It was a candid conversation discussing the possibilities of Human AI avatars in L&D workflow, different use cases applications, where to use Human avatars and where not to use them and most importantly how to test the waters with Human Avatars to figure out whether they work for you or not.

Throughout this blog, we bring you the summary of the conversation and some interesting poll results. You can also find the link to download the presentation slides at the end of this article.

Nicole is the founder of Your Instructional Designer a firm that focuses on creating engaging and transformative training programs embracing the latest technologies. Nicole is a visionary and a leader in the Learning and industry space with her experience spanning over two decades.

She has worked with many Fortune 500 brands helping them transform their training programs and strategies. Her field of work extends to Manufacturing, Aviation, Construction, Information technology and many other industries.

Nicole was also a speaker in Vmaker AI’s Train with Experts podcast where we host industry leaders talking about the different challenges, strategies of the L&D industry.

Here’s what you can expect in the session. Controversies.

Everyone has to embrace AI or any new technology out there. But, with new tools and tech popping up every day, it gets overwhelming to cope up with all of them.

In many cases, we try to embrace new tech in the fear of missing out or just because our boss wanted to check it out.

Human AI avatars is the latest kid in the block. Though it has many applications and benefits, many are still unsure on its usage and whether it would actually help their training program.

This session brought the spotlight into the following areas

1. Understanding Human AI avatar
2. A Human vs a Human AI avatar in your video
3. Where can you use Human AI avatars
4. Where you are not supposed to use Human AI avatars
5. How do you evaluate an AI avatar tool
6. How to get started with them

Let us uncover these topics in detail

But, before that in case you are interested in exploring the Human AI avatar tool for your workflow, use the link below to schedule a call with us.

Human AI avatars are the latest technology from the AI market place.

As an L&D manager, you have the liability to make your training content more engaging. With GenZ workforce on the rise, videos are an inevitable part of a training program today.

But going through the process of creating a video from scratch is time consuming, tedious and costly. (will cover this in detail in the following section)

Human AI avatars, especially when utilizing AI chat characters, offer a powerful solution.

Human AI Avatars are cloned versions of Humans with which you can create videos just by inserting a script.
You can choose an avatar from the stock library or you can create your own custom avatar bringing down the video generation time from days to seconds.

Below is a video created using my custom AI avatar on Vmaker AI for the webinar promotion. Both visuals and voice are cloned here.

The short answer is the most generic one “It depends”

Not every training video has to have a human in the frame. But you can certainly make videos more engaging by having a human in the frame.

You can either create the entire video with the human in frame or you can have them as a part of your video.

Where can you use Human AI avatars?

Not every video needs to have a human avatar in it. Saying that, as said earlier there are certain videos which can be made more engaging by having a human face in the picture.

The examples of such videos are

Explain over Influence

You can add a human avatar where you are looking to explain something with influence. It certainly adds up to have a human face while you are explaining a subject or concept to add some authority in the explanation.

Custom Avatars for Management

Let’s be honest, having your management team as a part of your videos is a great add on. But it is not easy to execute. Getting their time, making them comfortable in front of a camera is not an easy task. By creating custom avatars off of them, you can continue to create videos faster without waiting for their time.

Changing Environment

You have just finished creating a training program and in a span of two months everything changes. This constant change makes it difficult to create the entire program again. Hiring the actors, studio, equipment, post production could turn into a big mess. You can use Human AI avatars to generate videos quickly in such changing environments.

Consistency more than Emotions

If your content does not need an emotional appeal, where you are explaining a subject or a concept which does not need an emotional connection with the audience, you can utilize Human AI avatars.

Below image gives you 7 different use cases for using Vmaker AI avatars as a part of your training program

As mentioned earlier, while embracing a new technology it is important to evaluate their right applications to make sure they don’t disturb the learning experience.

Here are some places where you should avoid using a Human AI avatar over a Human.

Emotional/Personal Messages

If your video content carries an emotional message such as a greeting or a breaking news or any personal information to an employee, it is advisable to not use an AI avatar for this. In such cases having an actual human reveal the message via video will be the better option.

Major Brand touch points

Let’s say if you are using a soft launch for your product or an educational message to your customers, it makes sense to use an AI avatar which is quick and resourceful. In cases of a major launch such as a new product reveal or major overhaul announcement, it is advisable to not use a Human AI avatar.

When Empathy is required

In certain cases, you need to convey the message with some deep empathy. There are chances this could also turn into conversational than a narrational video. In cases where such deep empathy towards the audience is crucial, it is advisable to use an actual human in your video.

Feedback Sessions

Feedback sessions are deeply personal. The objective is to share feedback with the notion of helping them improve. This would be better off with a human in the video than their AI avatar. In case you are using the video as an introduction to the feedback session, then an AI avatar can be used. But the actual feedback should be delivered by a Human.

Here’s the full video recording of the live session. You can download Nicole’s slides here and Vmaker AI Avatar slides here.

The easiest way to do the same is to book a call with Vmaker AI Avatar team – ask them for a complete demo, share your use cases, get sample videos generated, test them out and make the call.

Saying that, in general there are a few items you should look into while choosing your AI avatar platform.

Ease of use

The purpose of moving to an AI Avatar video journey is to reduce the friction in video creation. If the platform has too many complex steps to generate your video, it is not the right solution. Make sure it is easy to use and faster to generate (ideally under 3 minutes to generate your video)

Avatar Library

Look for a wide variety of AI avatar character libraries. Vmaker AI avatar library has over 100 characters from 15 different ethnicities. Have a plan in mind on how your AI avatar video should look like and evaluate the library accordingly. While you won’t be using 100+ avatars, look for the ones that will suit your brand style and image.

