the power of video to continue to raise awareness and keep the community engaged. By empowering young storytellers to create their own videos and share their personal journeys in their own words, the Trust sparks important conversations and motivates others to get involved. And when these videos are shared and views go up, so do supporter sign-ups, which means the Trust is able to help a lot more young people who need it most.  

“User-generated content allows us to expand the number of videos we produce, which is the best way to stay in front of people with authentic stories that resonate. Video is uniquely able to bring our work to life in an engaging and emotional way. Through video, viewers can see the difference The Prince’s Trust is making.” – Donna-Michelle White, Senior Head of Digital Marketing at The Prince’s Trust

The City of Malmö: Good for the environment 

Malmö, Sweden is one of those hidden gems in Europe you may have never heard of. Sweden’s third largest by population, it has spent years quietly undergoing a major transformation to become a leader in social, economic, and ecological sustainability. While video is commonly used for business, the city’s unique strategy for municipal communications has earned praise throughout Europe and has created an important platform for its citizens. From green roofs and rainwater ponds to new bike trails and using food waste to fuel city buses, sustainability initiatives are shared with residents via video to gain their support. In Malmö, engaged and informed residents are great for the environment – and video makes it possible.

“We want to continue to explore ways to use video and remain a sustainability and communication leader for our citizens. We can tell the stories of environmental efforts around the city and also show projects where we are making sustainability-based improvements.” – Mikael Hellman, Visual Communication Manager for the City of Malmö

Inspiring Interns: Good for job seekers

Inspiring Interns, the United Kingdom’s leading graduate recruitment agency, thought there had to be a better way to apply for a job, especially for new graduates looking for their first position in a competitive market. So the agency turned to video to disrupt and transform its recruitment program. By enabling graduates to record personalized curriculum vitae (CVs) for the companies they wish to work for and hosting them on its website, Inspiring Interns has started thousands of graduates on their career paths. For candidates, video CVs showcase their personality, professionalism, and passion in a way that’s just not possible with a PDF. And for employers, video has helped broaden their perspective and opened their eyes to candidates they might not have considered from a traditional CV. The agency credits video for helping to better match the right applicants with the right jobs, leading to happier employees and employers.

“It can be difficult to stand out in a competitive job market. The video CV enables applicants to inject their unique personality into an otherwise faceless process. Employers have told us they hired people they might not have hired if they just considered their paper CV. But what they saw on video really impressed them.” – Ben Rosen, Founder & CEO at Inspiring Interns

SEEK: Good for mental health awareness 

SEEK, the #1 employment marketplace in Australia, strives to help people live more fulfilled and productive working lives. More than just a job posting site, SEEK’s evolving collection of video content and expanding library of resources helps millions of Australians with everything from career advice and mid-career changes to small business guidance. During the COVID-19 crisis, for example, instead of just posting an article about how to manage mental health and work demands, viewers could watch resident SEEK psychologist Sabina Read speak directly to them, addressing issues and questions with great care and concern. SEEK will continue to be a valuable resource by responding to people’s emotional needs, no matter what challenges lie ahead.

“[It was important to] create a destination for candidates and hirers to visit for tools and resources on every step of their career journey. Telling great stories in a beautiful way is one of the most important attributes of video.” – Pip Duncan, Head of Production at SEEK

REVRY: Good for representation

For LGBTQ+ people, seeing themselves represented in music, television, and media is incredibly powerful. But for individuals living in parts of the world where their identity is unwelcome or even illegal, finding this type of content was once impossible. Revry has made it their mission to end this kind of isolation and create community and inclusion with the power of video. Revry is the first global streaming network focused on telling stories about and by the LGBTQ+ community, with a presence in over 130 countries around the world. By inspiring and more authentically representing its audiences, the social and global impact of Revry will be felt by more people and in more places for many years to come.

