Human interaction has taken a back seat as many countries, regions and companies continue to adopt work from home policies to contain the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19).
For customer-facing organizations, that’s a problem. But there are solutions.
BlueRush Inc has developed IndiVideo, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) interactive personalized video platform for financial services, that is attracting customers in its Canadian home market, in the US, and further afield.
Proactive sat down with CEO Steve Taylor and asked how BlueRush is helping to improve the customer experience of its clients by adding video media as a delivery option for transactional communications or as a detailed explainer to help reduce call centre traffic.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought digital to the fore, mostly through necessity. Why is digital engagement so critical?
As more companies embrace digital channels, the problem that has become apparent is that they don't have a meaningful way to actually engage customers to be able to tell a story, build trust and drive an action.
What we’re able to do is catch the attention of people for 60 to 90 seconds - long enough to explain the difference between, let’s say two credit card products or two mortgage products - and build that knowledge and understanding. And that becomes the foundation of trust, which is what you need to build in order to get someone to take an action.
That’s the place that we own, and where we excel and the reason why we keep driving all these great results for our customers.
Is human interaction missing from current digital strategies?
We all know that a great live meeting with a person, where there are questions and answers and interactivity, and the conversation becomes increasingly relevant, is the best approach. That’s gone away; you can't meet somebody in a branch, you can't meet them for coffee, you can’t meet them in their home or even at an event.
What we’re left with are digital technologies that are great at scale. You can get to a lot of people very cost-effectively, but they're not great at creating context for each individual. It’s a one-to-many approach and it’s not contextualised to the end-user. There are not a lot of tools that sit in the middle.
There are not a lot of technologies or capabilities out there that really allow for a meaningful two-way dialogue in the digital channels. So, that's the gap and that's what I think a lot of digital teams are missing.
How does IndiVideo enable a stronger digital experience and how does it humanise the experience?
What we know is that people are generally more engaged when they see video as the option; when they can click a button to see a video. And if there's a promise that it is personalised or contextualised, again, we know that that's even more compelling in terms of drawing them into the experience.
So, how do you get them engaged? The promise of video and personalization drives higher engagement rates, whether that's through an email campaign or social media, on a web page, or through an app. If we can get their attention, the way we keep their attention is with contextual information, but also often with interactivity, and this is where we start to mimic a conversation.
We ask questions within the context of the video, and then ultimately the content that we pay that off with is as relevant or precise as it could be, similar to what would happen in a conversation.
Can you provide an example of how you use personalized video in a transaction?
A strong use case is around buying a home and acquiring a mortgage for your home purchase.
If I asked you right away whether you are interested in a home, a condo, or a second home and the answer is a second home, then we are going down a different stream. There are different lending products, different lending ratios. There are different considerations around costs to carry a property like that. And now we're going to talk about that, and we're not just going to talk generically about mortgages.
Again, that's as close to a conversation as you can get in an asynchronous video world.
How do you measure the success of IndiVideo?
We measure it at each point. We measure how many people we are engaging in the video experience, we keep detailed analytics and we report them to our customers. At all times they have access to dashboards where they can see all this.
But number one is how many people are actually engaging in the experience.
Then we track, of those, how many are making it through to the call to action, which could be at the end of the video but also could be embedded during the video. And then, ideally, we're staying on the buyer journey so we can measure the ultimate action rate, from the pre-approval rate to how many people turn into mortgage customers.
How does this convert into revenue streams for BlueRush and deliverables for your shareholders?
It translates into revenue for our customers first; it’s translating into real dollars for them in terms of the additional business that they wouldn't have had in whatever domain we're supporting, and then that success translates into success for BlueRush as we grow our business with those accounts.
It translates into revenue for us because it works really well. We get great results for our customers. Those results tend to lead to additional projects with them. You see a lot of our growth in recurring revenue with existing customers as we build on the positive results. They also feedback into our marketing material so we can go out and show potential clients what we’ve achieved for our customers.
Do you see lots of open road ahead for Blue Rush?
We’ve barely scratched the surface. We have 30-plus accounts now. Just in the FI (financial industries) vertical, which is not our only vertical, there are thousands more banks just in the United States.
We now also have prospects through our global partners in other regions like South America, the Middle East, India, Japan, Southeast Asia.
Contact the author at stephen.gunnion@proactiveinvestors.com