Language Support

The application of AI avatar is endless. You can use them for multilingual training, marketing videos, partnership programs and more. Vmaker AI avatars can help you generate videos in over 50+ languages. In addition, for each voice you have a conversational, promotional and narrational tone which can be used based on the type of video you create.

Realism and Quality

It goes without saying that your Avatars need to look and sound as realistic as possible. They should be able to do hand gestures, facial expressions, modulation in the voice based on script, etc. to make the experience as real as possible.

Custom Avatars

If you are looking to create videos with the face of your management team, check for the feasibility of creating custom avatars. You have to offer a training footage in order to create a custom avatar. Check on the detailed requirements, timeline and cost for creating your own custom avatars.

Pricing

We know that getting your budget approvals for the L&D program is a tiresome task. It is important you get the value for your money from your investments. Make sure you compare different pricing options, and the features you get for the same.

Note

With Vmaker AI you can get the following in one subscription. Request a Demo

We have established the usage of Human AI avatars with how to use them and where not to use them.

The best way to approach this new technology is by experimenting with it. Test with a few videos and see how your audience reacts to it.

Nicole shared an example where they used a Human AI avatar in their video and they modified the script where the Avatar would mock itself saying it is a Human AI avatar instead of pertaining to be an actual person.

There are creative ways in which you can use AI avatars as a part of your training programs, marketing content and even customer engagement materials.

Make sure you have a video idea in place to experiment with before you go all in with the Avatar platform.

If you wish to try this for your workflow, you can book a demo with our team. With over 15 years of experience in the learning and development industry, we bring in truly tailored software solutions that solve the problem for our L&D friends.

Training engagement, Knowledge retrieval. Human AI avatars – you can solve some of your leading challenges with Vmaker AI. Connect for a free consultation session with us.

We went live on LinkedIn discussing video content marketing strategy for 2023.

In case you missed the session, here is the recording of the same. Please move to 1:52 for the conversation to start.

• Camille’s personal experience with Video content (starts at 1:52)
• An example of one of Camille’s favorite video content (4:32)
• The evolution of content consumption in different formats (7:50)
• The different areas to use videos in our marketing strategies (10:30)
• Game plan with videos for 2022 (13:25)

Video content consumption has been on the rise over the last 3 years and we can all be sure that the trend will continue in the upcoming year as well.

With this in mind, I wanted to understand how different brands are preparing to use this trend as a part of their marketing process.

So, I recently hosted Camille Trent who is a Content marketer at Dooly, to join me on a LinkedIn Live session and talk about her plans on using videos as a part of their content marketing game in 2022.

We went through a series of questions to understand how Camille’s personal experience with videos unfolded over time, the understanding of the audience’s reception to the video content, and how to put all the learnings to the best of their use in 2022.

Here is a quick transcript of our conversation on video content marketing strategy. If you decide to contradict my above statement about the video and decide to read the text instead (Make no mistake, the text is still interesting!)

Camille started out in the advertising industry by writing copies for B2C and B2B companies for ads, video scripts. Later she started focusing more on the B2B tech companies writing copies and reviewing them for multiple content formats such as videos, voice-over, ads, blogs, etc.

Slowly her career moved towards content marketing where she started focusing on distributing the content in addition to creating them.

Sooner she was into understanding the different ways the content channels worked, the different types of audience each of these channels attract, and how to distribute content effectively via the same.

Camille has had a 360-degree experience in the early stage of her career in the content marketing game from writing, editing, distributing to the marketing game.

Though she has been experimenting a lot with written content which also happens to be her strong suit, her experience with videos especially on LinkedIn is still in the growth phase.

Her recent tryout with LinkedIn videos has shown surprising results compared to the engagement in other formats. This led to more experiments and trials on the way.

I am pretty sure this live session added to the list of positives to do more experiments with LinkedIn videos.

Videos have evolved over the years to match the different preferences set by consumers of the content. When it originated it was very common to see videos that range from 30 minutes to an hour on average on Youtube. But today things have changed a lot.

Each platform has a preference over the way they want the content to be formatted to suit their audience. Youtube loves content that is ideally 20 minutes long to better optimize for ads. Facebook loves videos that are 5 to 10 minutes long for the same reason. There is a new kind of format for short portrait videos that ranges between 15 to 60 seconds to consume on the go.

While we talk about the video game in general I was curious to understand Camille’s perspectives in the way she optimizes her video content based on timeline and channel.

The long-form content still works, as long as you can deliver value. People are open to consuming in-depth information and these people are significant to your business. As long as you can create engaging content that can deliver value consistently throughout the content, you can win with them.

But to expand your reach to all segments in the market you have to use the distribution methods. Content distribution is vital to complete the content marketing cycle,

Most people do it wrong by just reposting the same content across different platforms. But you have to start optimizing the content for the platform before you share the same.

This helps you operate efficiently in the content creation process and in better ROI.

Reemphasizing again here the importance of content distribution and repurposing the content again here.

You have to start with long-form content – a webinar, a podcast, an interview, anything. This way you can loop in an influencer to help you create your content in the long-form.

With this, you can repurpose the same to multiple formats of content. Since the long-form content will help you get all the information you need you can later impart the information and the credibility on your content preferences both in paid and organic marketing.

This has helped us in the past effectively. How to get more ideas from authentic information and how to use them effectively. These are the questions you need to get the answer to.

It is going to be a package of all the things we have discussed so far. But more importantly to focus on the one important thing – whether it is a podcast, interview, or video.

