Video surveys are one of the best ways to get the customer insights you need to improve your business. Compared to telephone, written, or in-person surveys, an asynchronous video survey is more convenient for the respondent, and they’re more likely to give you a meaningful understanding of their opinions and behaviors.
When you use our survey platform, Vocal Video, to build your video questionnaire and collect responses, the process is fast and affordable.
Here, we’ll introduce five of our most popular video survey templates for market research and customer feedback, and show you how to…
As a bonus, we’ll also show you how to publish and share customer feedback as beautiful testimonial videos (covering the benefits of your product or service), like this one:
Sign up for a free Vocal Video account today to create your first video survey and start collecting feedback from your clients.
When Should You Use Video Surveys for Your Business?
Video surveys are an efficient way to collect qualitative data from a cross-section of your customer base. These responses can help you see the big picture about the characteristics of your audience and how they’re receiving your product.
This is different from quantitative data like the statistics you get when customers rate their experience from one to five. If you want quantitative data about who’s using your product and whether they’d recommend you to a friend, a video questionnaire isn’t necessarily the way to go. But if you want to look beyond star ratings, asking open-ended questions and gauging the emotional response to your business, they can give you a much richer, more nuanced, and authentic view of what’s going on behind the statistics.
The customer insights you get from video answers can help you interpret and apply qualitative feedback with a deeper understanding of the pain points your customers are facing. This can help you respond to these challenges and improve your product, service, or customer experience going forward.
Video surveys can also help you include a wider cross-section of your customer base in your research. Whereas customers often have to make an appointment or travel to your location to take part in in-person feedback or market research, video research surveys open up the process to people who don’t have the spare time to do this. This gives you a larger sample size, so you can be more certain that you’re acting on information that represents your entire audience.
The people who make a self-recorded video survey response can also respond privately, whenever they have time, and give a detailed account of their opinion without being influenced by moderator bias or the group dynamic of a market research panel. Again, this gives you more reliable data to consider as you make business decisions based on survey results.
3 Ways to Use Video Surveys to Improve Your Business
Businesses of every size and type can use video questionnaires to humanize data collection, gain a deeper understanding of their respondents’ preferences, and inform product development.
Most businesses have several opportunities to get feedback from their customers and apply it.
1. Conduct Market Research with Asynchronous Video
Asynchronous video interview tools (like Vocal Video) are an efficient and objective way to replace the traditional market research sessions that help businesses develop their strategies. The easiest way to get a range of responses is to customize one of our template survey collectors.
When you want specific consumer insights into a new product or service, our Video Surveys template for market research includes these customizable video questions:
- How would this new feature from [your organization] impact your business?
- What kinds of things would you like to see in new offerings from [your organization]?
- How likely are you to recommend [your organization] to a friend?
For example, Skincare by Dr. Victoria uses a similar template to send a video survey after patients complete their procedures.
2. Get Customer Feedback, However You Sell
Video surveys can also give the people who interact with your business a chance to evaluate every aspect of their experience.
This template, designed for businesses that sell online, includes these survey questions:
- Out of five stars, how would you rate [your organization]?
- What has been your experience with our product so far?
- Could you describe your overall experience with [your organization]?
It’s easy to add a link to this survey to the follow-up emails you send after someone buys something from your online store.
For example, Vocal Video customer Martha Stoumen Wines invites customers to share their feedback once they become part of their online community (as shown above).
The survey for this review of your company’s physical location includes these questions:
- What was one of the benefits of working with a team member at [your organization]?
- Is there anything else you’d like to share about your experience with [your organization]?
This is a great survey to share with a QR code displayed in your store. You could also add a link to the survey to your receipt, or put it on a business card that customers can pick up at the cash desk.
This survey template is designed to video insights into how one business benefited from a partnership with another product, service, or professional. It’s built around these questions:
- What was the main challenge you needed to overcome with [your organization]?
- Could you describe a time that [your organization] helped your business, including any metrics that come to mind?
- What has been the most significant impact of working with [your organization]?
This template also makes a great basis for a video case study to use on your website or marketing. Check out this video from Will Curran from Endless Events to see how Vocal Video’s automatic editing creates a case study that’s informative, engaging, and ready to share.
3. Use Employee Feedback to Improve Workplace Morale
When you want to attract and keep the best team members for your business, it’s helpful to collect (and share) videos about your employees’ experiences. Alongside our sales success stories and employee awards videos templates, you can show your employees how much you value their unique perspectives by collecting video surveys.
The questions in this template can give you a deeper understanding of your employees experience with your company:
- How did you find your way to your current role at [your organization]?
- Could you share a few details about your favorite part of your role and the team at [your organization]?
- What stands out to you about the culture at [your organization]?
Questions like these can create an inspiring and relatable employee testimonial like this one:
See more examples of employee testimonial videos and find out more about our custom-designed testimonial templates.
A Vocal Video template is the easiest tool for conducting video surveys for your company. With our video survey software, you can get set up to start collecting and applying invaluable customer satisfaction feedback today.
How to Use Vocal Video for Customer Surveys
1. Set Up a Video Collector
With Vocal Video, you can customize any of our survey templates or write your questions, welcome, and thank you messages from scratch.
Simply open your Vocal Video dashboard, go to “Video Collectors” and click “Create a Collector.”
Give your survey collector a name, then work through the simple steps on the left side of the dashboard to...
- Introduce your survey.
- Write or customize up to five questions.
- Decide on the attribution information you’d like to request from the respondents.
- Write a thank you message letting the respondent know how much you appreciate their time.
