“We are the champions, my friends and we’ll keep on fighting, till the end”
I’d love to tell you our customers sing Queen to us in support of SmartVideo. (Maybe they do?!) Regardless, our customers not only support and root for SmartVideo programs within their organizations, they help educate their colleagues and cross-functional departments on how SmartVideo can be deployed across their brand through their customer’s lifecycle – from customer conversion and acquisition through customer care, support and retention.
But let me back up a step. Champions of any new technology initiative possess certain characteristics, such as thought leadership and innovation. Today, companies are investing more than ever in innovation in order to stay competitive, be first to market and advance their goals. The CTO and co-founder of travel site KAYAK encourages fast decision-making and risk-taking, in order to create their culture of innovation. Even classic brands such as Burberry balance innovation with tradition.
Champions of technology initiatives have organizational awareness, strategic partnerships and analytical thinking. They state a strong point of view, yet ask for input and feedback, too. They understand timely deployment makes all the difference, and therefore assign a project manager, or play the role themselves for a seamless project timeline.
And champions remember to celebrate success. In today’s fast-paced business world, even faster with technology initiatives, it is impressive to have a “first mover” competitive advantage. Champions foresee opportunities, whether through press and media exposure for their brand and/or personal success internally within their organization.
But, what does it take to be a SmartVideo champion?
SmartVideo is an innovative and forward-thinking customer engagement technology, so naturally all of our customers are excited and inspired by the use case possibilities that they can deploy for customer engagement and customer experience. As a result of this, they become our champions, and we’ve discovered five traits that make them such, well, triumphant SmartVideo champions.
#1. Internalize and communicate the real-time, “1 to 1” concept
Our SmartVideo champions take the lead on internally educating their organizations on the distinction between one video created for one single customer, generated in real-time, as opposed to one video created in advance and for a mass audience. Many companies today are very experienced in making one video that is used and viewed by many people (mass audience). SmartVideo leads the concept of providing a unique, personally relevant and actionable video for each individual viewer at any specific point in time, hence “1 to 1.”
#2. Evaluate all opportunities to deliver value
SmartVideo Champions use five criteria to evaluate opportunities within their customer engagement and customer experience strategies across the entire customer lifecycle. (In fact, these five considerations were defined by one of our own SmartVideo champions, the CMO of a top cable provider.)
For example, if you have deep and rich data for 100 customers, but 90 of those 100 customers have very similar profiles, then SmartVideo may not be needed for that use case. Yet, if there are several different customer segments, personas and personalization opportunities, then we should talk.
#3. Know and access rich data sources
A significant strength of all our SmartVideo champions is that they are quite familiar with their company’s data feeds and sources. They talk to their internal experts and learn as much as they can about their customer data. The deeper and richer the data is, the deeper and richer the SmartVideo experience.
More so, our champions are able to provide examples of data sources for internal analysis by our professional services team. Then they leave the data intelligence and adaptation to us.
The more you can provide data in real time, the more “in the moment” SmartVideos will be for your customers. When data is highly organized and structured, the more extensive the SmartVideo logic can be and will deliver highly relevant content to each viewer.
#4. Share real examples across the customer lifecycle
Our champions are constantly thinking about use cases to apply SmartVideo across the customer lifecycle. They share examples of how leading brands such as AT&T, Lenovo and Office Depot are using SmartVideo across the customer lifecycle to target, acquire, convert, onboard, educate, support and upsell.
For example, Office Depot utilizes SmartVideo within their product catalog on-site as well as bringing site abandoners back with retargeted pre-roll video ads. Our champions establish a first use-case focus, such as SmartVideo for Delivering Bills & Statements, but open the discussion to the full SmartVideo platform approach. Nothing brings it home like seeing the full customer experience of a kick-butt SmartVideo program.
#5. Promote and facilitate visibility of SmartVideo through the organization
Finally, it’s necessary to be or find the executive champion who is ready to fund, support and promote SmartVideo throughout the organization. This executive champion should be ready for maximum visibility because as soon as SmartVideo goes live and is viewed by hundreds of thousands or millions of customers, a LOT of other executives and departments will want to learn more.