Master one channel and try not to get too caught up in multiple channels and formats.

The game plan is to get started with one channel, create some long-form authentic content in the same, and later repurpose the same to different channels and the audience.

Camille Trent is a household name today amongst all marketers with her constant daily dose of value-added via her social platforms.

I wanted to host Camille for her enthusiasm in learning and unlearning new things each day in the content marketing space.

This conversation had some key highlights worthy of giving a shot for anyone who is into content marketing.

• Focus on one channel, master it and then move
• Create one long-form content and then repurpose it to multiple short-form content
• Personalize your content according to your audience and the channel before you distribute them
• We all start by writing choppy copies but you have to do them anyway to become better at it.

Hope you guys found this useful. You can check our upcoming series guests here. If you have someone in mind we should host next time, do drop me a message here.

Videos have been a powerful medium and the consumption of video content has grown trifold since the pandemic caused a workplace paradigm.

One of the most interesting and rewarding applications has been the use of videos in emails.

Individuals and businesses have started using videos in their emails to make the email personalized and engaging. This act has rewarded them with new business deals and better email engagement.

If you are someone who is looking to use videos on your email marketing channel, you can get started for free with Vmaker to create your videos on the go.

Learn more about Vmaker Screen Recorder.

Now, back to the objective of this blog.

While Vmaker covers one part of video emails (creating videos) we wanted to cover the other part of the process as well – emails.

We partnered with the Mailshake team to deliver a complete view of the entire process. We hosted Will Taylor from Mailshake to talk more about how individuals and solopreneurs can use video emails to generate more engagement and win new business.

To gain your undivided attention here is a stat I googled on video consumption – As of 2021, an average person is predicted to spend 100 minutes per day watching online videos.

With the average screen time being 7 hours and 11 minutes in the US, and the favor towards consuming video content compared to text content, the numbers are always poised to rise.

Marketing is a function that capitalises on user behaviour and as always brands have picked up on the same.

A wise man once said don’t build a marketing team build an ad agency for your brand.

You have to create content which your users enjoy, educate and can empathise (let’s frame it as the EEE framework for content creation)

WIth videos currently on top of the pyramid of content consumption, the good brands started finding a way to create video content in the EEE framework to make them work.

Emails has been a traditional channel in marketing playbooks and even after decades since the inception the importance and the returns from email engagement continue to grow.

Given a choice, even today I will personally pick an email list with 10,000 subscribers compared to a social following of 10,000.

From the user perspective, they need something new in their emails to make it engaging. Frankly, the average inbox is swamped with thousands of emails begging for attention that it paved way for a new concept called ‘Inbox Zero’

But with the involvement of videos and attractive thumbnails, you can help your emails stand out.

Video emails are a great asset to aid your creativity in email communication. This has helped marketers gain 3X results compared to the traditional HTML or plain text email formats.

But, this does not mean all your emails have to be video-based.

Given the amount of hype so far, it is natural to feel tempted (hopefully) to use videos in all forms of communication right away.

But videos should be used wisely with specific goals and cadences.

There are different types of videos you can create based on the objective

• Introduction videos
• Presentation videos
• Product Demo videos
• Sales Videos

And more..

Break down the objective and analyse what type of content will yield benefit for the user.

Do remember, videos are an add on and not a replacement for your regular text. Even if you are considering sending videos on emails, do append the same with text to set the context and the action performed once the user clicks on the video link.

If you are looking at the ways in which you can embed videos to your email, check this blog ~ Video Emails: How to Send a Video via Email

Bonus: Top Video Email Platforms Ranked | Video Emails

The next step in the video email workflow is to personalize the experience. And by personalization, we don’t mean mentioning their first name and their company name or their designation.

Email marketing and email marketing platforms have evolved a lot, that the usage of names and basic info on emails don’t create a personalized engagement anymore, they are page 1.

So, what else can you do?

Go through the prospect’s profile and try to pick something from their bio. One example is mentioning their favourite sports team or their recent tweet.

If none of these things work, you can still create a human touch in your emails by sharing a glimpse of your own environment.

Yes, I am referring to the email screenshot that has their pet do image added to it. Who doesn’t love that?

In short, try to add elements to your emails that can create a human connection than showing this is nothing short of a system-generated disclaimer statement feel.

Ah! No marketing plan is complete without a column or a slide that has the 3 Golden alphabets ROI.

Unlike other channels, video ROI management is straightforward (unless you want to get into the dark or hidden touchpoints of a buyer journey)

Video email metrics are no different from your regular email metrics, except that this time you add a couple more metrics to measure.

You should check the CTR to the video, the average view duration and post watch action (share, engage with the video etc.)

To get this closer to the revenue circle, we at Vmaker added a new feature to our platform. We added the option to include a CTA right there in the video player page.

This helps your user to watch the video and then take the next action right from the video player page instead of switching tabs or platforms.

This simple element has brought the overall engagement directly in lieu of the conversion metric.

Don’t forget to test the emails with A/B options wherever possible. You have to arrive at a template after multiple experiments and continue to experiment to improvise.

Too little to choose from too many. That’s the scenario in the market today for any product.

But, to help you get started you can choose from the below options,

• Vmaker to create your videos (You’re here anyway why not try it?!)
• Mailshake for email automation (They added some great value here)
• A laptop with a webcam (yes external cams work great, but not a hindrance)
• AI Video Editor (You have it covered if you choose Vmaker. Vmaker AI turns raw video footage into published-ready video in a minuties.)
• Time (You might not have heard this before but ‘good things take time and practice’)

This arsenal should help you get started with video emails right away.