You can also customize your collector so respondents can instantly identify it with your brand. Under “Logo & Colors,” upload your logo and decide on the background and accent colors you want to use. You can also set up the logo and color scheme within your Vocal Video Brand Kit, so they’ll automatically be applied to your new collectors in the future. This is a great feature if you want to make surveys a regular part of your customer service, or if you want to check in with your customers 6 or 12 months after their interaction with your business to collect the longitudinal data that can help you understand the trends and shifts of opinion that occur over time.
Add Incentives to Reward Respondents
You can also use our video collectors to add incentives and encourage more people to complete your survey. This extra nudge is something that experienced interviewers are familiar with, and we make it easy to choose a custom incentive for your potential respondents.
On the welcome page, open the optional “Incentives” tab and choose from Giveaway, Contest, or Donation. You’ll handle the fulfillment of these incentives once someone has finished recording their video survey response.
You can also choose to enter respondents into our monthly Vocal Video prize draw, where five winners receive $100.
2. Share Your Collector with the People You Want to Hear From
To collect responses, share this link with your target respondents.Click “Get Responses'' to open the menu of sharing options. We’ll generate a unique URL for every Vocal Video collector you create. Your respondents simply have to open the link and start recording on their Android or iOS device.
As well as being easy for your respondents to use, this URL-based system also has several options for sharing your survey, helping you to get more responses and more data.
To share the collector with your audience, you can:
- Add the URL to the follow-up emails you send to customers after they’ve bought something so everyone has a chance to share their opinion.
- Use your CRM software to create a list of the customers you want to sample (for example, new customers, returning customers, or customers in a specific demographic or location) and send the collector link to them by email.
- Link to your collector from your website, so people always have the opportunity to give video feedback.
- Post the collector link on social media to reach a wider audience and show how much you value your customers and their insights.
With a Vocal Video Pro plan, you can also use our innovative Kiosk Mode to survey attendees at events (like conferences and conventions). This lets you find out more about their opinions in person and in real-time.
Find out more about how to set up Kiosk Mode to collect rolling survey responses at live events.
Remember, however you choose to share your collector, Vocal Video will record, automatically edit, and send unlimited responses straight to your library to review.
Get More Responses with Our Proven Email Sequence
When you have a larger sample, you can be more confident that your data is giving you a true picture of what your customers are thinking. Vocal Video collectors get high response rates because they’re so easy to use. We’ve also designed a simple three-touch email template to encourage more people to record a video.
It’s as simple as:
- The Pre-Ask email where you introduce the idea of recording a video.
- The Invitation email where you provide the questions in your survey and make your potential respondent feel at ease.
- The Reminder email where you contact your customer again to bump the collector to the top of their inbox.
Find out more about the best way to ask for and build a library of testimonials, reviews, and survey responses from your customers.
3. Evaluate the Responses
You can watch every video your collector receives in the “Draft Videos” section of your Vocal Video dashboard. We’ll even add attribution and question cards to make it easier to process the information or share it with your team.
When you want to evaluate the responses together, Vocal Video Team plans include up to three seats, and Pro plans up to five. With Pro, we also provide an API key to integrate Vocal Video with platforms like Google Drive and Slack so you can effortlessly share video responses on the software you already use to collaborate. This makes it easier to discuss the emotional responses you see in the videos, the themes that emerge, and any unique insights from your respondents that you’d like to explore further.
Remember, when it comes to publishing any conclusions you draw from the video surveys, Vocal Video’s URL-sharing system produces what’s called a self-selected survey. This means that it’s best practice to preface your results with “of those who chose to respond…”
Use Vocal Video Transcripts to Track Trends in Your Customers’ Stories
For every survey response your customers record, we also use AI to generate subtitles that make the video more accessible. When you publish a video to share with your team or your audience, you can also view the full transcript underneath the video in your dashboard.
It’s easy to copy or download the transcript of your video — like this one from Vocal Video Customer Chris Dalton from Clari. Just click the icons beside the “Transcript” heading.
Building a bank of these written survey responses can make it easier to understand the needs and opinions of your users. You can use them to identify and search for the keywords people use to talk about your product and identify trends. You could even use your transcript files to generate a word cloud to spark discussions with your team.
Bonus: Publish and Share Testimonials to Increase Conversions
With Vocal Video, you can also use a collector to request customer or employee testimonials to use in your marketing strategy. These authentic, relatable stories from the people who already know your business well can give your potential customers a down-to-earth look behind the scenes and help to build your brand voice across your marketing channels. What’s more, our research shows that marketing campaigns that use testimonial videos see a significant lift in conversion rates compared to those that don’t.
As always, you can write your own testimonial prompts, or explore templates designed to collect this high-quality, convincing, user-generated content — whatever industry you work in.
We recommend:
Vocal Video’s automatic editing process creates social proof testimonials that look and sound beautiful and are instantly identifiable with your brand. We include a release giving you permission to publish the videos you collect from your customers and, with a Vocal Video Pro plan, you can include a custom release so you can share customer feedback with peace of mind.
When you’re ready to publish testimonial videos, simply go to “Publish” or “Embed” on your draft video. We’ll host the clip on a public Vocal Video page which you can set to be indexed by search engines, and we’ll generate an embed code so you can add the videos seamlessly to your website — either alone or in eye-catching interactive galleries like these:
Find out more in our definitive guide to customer testimonials.
Vocal Video is an affordable solution for creating, sharing, and applying the results from video surveys that respondents enjoy completing. With customizable incentives and our strategies for sharing surveys at every customer touchpoint, you can gather more responses to learn about your customers and develop your brand.
Setting up your first survey is easy, simply:
- Build a survey video collector using one of our industry-specific templates.
- Send the URL for your customers to open whenever and wherever it’s convenient for them.
- Gather responses in your Vocal Video library to get a deeper sense of what your customers need and why they choose to work with you.
Sign up for your free Vocal Video account today to get started, or upgrade to run multiple surveys and use Vocal Video’s integrations to collaborate with your team.