It’s 2024, Do You Know Where Your Customers Are?
Reaching the various viewers, listeners, and consumers of your media isn’t just about your main channels anymore, you have to find ways to engage them where they are, no matter how they want to communicate. In 2024 that involves mobile apps, web apps, websites, streaming apps, other streaming services, and more. It also includes the people providing access to your content – mobile carriers, internet carriers, and cable providers.
This is the multi-channel and even omnichannel customer experience where your customers, providers, and partners live, play, and conduct business. You often don’t know the platform where your viewers, customers, and partners will log in, shop, or visit, so ensuring that their experience across all of your channels and platforms is positive and meets your brand is critical.
Can You Collect Feedback in Context?
With the market growing so fast (an estimated 21.5% CAGR according to Grand View Research), one of the big challenges facing streamers is the different ways – and content delivery networks (CDN) – people use to access streaming content. They might use different networks to access the same streaming content in the same house on their phone’s mobile networks and on their smart TV’s cable or internet connection.
This makes managing their experience challenging, as you cannot predict where and how your customers will consume content, and a single customer might consume it on multiple devices and even multiple networks at the same time. When they contact customer service, understanding the context surrounding their experience is key. Their bandwidth on their phone might be very different from their smart TV or even laptop.
Finding ways to reach people when and where they are most likely to respond, without interrupting their experience will give you better conversations, better ratings and reviews, and the best possible customer experience.
Can You Create Content that Resonates?
The market leaders are already relying on user recommendations to guide programming choices, but they’re doing that based on algorithms that say, “other customers who viewed this also watched this.” But what if you were to ask people directly about their favorite entertainment experiences?
Hearing directly from customers as opposed to inferring preferences gives you more accurate data points. This also gives you a chance to dig a bit deeper and find out why somebody likes a certain experience. It could be that they like a certain actor, or that genre of entertainment. They might have had a pleasurable experience with it in the past. You can get to the kind of information that inference algorithms miss.
Then your “recommended for you” carousel can offer suggestions based on secondary questions (why did you like this?). And, when your recommendations don’t work, you can engage your consumers in a variety of other ways as well.
Can You Stand Out from the Crowd?
You need a way to stand out from the large crowd of streaming media providers. Enhanced interactivity remains the top value proposition for streaming companies over traditional cable TV viewing but is it enough? You want to be the platform of choice so that your content can be seen and enjoyed by more people.
Taking your interaction to a new level with a more personal touch gives people the impression that you know them and care. You can do this with surveys, polls, quizzes, and games that people can play between or during programs.
Also, by asking people what they liked about a program and what they would like to see more of, allows you to plan ahead, meet their needs, and further customize your offerings to your audiences.
Can You Get to Know Your Different Audiences Better?
Setting up your feedback solution to dig deeper into your audience’s personal preferences, and then asking a follow-up question allows you to understand your audience in ways others simply cannot.
Some feedback platforms allow you to automate your feedback collection and response. For example, you can use skip-logic to ask follow-up questions based on responses, so that the next question is completely relevant to the answer provided. You might ask what they liked best about the content. If they answered the performance, you can ask if they like other work by that performer.
If they didn’t like the content, there are ways that you can automatically respond with a separate survey asking why they didn’t enjoy it and what else they might enjoy. You can even offer bonuses to keep customers coming back.
Automating surveys and responses allow you to engage in conversations with your audiences, without consuming valuable people resources. Additionally, when you gather feedback in context of what, where, and how people are enjoying your content, you collect more accurate and useful data. Data you can use to guide your product development, programming, and UX design.
And when you let people know that you heard them and took their feedback, it dramatically increases the likelihood that your customers will stay with you down the road.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Alchemer. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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