The best time to start video emails was yesterday and the next best time to start video email marketing is now. (Another quote you might not have heard before)

I suggest you try a few quick videos amongst your internal team members before you roll out big time.

While you do so, be prepared to roll out a few imperfect videos and work on perfection as a process rather than an end result.

The consumption style of videos is only going to increase with VR and technologies coming into the picture. Your brand should not miss out on the same.​​

With lockdown restrictions coming to an end and the pandemic settling down, the future still holds good for the remote working environment. As per McKinsey & Company, hybrid work environments will persist long after the pandemic is over. As we’re slowly getting used to many aspects of this environment, communicating effectively while working as a remote team is something we are still improving on.

We invited Yaagneswhar, Director of Marketing at Avoma to speak with us and share his knowledge, experience, and anecdotes on how to build and run a remote team effectively.

Here are a few snippets from our How to Collaborate Effectively as a Remote Team webinar, tailored for you.

You can watch the full video here:

Customer intelligence is about gaining insights from your customer behavior. When customers interact with your team, their feedback, reviews, and overall communication tells you a lot about them. This is a goldmine for all the teams in the organization as they can leverage this to give a better customer experience.

Each day we parse through different data points about the users and customers. Not all of these data points are actionable for one team. It should be inferred and the inference should be shared with the right team to take actions. This should be transparent to avoid any duplication of content within teams.

Consider, a prospect and your salesperson are talking, and they answer many questions about the product and the use cases. The result of this conversation will be held between them, and the same is not shared to the team.

If you look into it, the marketing team can benefit a lot from this conversation. They will get to know the pain points of the user base directly, and they can curate content to benefit the same.

When you solve the problem for the specific user, it solves the problem for the similar customer cohort.

The product development team can benefit from the conversation by listening to the same and planning their product roadmap prioritizing on how the customer base wants first.

Democratizing customer intelligence will help align your entire team in the same direction.

The remote work culture has brought the world closer. You are always a click away from your colleague who is connecting from the other end of the world. But with this, comes the problem of quick sync-ups.

Here’s what Yaagneshwaran had to say about online communication – 

Working between different time zones often causes unusual delays. All of us at some point must have faced this problem while scheduling a meeting. The entire leadership team at Avoma resides in the US, and I’m no stranger to timezone management and its issues.

Asynchronous communication concept has helped us to move out of this. It has helped us reduce everyday calls such as daily stand-ups and scrum calls. By going asynchronous, the recorded videos and notes are shared across teams which brings everyone closer to each other’s work.

For example, a salesperson writes about his customer call from the last day — a marketer can share a material related to it which might help the prospect. Similarly, a product manager can share feedback about the demo. This also applies in other scenarios such as learning, onboarding new customers or hires, etc.

Remote working is the future. It is here to stay and asynchronous communication modes have helped to add more clarity to conversations and make the end product more effective. Asynchronous communication does not eradicate synchronous communications, but it makes you more productive, and get things done faster.

☛ Try Vmaker Screen Recorder

Time management is indeed a challenge. Especially after the pandemic, when most of us were forced to accept a new working atmosphere. There are so many distractions now, and it takes more time to focus on a task. 

There are a few techniques which have helped Yaagneshwar to manage his time. So here are a few of them which you might find helpful too:

i) Prioritize the things you have to do in a day. If you are in a smaller setup, you have to decide what kind of value your activity adds to the overall goal of your organization or team. Based on this you have to do your activities.

ii) You will get a lot of ideas and you want to do a lot of things. Everything needs your time and effort. All of them boil down to prioritizing the activities.

iii) Most of the problems get solved after prioritizing the tasks. Don’t spend too much time in looking for multiple tips

iv) If the activity in your hand adds great value, and you have great clarity over it, then do it. However, if you have to spend time thinking over it, then don’t proceed with it.

v) A checklist is a great tool to put things in order. It guides you through the multiple steps in the process and ensures you don’t miss out on any steps.

vi) Restrict yourself to limited tasks if not it can turn into a hindrance. Taking too many things at the same time will kill the quality of the output, and also lead to burnout.

Remote working has opened up a new channel for interacting with colleagues and co-workers. Earlier, a lot of interactions happened in person, but now we don’t have a choice. Tools are our savior, especially when dealing with processes like hardware procurement automation, virtual collaboration, and even audiovisual setups for remote presentations. Platforms like Audio Visual Nation help organizations create seamless communication environments, ensuring smoother operations in a remote setup.

In this section, we asked Yaagneshwar about his favorite tools, and how it helps them.

1) Slack is the first communication tool for us. For quick updates, feedback, questions, this is our go-to tool

2) Intercom is used for customer chats, and it also helps us in keeping track of conversations

3) Click-up is a great tool for streamlining everything in one tool. We use it for our daily productivity

4) Ahrefs and Avoma are the other two tools I use on a daily basis.

Yaag has promised that he will give Vmaker a shot. If you’re curious about Vmaker and looking to kick start your asynchronous journey, then we can’t wait to have you on board. Here’s the link to get started.

Most of you reading this, Yaag and I were onboarded virtually during the pandemic. The hiring, onboarding happened online. This was the first time for me, and overall it was a new experience. But, I was curious to know what a recruiter has to say about building a team while working remotely. 

Yaag shared some great points with us –

In a broader sense, you need to have clarity over what is expected out of the role. When you are working in a company, you will find a lot of water-cooler conversations that help you understand more about the company. While remote work has helped avoid many unnecessary conversations, automating a lot of manual tasks and prioritizing high-value tasks helps us a lot.