“Creating a space for true belonging has always been a core mission of Revry, given the makeup of our women-led, majority queer, and person-of-color founding team. We know that representation saves lives, but what’s the good if the people who need to see themselves on screen don’t have access?” – Damian Pelliccione, CEO and Co-Founder of Revry

FacingDisability.com: Good for human connection

FacingDisability.com is where questions are answered, support is offered, and strength is found for patients and families living with spinal cord injuries. The suddenness of a spinal cord injury can often be overwhelming and leave families feeling unprepared and isolated – and this is exactly how Thea Flaum felt when her daughter Vicki experienced a spinal cord injury at age 19. With the creation of FacingDisability.com, Flaum channeled her fear and frustration into a mission to let patients and their families know, “You are not alone.” The site offers extensive video content from doctors, psychologists, therapists, rehabilitation experts, and, above all, people living with spinal cord injuries to provide unvarnished truths and invaluable insights. With these videos, Facing Disability creates human connections just when people need them most. 

“What you’re getting are honest, human responses. Video gives you the power of the image, the power of the close-up. So from the very beginning, we insisted on broadcast-quality video.” – Thea Flaum, Founder at FacingDisability.com

We’re honored to partner with these incredible organizations, and we applaud the amazing work they do every day. Keep watching this space for others that are using video for good. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you about examples you’ve seen of video for good or video storytelling that inspires you to do good.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Picture this. You’ve recently subscribed to new software, and now you’re having issues synchronising your data and information to start using it. Unable to find answers online, you pick up the phone to contact customer support, only to be faced with an automated voice menu… or to be put on hold indefinitely… or to be told that an IT specialist will get back to you within three to five working days.

When their problems are more routine than the above example, customers are quick to search for a solution online – contacting customer service is the last resort. But even when a customer searches online for troubleshooting tips, what they usually find is in a long written format that can be hard to follow.

The simple fact is that getting answers to questions, no matter how complex they are, is usually an exercise in frustration – and that’s not a good look for your brand.

Here’s a better way

Customers don’t want to waste time with trial-and-error troubleshooting or waiting for attention from a customer service rep. This is where the customer service department can leverage a self-service content strategy to quickly answer customer questions and even reduce the number of inbound calls. At the heart of this strategy is video.

Let me explain with an example. Brightcove worked with Xero, a company that makes innovative cloud-based accounting software, to launch Xero TV , a comprehensive library of video tutorials and explainers that address the most frequent queries and concerns and show how to troubleshoot simple technical problems.

By firmly rooting its customer service strategy in video, the New Zealand company, which has over one million subscribers, has been able to boost conversion rates and bolster customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Xero TV put a lot of effort into ensuring they have engaging and useful content for their customers, wherever they are in the sales funnel, and their efforts have paid off with an increase of 150% in average video viewing time . In addition, they have been able to roll out global initiatives in a precisely tailored manner that ensures every customer gets what they need when they need it.

When customer service is made more accessible, it saves costs by reducing calls for common inquiries while delivering better results for customers with more complex inquiries that require personal intervention.

Don’t guess what’s working – know with data analytics

Once you post a video on your website, how can you demonstrate that it’s generating the results you want?

As a basic rule, determining whether the content is successful depends on how many times the video was watched and the actions your customers then took. When you’re looking at video playback data, views are important, but there’s so much deeper you can go.

With video analytics, it should be a simple matter of tracking performance and following up with relevant communications, depending on which video and how much of the video or video the customer has watched. For example, if you’re prioritising B2B customers for an in-person follow-up, then analysing which videos produce the strongest engagement will allow you to optimise those efforts. And if you keep track of this in an integrated customer database, then you can monitor the performance and effectiveness of your entire communications program.

Video that means business

The return on investment that results from using video content for customer service is potentially immense. Whether you’re a small business, mid-size commercial bank, or large software provider, video enables you to attract and retain customers, reduce overhead, and accurately measure the success of what you’re doing.

If you want to know how we can help you build a video strategy for customer service, marketing automation, and much more, talk to us . We’ll show you why Brightcove is video that means business… for your business.

