The only true way to fully understand how successful your videos are is to get feedback from the customers who receive them. For CitNOW Sales and Workshop users, this can be done through the Rate This Video feature, which enables the collection of video scores out of 5 and written feedback directly from customers.

Collecting this data alone won’t help you improve your videos. Monitoring the trends in your feedback however, can be an extremely useful tool in making your videos the best they can be.

The average rating for a CitNOW Sales video is 4.86, and for a Workshop video, 4.8 – so if your team is regularly receiving four or five stars for their videos, and is maintaining a high average rating, then you’re doing great (although it’s always worth looking for ways that you can make your videos even better!). However, if ones and twos keep cropping up with regularity, then there’s no time to lose in taking steps to improve the videos you’re producing.

In this blog, we’ll give you some handy tips on creating videos that your customers will love, as well as highlighting how to fix the most common issues that customers are reporting nationwide.

How can you improve your videos using feedback?

There are plenty of things that you can do to improve the quality of your videos, but the vital first step is to regularly check and analyse ratings and feedback. This is a quick and easy task within CitNOW, as both average video ratings and the number of videos receiving each star rating can be viewed on the Overview page of the dashboard.

From this, you can then understand where you’re struggling and support those sales or workshop staff that need help, including:

• Sharing positive feedback: If a particular staff member is excelling with their videos, then sharing the feedback they’ve received with the rest of the workforce can help them emulate success and make their own improvements.
• Setting up dealership leaderboards: Incentivising consistently high ratings through a leaderboard, with prizes for the best performers each month, can motivate staff to bring their averages up. The Presenters page on the dashboard displays a table of average video ratings from where this can be measured.
• Promoting retraining: In more serious cases where no particular pain point can be spotted, using CitNOW’s webinars and training resources can help put them on the right track.

A 5-star Sales video from Arden Maidstone MINI

Fixing common issues

Through the videos that CitNOW users all over the country are creating and sending to customers, we’ve been able to spot a few regular comments that lead to lower ratings. The good news, however, is that all these problems are easily solvable without any significant financial investment, or any major inconvenience to the staff recording the videos.

Three issues in particular stand out from the rest:

• Wired for sound: plenty of videos look the part and tick all the boxes visually, but are then let down by poor audio that leaves customers confused and frustrated.
  There are several factors at play here, such as loud background noise (be it workshop activity or even the radio) drowning out the person speaking, and wind noise that overpowers staff speaking outside. Many videos have also been affected by the video taker talking so quickly that customers can’t keep up or understand what’s being said.
  The simplest way to solve these problems is to take a calm, considered approach. Use a proper microphone such as iRig, find a quieter background environment to record if possible (use a windjammer if not), and deliver a steady, clear flow of information that every customer can understand. The Clarity function within CitNOW, which automatically enhances the sound within a video and filters out unnecessary background noise, can also help in this area.
• The bigger picture: although most CitNOW users are good at showing off car details or workshop measurements, many neglect to consider the finer points of creating a video. For example, lighting that is too bright or too dark can make it difficult for a viewer to see particular details, and an unfocused camera has a similar effect. Spending a bit of time to perfect camera use can easily alleviate these pain points.
• The car is the star: a number of low-rated videos have generated complaints that the sales executive spends too much time talking about themselves and not enough time about the car. At the same time, some customers have been left dissatisfied that the spec of car shown in the video was different to the one they expected to see.
  This is where attention to detail really makes a difference. When planning out a video, make sure that the right model and spec forms the core of the video, and make sure that every important piece of information is covered. There is a place for more general videos, but these should only be used at the start of a sales journey or where information on a particular model hasn’t been requested.

A 5-star Workshop video from Rybrook Volvo Preston

The Reporting function within the dashboard can track progress in improving videos, and reports across a particular week, month or quarter can be downloaded and assessed. As low ratings still mean that a customer has engaged with a video, even small changes should result in improvements in scores that reports will pick up on.

For more on utilising your CitNOW dashboard, download our guides for Workshop and Sales, or join one of our dashboard and reporting focused webinars.