You need to create a knowledge base about the company, the product in the form of videos, and written content to speed up the onboarding. You can use an asynchronous tool like Avoma and Vmaker when a new employee is being added to the team and then listen to the feedback.

It will take some time to be good at this, but with the remote culture all set, we have to work on building a culture on remote onboarding.

Working and collaborating in a remote work environment is tough. There are many pain points that you have to tackle which is a challenge. To make things easy for you, we invited Yaagneshwar from the team of Avoma to share his ideas on the different challenges and opportunities for making remote working more conducive. From customer intelligence to onboarding new employees, the spectrum of insights shared by him will surely help you.

If you miss that, you can check our YouTube channel. We upload the recorded version the next day.

You can also be a part of our Facebook and Slack community to participate in many conversations related to business, productivity, and growth.

This is not how you would expect your customers to behave, but sadly this is true. The average amount of time taken between Google search and purchase is 20 days. During these 20 days, a few of them drop the idea of buying, decide to go for an alternative, or never come back because they never had the intention of buying the product in the first place.

What about the people who decide to stay in the journey because they want to buy the product online? What do they go through, and what makes them convert?

In a nutshell, a prospect who finally ends up buying the product goes through a series of steps called buyer’s journey.

Let’s get into that in detail.

Buyer’s journey is a process that most prospective buyers follow to consider, evaluate and purchase the product or service that fits their needs the best. A few buyers take a short span of time in making the final decision, while a few others can take a considerable amount of time.
Either way, a buyer goes through three different stages of buying process.

Awareness: At this stage, the buyer is aware that there is a problem, and to solve it they need to buy a product or use a service

Consideration: In their quest to solve the problem, buyers consider and evaluate different options based on strengths and weaknesses. 

Decision stage: This is the final stage where the buyer has a clear understanding of the problem, how it can be solved by the product or service of a brand, and they don’t mind putting their money in it. 

Video marketing is the thing right now. So alienating it from your buyer’s journey can be a big miss for your business. 53% of the marketers have agreed that marketing videos can help in creating more brand awareness. 

To talk more about this in detail, we invited Karthik Subramanian, head of marketing at Picmaker. Karthik has close to two decades of experience and has worked with IT giants like Cognizant and Accenture in the past. Recently, his interview series, “High on Stories” has been getting a lot of attention on LinkedIn.

There is an interesting story about how he made his transition to marketing, but for that, we recommend checking out our recorded webinar video. 

In the next part of this blog, we will be talking about the points that we discussed in the webinar. This will keep the discussion relevant, and give you a quick walkthrough of what you can expect from the webinar video.

A lot of marketers mix up buyer’s journey with the marketing funnel. While they both have similarities, using them interchangeably can make things go wrong. 

A buyer’s journey is looking at the buying process from the buyers point of view. It means you list down all the activities that your buyers perform, and map out the steps that they follow before taking the final decision of buying the product.

A Marketing funnel is a blueprint laid down by a marketer. With a marketing funnel, a marketer tries to look at a customer’s journey from their point of view. This gives them a good understanding of the process and how they should frame the marketing strategy.

“Talk to your customers” — Karthik Subramanian

 Yes, that is it. That’s all you have to do to understand the customer journey. There are no magic formulas or secret ingredients that will give you success overnight. Talking to your customers will help you to reverse engineer from customer’s behavior to learn more about the customer journey.

A marketer can start an interaction with a prospect right from the start. Like when they reach out on chat or email to enquire about the product. Besides, a marketer can ramp up their efforts of studying more about customer behavior by running surveys. To encourage customers for filling these surveys, they can offer a minimal reward.

Simplicity is the key here. Using practical methods can help anyone to gain a lot of insights about customer journey.

At every stage of the buyer journey, a customer has different requirements. The videos can be aligned with these requirements to make it relevant for the customers. Getting your videos right is like holding the hands of your customers and leading them to the destination. Here are some examples of different type of videos you can create at different stages – 

Brand awareness stage: Here your customer is only trying to learn more about your brand. So telling your customer about the product, and its features is probably not a very good idea here. Instead, a video showing the brand value, mission, vision and what problem you’re trying to solve will work better at this stage.  

Evaluation stage: This is the stage where you can go a step further and give your customers a complete picture of your product. A customer at this stage is evaluating everything and learning about the product. By creating a video, you’re serving them everything they need and making their job easier.

Decision stage: If they have gone through your above two videos, then most likely they’re comparing your product with your competitors. Your prospective customers are looking for subtle signs on the basis of which they can give a score to the products. A customer testimonial video can be very effective at this stage. Additionally, videos on case studies, success stories, etc. will help you establish trust and credibility on you over your competition. 

Videos have evolved along with marketing. There are so many ways by which you can create videos, and each one of it can have a different impact on your customers. So after you have an understanding of what videos will work at different stages, it’s a great idea to decide what type of video will be the right fit for your business. This is necessary because video production costs money and other resources. Taking a wrong decision here can put tremendous pressure on your marketing activities thereby halting other operations.

Let’s take a look at the four most common types of videos created by businesses for marketing purpose

Real-time videos

These videos are not very budget-friendly because there are high production costs involved. Being real-time in nature, there is no editing and your customers are looking at raw footage. To get it right at the first attempt you need to ensure that every piece of equipment is at the right place, and all other factors like lighting has also been taken care of. In spite of being expensive, real-time videos can be very effective. The amount of value that they can create is tremendous. The customer watching a real-time video will know that there is no filter involved, and whatever they’re looking at is real.

