How to make the biggest impact with AI video in customer success

What does the new partnership between ChurnZero and Synthesia mean for customer teams?

Announced this March, our integration with the leading AI video platform for business stands to revolutionize the way you engage and educate your customers—creating and personalizing AI video messages effortlessly, then delivering them with precision.

How can you make the most of this new form of media, and how are customer teams already using it?

We caught up with Synthesia customer success leader Lee Beddows at ChurnZero’s annual conference and asked him to share his tips and best practices on AI video for customer teams.

ChurnZero’s team used Synthesia to create this product announcement with an AI avatar of CCO and CPO Abby Hammer.

What are the most popular AI video use cases for customer teams?

Synthesia: One of the most important things that all customer success teams are trying to do is build sustainable and valuable relationships with their customers. Increasingly, Synthesia is playing a big supporting role in enhancing those one-to-one relationships.

A popular CS use case is where a CSM knows about the customer’s value drivers—the things that they need to do and achieve to be successful—then crafts video messages that relate back to those value drivers specifically.

Instead of sharing a generic ‘new features’ video from their product team once a quarter, CSMs are taking the information and creating specific videos just for the features that individual customers care about, and talking about why they care.

We know of customers who’ve used these videos to justify continued investment in a product to their stakeholders. “Look at the amazing things that we care about in this feature release.”

The message is so much stronger and more impactful when it’s communicated with video. Traditionally, though, it’s expensive and difficult to do, requiring a bunch of skills that people don’t have natively and aren’t trained to do professionally.

Now—for people who are trained—the efficiencies a video team can make with Synthesia are massive.  But the bigger “unlock”, by far, is for people who are now able to use video tools for the first time.  Most CSMs don’t have the ability to craft a video simply, easily, or quickly for a customer to talk about their goals—but with Synthesia, they do.

From the customer’s perspective, how impactful is a video compared to an email?

Synthesia: When people receive a video, rather than a flat email, or PDF, or some slides, the level of engagement goes up. They stop what they’re doing to listen and watch, unlike an email with which we tend to scan the first three lines and not read the rest.

The impact is so much greater; we’ve seen it in our own research on video in learning and development, where we’ve tested different learning formats rigorously. The assessment results for people trained on personalized Synthesia videos are so much higher, with 50 to 60% more retention of information at later points.

We also see significant increases in how engaging the content is: how long people stay with the content. Rather than skipping, people stay and continue to watch the whole thing.

It resonates more because people are used to video content that’s either very high-quality but generic, or relevant and specific but low quality, like a webcam conversation.

Synthesia combines the best of both: high-grade video that’s also personalized, specific, and timely.

What best practices do you recommend for CS teams using Synthesia?

Synthesia: Lengthwise, smaller, shorter videos tend to be better. I’m not of the TikTok generation, but short-form content is so much more engaging. People spend longer watching shorter clips in sequence than they do watching longer-form content.

So, keep it short, tight, and to the point. If you’re going to talk about four different things, do four different short videos rather than one long one. Synthesia makes it easy to do that. You can easily edit them individually. You can easily make sure they flow nicely, which is much more difficult with traditional video creation.

The other best practice is to use existing templates. The way we’re creating video here is not the traditional way. You write out what you want to happen, and it gets turned into video as you select it.

This means that you can have templated content set up and ready to go. You can have your own templated intro; your own templated thank-you and goodbye.

You can have company-wide middle sections around new features and products, for example, which you can copy and paste into your narrative, as if you were adding a slide.

Your brand and marketing team can set up templates for you beforehand or in real time—again, like they would with a PowerPoint deck—with consistent, professional versions for CS, sales, marketing or internal learning teams. A lot of large companies have very stringent guidelines and processes, and our platform supports that.

If you’ve got 20, or 30, or 150 CS people managing a variety of different customers, you might start with a centralized template of those feature releases. The small business CSMs can do one thing with it; the emerging and mid-market teams can do something else. The strategic and enterprise teams can apply their own customers’ branding across those templates in a shared way and then send that out with their avatar presenting the use case.

What are some other ways that companies are using Synthesia technology?

Synthesia: Some companies—actually very traditional companies who you might not expect—have gone all in on video for their knowledge bases.

You wouldn’t imagine going to a filing cabinet today to pull out great big operating documents and huge books, because we all have online repositories of information. Now, these companies are taking it a step further by having subject matter experts from every department create short-form video content about it.

They’ve seen how it’s more engaging and impactful, and how people retain more of the information. So they’ve decided: let’s open the door to allow every knowledge worker to create their own video in this way, in the same way that most of us right now could upload something to our company’s knowledge base or intranet.

These companies now have a huge catalogue of video. When new people join, or transfer between departments, they can consume an entire body of video content as part of their learning and development.

The power of immediate translation is also very impactful. For example, I only speak English (and terrible versions of other languages) but I can take an English-language video and tell our platform to translate it into Spanish, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Japanese…

Synthesia will translate the presentation, pick out a voice that matches the language, and deliver a draft back—and you can do this in up to 120 supported languages.

So if you’re a company based in Germany, for example, whose products are found in homes worldwide, and whose staff speak 45 languages across the globe, you can have video-based training content for a global workforce. You don’t have to find 45 voice actors, or re-record things every time you change the way a factory operates. You write it once, translate it as many times as you like, and edit those translations whenever you need to.

What is the learning curve like for a typical Synthesia user?

Synthesia: As you’ve seen at ChurnZero, our platform is really very easy to use. At the initial point of familiarization, it looks very much like anything that you’ve created slides in before. You have the slide chooser down the side; the drag-and-drop elements that you add to the screen in front of it.

The piece that becomes different to most other platforms is that you then choose an avatar and write your script below it. The script and the words that progress down the screen are your timeline for the video, so if what you write takes 20 seconds to say, you’ve got a 20-second clip and you can see its progression.

Synthesia customers in certain segments get a Synthesia CSM that they can rely on to help with training and engagement. We have online webinars, our online knowledge base, and an enormous gallery of templates and use cases geared to different use cases.

Our support team are fantastic at providing guidance, but most people simply use trial and experimentation to become familiar with it.

Just like PowerPoint, the first time most of us created a presentation, we weren’t great at it. You experiment, you get better at it, you see what works, you see what you like. And most people come out of it with an ability to create content in ways that they just could not do before.