To view our Partner blog, click here

2020 has been a year of unprecedented video streaming all around the world, thanks to a homebound audience hungry for entertainment. Competition for viewers has been fierce, with Disney, HBO, and Peacock all jostling their way into an already-crowded market. 

This is uncharted territory for many media companies, with new players still learning the business of online TV. As for viewers, never before have they had so many options to choose from to create their own content bundles and decide how to spend their monthly entertainment budget. 

To learn about consumer preferences around subscriptions, devices, payments, advertising, and more, we polled 22,000 users in 22 countries. What are the current audience trends that will shape the future of OTT beyond 2020? Here are the top five takeaways:

Viewers Build Their Own Content Bundles With Multiple Subscriptions

Having a variety of streaming services to choose from lets viewers build their own custom bundles. That’s important because our research found that subscribing to a single service often doesn’t give a customer a sufficient breadth of content. Having a mix of services and adjusting that mix occasionally is an easy and relatively inexpensive way to get the content they want (and avoid paying for content they don’t).

Viewers become interested in new content in a number of ways, including social media, search, and recommendations from friends and family. Once that content has been viewed, however, the platform needs a retention strategy to entice them to come back for what they’ll watch next. For example, OTT service providers can offer additional channels as an add-on to their viewers’ monthly subscriptions. This not only helps to retain viewers on the primary service, but it also allows the provider to sell the added space to content owners. 

Factor In How Viewers Discover Content In Your Marketing Campaigns

Streaming services are now part of everyday life. What we’re watching is a frequent topic of conversation among friends, at the family dinner table, and on social media. Finding, watching, and talking about content has become a social experience. OTT providers need to understand how their prospective viewers discover content and use this insight to shape their marketing campaigns. While there are similarities around the world, the process is not the same in every market.

A Multi-Device Strategy Is Essential

One of the great things about OTT streaming is that content can be accessed on different kinds of devices, a feature most subscribers take full advantage of, even if they have just one OTT service. So having a multi-device strategy is essential for maximising audience reach and keeping subscribers. Any device, any time, any place – OTT providers need to deliver consistent experiences across mobile, laptops, connected TVs, and Smart TVs.

Evolve Your Payment Models

Consumers are motivated to minimize how much they spend on OTT services, so they are perfectly willing to subscribe to one for a particular piece of content and unsubscribe after they’ve watched it. So-called subscriber churn rates are high in an era without contracts, and as the streaming landscape grows more crowded, this trend will only continue.

To give consumers the flexibility to opt-in and out of streaming packages at any time, providers can test out various pricing strategies – weekday vs. weekend pricing, with ads, without ads, with limited ads, etc. – to see which packages are most popular. Get creative with your pricing plans and see how your viewers respond.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to include advertising

Providing a free-with-ads option could be a draw for users on tight entertainment budgets.  In this case, almost all of the respondents polled considered 1-2 ads per break about right. In situations where ad tolerance is low (no more than one ad per break), OTT providers should sell the ad space at a premium. 

If you do go with an ad-based model, make sure your ad delivery is not intrusive or repetitive. Add in cues in the video player scrubber bar so viewers know where ad breaks are.  Experiment with banner ads during programming that disappears after a few seconds. Develop a feel for what your viewers consider acceptable and what they won’t tolerate.

To compete today and grow tomorrow, every OTT player needs an in-depth understanding of their customers’ viewing preferences. Service providers have to build their product and marketing strategies around content, devices, pricing, and user experiences. For the insights you need to do that effectively, download the regional editions of the Future of OTT report here:

• Asia

• South Asia

• ANZ

• Korea

To view our Partner blog, click here

At Brightcove, we’re immensely proud and excited to share that once again, the Technology & Services Industry Association recognized our customer support team for Support Staff Excellence, a recognition we have received for seven years in a row. 

We sat down with Brightcove’s Chief Customer Experience Officer, Denise Grimley, to find out what it takes to build a high-level global customer support team for a B2B business and why it matters. A lot. 