Interview videos

In interview videos, you invite people to ask questions, and gather their thoughts on different subjects. These videos can help you to establish brand credibility. You can invite prominent personalities, but that will require you to shell out some budget, or you might have to get a back-up from your own brand presence.

Animation videos

Animated videos has gained popularity over the years. With tools like Animaker, you can create videos without spending a heavy budget on recruiting an agency. With the help of these DIY tools, you can create animated videos to tell a story or even explain a process. These videos are light-hearted which makes it more engaging for the customers to watch.

Screen recording videos

Over the years, companies have realized their dependence on videos for improving their marketing reach. However, as the demand increased, so did the new ways of creating videos. One such technique that has been spreading amongst companies very fast is screen recording videos. Screen recording videos are not only used for marketing, but also for sales follow-up, internal communication, and customer support. Screen and webcam records are finding their way in multiple functions of business today with their luxury of easy production and cost. 

Further Read: How to Increase Feature Adoption with Explainer Videos

“Videos are just forms of content, so the weightage should be more towards the content idea and next move to the format” — Karthik Subramanian

One of the best ways of blending videos in current marketing activities is by creating more number of videos in a shorter format. Considering the low attention span of the customers, simple 90-second videos can help you get the job done.

Once you have the video in place, you can think of repurposing the content. Repurposing will help you to create more videos but by using the same content. For doing this, you don’t need to employ extra resources or spend a lot of time. Use The QR Code Generator, you can create QR Codes for your videos, allowing viewers to quickly access related resources, special promotions, or additional content with a simple scan. Additionally, integrating a QR Code with Uniqode’s QR code generator into your videos can further engage your audience by providing quick access to related resources or promotions.

The future of videos is going to be about quantity more than quality. People are so used to watching videos on their mobile devices that they will remain hooked to it for a long time. Along with this, the attention span is also shortening, so they will be more interested in your content than the quality.

Karthik shared a great message with us when we asked him this question. We will use his quote to answer this question, and also summarize this blog

“Keep producing as many videos as possible, and try to be more creative with your approach to be more successful. Keep it short, keep it simple and most importantly keep your audience in mind. Personalize your videos for the different stages of your buyer’s journey and ensure they answer the questions the buyer might have in those stages. You will succeed.”

An article published in Harvard Business Review upholds this by saying that today’s businesses need a different world view. To be considered as great companies, they need to obsess over productivity, not efficiency. This is not surprising. In the current business environment, companies function in a fiercely competitive market, and sell products to a well-researched group of omnipresent customers. If they’re only efficient, which means doing the same repeated work with the available resources, their business will turn in to a sinking ship. Instead, staying productive which means doing more with the available resources is the need of the hour. 

This brings us to the main agenda of this blog – Sales productivity in 2024. Unless your sales turnover is already in the upper echelons of your industry, you still be looking for different ways to maximize your sales potential. Your sales department is like a gear for your business, and when it starts moving, your other teams start operating like the pistons. However, if your gear is stuck or slow, you cannot create enough juice to run the other operations.

If you want to remain competitive, it’s high time that you examine your sales process, train your sales team, and identify the possible blockages that are slowing your sales. However, getting started can be scary, so in this blog, we will be reiterating the definition of sales productivity, and sharing different strategies that you can use to propel your sales productivity.

We also covered this topic in our weekly webinar. We invited Stephen Shartzer, VP of Global Sales at Animaker Inc to share his experience and ideas about sales productivity. Stephen has a wide industry experience, and has an expertise in building sales teams front the scratch. He has worked with conglomerates like Microsoft and Cloudera before joining Animaker Inc.

Here’s the recorded version of the webinar. By all means, go ahead and check this out, there are some serious words of wisdom shared by Stephen. We will also include a few snippets from this webinar within each point that we will be covering in this blog

Simply put, the definition of sales productivity is maximizing the potential of your sales team, and minimizing the use of resources at the same time. It’s about establishing a balance between the two most important steps in the sales process – Sales Efficiency and Sales Effectiveness. With rising targets every year, this is a metric companies have struggled to optimize in the past.

To improve sales productivity you need to ensure that you’re aware of the factors that are stopping your sales team from achieving their highest potential. Some most-common questions that you can ask yourself to investigate what’s hindering your sales productivity are – 

• Does everyone in your team contributing to the targets equally?
  
• Are the new hires well-trained enough to close calls?

• Is the team spending a lot of time in entering data to the CRM system?

Stephen had an interesting take on sales productivity. He was of the opinion that, “Sales productivity is the outcome you generate towards your end goal. Achieving the end goal by focusing on important activities such as prospecting, client meetings, networking with reduced resources is the best productivity formula.”

We’ve scratched the surface, now let’s go deeper into the subject to find out what drives sales productivity in 2021

An average sales development representative makes 52 calls daily. If your sales team members are making more calls than that, then they’re super busy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re productive. Productivity will depend on how many calls that they’re converting at the end of the day.

Bonus article: How to stand out in the era of remote onboarding?

Time management while building a sales team is very crucial. Briefing every member in the team on where they should spend most of their time is pertinent. If your sales force feels that spending time only on making calls is being productive, then it’s time to take control on hands, and bring a transformation in the way work is done.

In the words of Stephen, “You can be busy all day and yet be zero productive. You have to focus on tasks that really matter, delegate others (if possible), prioritize according to the team’s requirements and plan your execution.”

For instance, implementing tools like Call Fluent AI can automate routine sales calls, allowing your team to invest their time in more strategic and impactful activities.

Almost 27% of the sales team spend more than an hour working on entering data in the CRM system. The big question that needs to be answered here is that is it being productive? To be honest, there is no straightforward answer to this question. Information is power. The more accurate your information the more power you have over a customer.

When we asked this question to Stephen, after a hearty laugh he answered, “It’s kind of a double-edge sword. A CRM system helps a company, executives and salespeople too. Why is it so important? Because knowledge is powerful. If you don’t put in particular information about a company or a person, then you’re losing out on important things. The more information you have, the more time you save, and the more easily you solve problems.”

This is quite frustrating for managers. If their team is spending too much time on recreating content for the same purpose, then they will never achieve the highest productivity level. For example, every time a customer asks for a brochure, instead of creating it fresh, the standard brochure can be used over and over again to avoid repeat work.

Repurposing your current content can also be a great idea for sharing information with your clients. Creating explainer videos from your emails is one such example. Videos are easy to understand, and they can be shared with customers effortlessly.

Stephen’s team create a lot of animated videos on Animaker, and they repurpose it wonderfully using Vmaker – “We create a lot of videos on Animaker because it’s easy, and my team doesn’t need to worry about recreating everything from the scratch. Also, we use Vmaker, to screen record the animation video to explain a process or just create a how-to video.”

If you don’t know how what KPIs you should measure to evaluate sales productive, then your efforts will reap you half-baked results. Measure everything that defines the sales performance. Start with the number of emails sent. Number of demo requests received, and also the number of content shared with the customers. If any or all of them appears to be on the lower side of the scale, you know where you need to start optimizing the sales process.

Stephen’s point of view,  “Measuring KPI is the science part of sales. By measuring KPI, you identify the good, and waste of time activities. We track revenue, number of meetings, demo requests and even emails.”

The Sales team spend one-third of their day talking to prospects. The higher number of prospects is great for your business, however, if they’re stuck in the buying process for a long time, then you have to do something to push them ahead. While there are a lot of tools and ideas that you can implement is to educate the prospect with value. Understand what is stopping them from buying, and then weed it out with very personalized communication.

The sales team at Animaker does something similar,  “We use Vmaker to send personalized videos to such prospects helping them connect personally without eating their calendar. This has actually helped us advance more prospects over the last few months.”

Training is an integral part of the sales process. 42.5% of sales workers take more than 10 months to be productive enough to the company goals. To be more productive, effective training can go a long way in improving that. Better mentorship, onboarding process, and using more videos are some very effective steps to improve the training process. In fact, videos can be great for creating how-to videos, explainer videos, and giving virtual training. Managers in the sales team can use a tool like Vmaker, to record review and feedback videos. Videos are easy to understand, and there is a lot more clarity.

Stephen’s team create a lot of videos with the internal tools to train and onboard customers. Here’s what he had to say, “Training is extremely important. We use a lot of our internal tools to create videos.  Animaker integrated with Zoom. We use this integration to create videos like live meetings, training, and role-playing videos.  With Vmaker, we can also schedule a recording of the Zoom meeting even if you are not attending.”

Working on making your sales team more productive is necessary to sustain your business for the long run. Start by getting the definition of sales productivity right. A lot of companies still mistake productivity for efficiency. Once you’re through with that, start keeping a tab on the time spent by your team on calls because just being busy is not productive. Similarly, also check how much time is spent on entering data in the CRM system, if it’s too high you need to do some re-work there too.
Focus on repurposing the content that you already have.

This will stop your team from doing repeated work. Videos are a great example. Turn your emails, processes, and other documents into videos. With a screen recording tool like Vmaker, you can record feedback, reviews, and how-to videos. These are great for sharing with your customers and even prospects.

If you miss that, you check our YouTube channel. We upload the recorded version on the next day.

You can also be a part of our Facebook and Slack community to participate in many conversations related to business, productivity and growth.

At that moment, we realized we have found our topic.

To make this webinar interesting, we invited Ruben, head of the customer service team, Animaker Inc. to share his learnings, insights, and hands-on experience of solving customer problems.

In this webinar, Ruben exchanged some great ideas from his personal experience, customer service tips, and how Vmaker played a pivotal role in improving the customer service at Animaker Inc. We highly recommend checking out the recorded version of this webinar focused on customer service. 

If video is not your thing, then here’s a walkthrough on the five major points discussed in this webinar.

Empathy is the No.1 thing customers expect from customer service.

It’s easy to understand what makes it the top priority for customers. The prime reason why a user even approaches the customer support team is because they’re facing a problem and they need your help to get it sorted. The least you can do is to acknowledge their problem and listen to it.

To turn up the empathy meter in your support team members, here’s what you can do –

– Train them on how to establish a common ground to start a conversation with the customers

– Prepare a list of questions or a checklist so that you can clearly understand the problem

– Set a timeline so that the customer is clear when to expect a reply from you

– Resolve the problem instead of delaying it till the very last moment

Excerpts from the webinar:

“Empathy is very important. You need to first acknowledge the user, whatever the issue may be – big or small. This is to let them know that we’re here to help them and solve the problem”

Many customers who reach out to the support team have a common problem.

A common problem is something that has already been addressed by your team and it’s not necessary to create a resource separately to address the problem. You can pull out the answer from your database and send it to your customer.