Denise, what is the Technology Services and Technology Association (TSIA) Award criteria?  

It’s a couple of things; the first is that every single person in the support organization, every two years, has to go through a program to become a “Certified Support Professional”. Once this is complete, our Technical  Support Organization must prove, through metrics, that we’ve made a significant change in our organization that makes a better experience for our customers.  

This year, the TSIA evaluated Brightcove on customer satisfaction and feedback. 

We went from an 18.37% response rate to a 31.05% response rate. We were able to accomplish this by rethinking the way we ask customers for feedback.  In addition, we lowered our case age metric by over 2.5 days, this means our customers have the answers they need faster.

What does it mean for Brightcove to be recognized as a Support Staff Excellence Award recipient seven years in a row?  

I believe anyone can learn software languages, javascript, HTML, CSS, or whatever software is required for the role, in fact, that is how I started in the tech industry – but I can’t teach empathy. You either have it, or you don’t. For me, why we’ve done so well in this area is because we hire for precisely that. We look for people who understand that the customer’s ability to run their business and feed their families depends on our ability to help them solve their problems.

I’m incredibly proud that as we hire new talent, we keep that as a center point for our search. We look for individuals who bring the mindset that we’re all humans trying to make our way in this world and that every single exchange that we have has a profound impact on that person and their job.    

How do you grow a support organization to compete at a high-level year after year? 

It starts with who you hire. Patrick Lencioni, an author that our leadership team has worked with to help build better teams, has a book all about hiring individuals who are hungry, humble, and smart. The “smart” you should be looking for doesn’t necessarily refer to intellect or technical knowledge, but rather the ability to interact with others. 

Your ability to infer stress, a plea for help, or the customer’s temperament through a plain text email is essential for the role.

You’ve been at Brightcove for ten years. How has customer support changed over those ten years? What’s the most important thing now, and what will be important moving forward? 

One thing that has changed over the past decade is the speed of technology. From live chat to call me now buttons to web portals. There are so many different ways to interact with your customers and so many tools to enable your support organization to help customers faster. 

We’re always looking for what’s next for tools that will improve our communications with our customers.

Why is having a global support organization crucial for B2B companies?  

We’re all humans, and each region has its differences and preferences. Employing customer support team members across regions ensures the person customers interact with understands the nuances in language and culture that are paramount to providing top-notch customer service. Employing a human being who understands the language and the customer’s background inspires confidence that a solution will be reached quickly and efficiently.

Additionally, a global support team enables around-the-clock coverage to help solve problems faster and more efficiently, wherever or whenever the need arises. For example, if you open a case in Sydney, we can pass it to London, Boston, and even Guadalajara so that you will have someone working with you around the clock.   

What else do people need to know about support and why it’s so important? 

When it comes to customers, they need to know more about how they can get the support they need. If they know all the different ways they can contact your business, they can get help faster. Companies should make it clear how customers can and should get in touch for specific issues. 

For businesses, we must have a greater awareness that those who work on technical support teams are truly the unsung heroes of many organizations. I think it’s vital for businesses to acknowledge how much our support teams do to keep customers happy and engaged. The phone rings, slack dings, and live chat beeps non-stop, always with a problem that needs to be fixed.  It takes a resilient individual to get up every day, solve the case at hand, and then do it all over again, often without any thanks.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Government communications have undergone a significant transformation, one where the information expectations of the public are central to the strategy. As part of this transformation, Government departments have transitioned their communications approach from ‘managing’ citizens and stakeholders to one of partnership, where engagement and collaboration are highly sought. With new digital technologies, every government department and agency can now create useful, relevant, and consistent communications with the intent to inform, engage and collaborate with stakeholders about policy, programs, services, and regulations.