This way you can avoid repeat work and have a quick turnaround time

However, this is easier said than done. If you want to put such a structure in place, here’s what you have to do – 

– Create a database like a knowledge bank for all the frequently asked questions

– Tag them with relevant keywords so that it becomes easier to identify

– Use a video or screen recording tool like Vmaker to answer these questions to make it more effective

Excerpts from the webinar:

“The best practice that we follow at Animaker is having a database of frequently asked questions, and tagging them with relevant keywords. So, the next time an agent can go, and search for relevant keywords, and simply link it to the user”

Response time is the time taken by the support team to respond to a customer query. It is a significantly important parameter for customers to decide whether they want to go ahead with a product or not. As per this website, 53% of the customers decide not to continue with a product if the response time is low. So, how do you set an average response time for your customer support team? Well, to be honest a lot depends on the nature of your business and the kind of questions you receive. However, for the starters, here are some numbers that we pulled out from the internet that will help you to set a benchmark for your team.

All the numbers are based on the research done by with a sample size of 1000 companies –

– The average response time is 12 hours and 10 minutes (which is very high) – 88% of the customers expect a reply within 60 minutes and 30% expect a reply within 15 minutes or less

– 90% of the companies do not acknowledge the customer that the email has been received

The above numbers should give you the right impetus about what you should and should not do to set a response strategy. To improve, consider tools like AI Phone Calls, which automate rapid, personalized voice responses to acknowledge queries or provide solutions, ensuring customers aren’t left waiting. 

You can ask yourself these questions to get started –

– Do you want to keep your customers hanging for 12 hours before you respond?

– What are the changes you can make in the team to reply to a customer within an hour, so that most of the customers stick with you?

– What procedure can you set to acknowledge customer emails in the shortest time possible?

Tooling also matters. If your help desk can’t enforce SLAs, auto-triage across email, chat, and voice, or surface AI suggestions, it will be hard to hit the response-time benchmarks above. Compare freshdesk alternatives in a 2026-focused roundup that scores 20 platforms on channels, AI, knowledge base, security, integrations, KPIs, and pricing clarity, so your team can pick a system that accelerates replies and boosts FTR.

Excerpts from the webinar:

“We do recommend to our agents to acknowledge the user even when they do not have a solution right at hand. It’s important to let the customer know that someone will look into the issue, and set the right expectations so that the customer is not left hanging in the chat”

You have set a goal, you know what are the steps you need to take to improve customer service in your business, and now it’s time to start measuring the results.

For example, you can measure your cloud contact center metrics in your customer service department.

This step is important because it’s a reality check on how good your plans worked, and what corrective actions you can take to get your plans back on track.

One of the best ways of ascertaining the quality of customer service is by asking your customers for feedback.

But, it doesn’t end by asking for it. In fact, that’s just the start.

If you have plans to ask for feedback to your customers just to make them feel heard, then that’s a stale idea. Instead, take an active approach and start by acknowledging their feedback and sending personalized replies. I know, it’s getting repetitive, but we can’t stop stressing enough on acknowledging customer communication.

While we talk about taking feedback, there is a bitter side to it. A lot of businesses have experienced that a customer is most likely to leave feedback when they have a negative experience than a positive one.

However, this should not discourage you from asking for feedback. Negative feedback is a great way of working on the downsides and identifying the loopholes missed by your team. Taking all of it in a positive stride and working on it almost guarantees a better customer service team.

As a takeaway, here’s a link to the top 16 strategies to obtain customer feedback.

Excerpts from the webinar:

“Negative feedback keeps coming all the time, what matters is how we look at it. At Animaker, we welcome negative feedback because we look at it as a great learning opportunity”

1. Response Time

Acknowledging your customer is pivotal for customer success. Response time is a metric that you can use to analyze how quickly your support team replied to your customer to confirm that their email has been received. This metric is even more important for B2B customer service teams, as their customer base is smaller as compared to B2C companies.

2. First Time Resolution (FTR)

FTR is a prime parameter for measuring the efficiency of the support staff. A high FTR rate denotes that a lot of customer queries get resolved in the first call, highlighting the effectiveness of the call management software. This is a positive sign for a business because even if the average time spent on a call is higher, it reduces the probability of a customer calling the support team repeatedly with the same problem.

3. Customer satisfaction score

One thing that every business wants to achieve is an active group of satisfied customers. Over the years, companies have realised that it’s more advantageous to keep your existing customers happy than to go out hunting for new customers every time.

Customer satisfaction is one metric that helps companies to measure and retain satisfied customers. Also, the customer satisfaction score is like the true north for the support team. All other numbers fall flat if the customer satisfaction score is nosediving.

There are numerous ways of calculating customer satisfaction scores, but here are some of the best techniques that we found online – Take complete charge of customer satisfaction metrics

Excerpts from the webinar:

“There are a lot of KPIs but the two most important points that we consider at Animaker is Response time and First Time Resolution(FTR)”

Your customer service team is like an army who are always on the frontline tackling customer queries, complaints, and feedback. Having a weak army is opening the doors for infiltration.

To stop this, start building a strong and resilient customer support team. Start by making your team more emotionally inclined to the customer’s requirements. Set a procedure to create customer service resources, so that your team has to spend the minimum amount of time in answering the FAQs.

Once you have the first two priorities in place, it’s time to start measuring activities by clocking the response time and setting the key parameters to evaluate the performance of your team. When you’re done with that, ask for feedback from your customers, and even if they’re largely negative, take them on a positive note. This will go a long way in deciding the growth trajectory of your organization.

We hope you liked our customer service webinar. We will be talking about more such interesting topics in our weekly webinar. You can visit our webinar page to register and attend it live. If you miss that, you check our YouTube channel. We upload the recorded version on the next day.

You can also be a part of our Facebook and Slack community to participate in many conversations related to business, productivity, and growth.

Read more:

How Videos Can Help You Offer Personalized Support and Improve Customer Satisfaction!