A recent review  conducted by the Australian Public Service revealed that Australians now expect the same level of personalisation and information integrated across departments in the same manner as they receive from private-sector businesses. Public sector communications professionals need to prioritise the right communication channels, formats, and the public’s preferences on when and where they want to be reached to encourage responsiveness and build trust, while delivering information in an open, timely, and meaningful way.  

And this is where a video content strategy and an online video platform make a compelling case for engagement. A communications strategy with video can be useful in:

• Building trust – Deliver an authentic, transparent, and consistent communications experience using video. Connect and engage with constituents in more meaningful ways, and provide live and on-demand interactions with the public about their expectations, needs, and concerns. 
• Driving engagement – Nothing cuts through general noise and delivers an engaged audience like video, especially when content and messages can be streamed securely, at any time and across any device, in a format that the public will be likely to be responsive to.
• Communicating at scale – Whether you’re targeting selected stakeholders or an entire community, you can reach audiences of any size reliably and securely using an online video platform. Enhanced accessibility using captions, subtitles, and audio descriptions can be added to enhance the video experience. 
• Manage identity and reputation – An online video platform lets you control both the content and context of your communications across websites, social media networks, and mobile apps so that communications can be delivered with a unified vision and voice.

For government agencies and departments, using a secure and reliable video hosting and streaming platform is essential to ensure security, quality, and scalability of communications. Key metrics such as time watched, video completion rates, and engagement level can also help you better understand which messages are resonating with the public and other stakeholders and help inform future communication strategies.

While many government departments are already capitalising on video communications, not all agencies are quick to adopt video as part of their communications strategy. Video is a much more effective tool for engagement than any other forms of government communication, such as lengthy written public statements or policy documents. For an increasingly digital-savvy public, who want information in just a few clicks and who demand trust and authenticity, the opportunity for government departments to embrace video is now.

To view our Partner blog, click here

You had questions, and these inspiring women had answers. Salient Venture’s CEO, Diane Hessan, sat down with four of the most innovative and forward-thinking female leaders in tech to share their best insights on how women in tech can reach their full potential.

Here’s what you wanted to know— and what this group of amazing women had to say:

Five of the top tech companies only have a workforce of 34% of women….what gives?

For most women pursuing tech careers, the perception of the kind of person who fits-in in tech and the kind of person who doesn’t is a huge part of why the industry faces a diversity drought.

The only way to successfully bring more women into the field is to “battle the image,” says AnitaB.org’s Brenda Wilkerson. We as a society need to assert, early on, that the tech world is everyone’s world and that there’s something for everyone to pursue and explore.

“Start with an increase in educational opportunities for young women,” says Google’s Ritcha Gupta Ranjan. “Let women and young girls know that there are role models out there.”

What if you don’t have a tech-savvy support system? How do you get the mentors or the help you need?

“It’s on you to make a network amongst the people that you admire,” says Brightcove’s Namita Dhallan. You have to put yourself out there and get involved to build the network or mentorship you wish to have.

“You don’t just have to join the women in tech group,” she says; it’s about joining the type of team or group that resonates with you or aligns with your interests. Speak, listen, and, more importantly, learn. You’ll never know the kind of connections you’ll end up making.

What should we be telling younger generations of women?

LaShawn McGhee of Revry says we should be telling younger women who want to explore a future in tech to chase it. “It doesn’t matter when you start; all that matters is: if it’s your passion, and it’s something you’re interested in, just start.”

What should you do if you’re the only woman on your team?

“When you think about what diversity means, – different ideas and backgrounds help to bring ‘you’ to the table,” says Brenda Wilkerson. The only way to make sure everybody fits in equally is to throw out the notion that there is, in fact, a way to fit in.

What role can male team members play to best support their female peers in the business and tech world?

“Sometimes, when you’re in a meeting, you need to make your point heard – it’s important to look around the room and see if any of your women counterparts has something to say,” says LaShawn McGhee. Far too often, women are interrupted or not heard, and it’s time we put an end to poor communication skills. It’s important, not just for men, but for everyone to remain observant, respectful, and attentive.

To view our Partner blog, click here