From our experience of working with various organizations, we have seen them evolving their methods of explanation from simple power point presentations to explainer videos. Many people ask us if creating an explainer video is worth it as compared to the investment required for creating multiple videos.
Explainer videos are not only used for explaining the services or usability of the product to customers, or even pitching an idea to investors, they are being increasingly used to train internal teams and employees in different departments to improve their understanding of the company’s processes, and also to improve their presentation skills so that they are capable of serving the customers in a better way.
Explainer videos can be a characteristic of your company representing it with the right color theme, company logo, graphics and animation. The videos don’t have to be high in quality as in this case they are not meant for mass audience. As you may have to create multiple explainer videos to cater to different needs of your employees, a descent video quality is more than enough. Highlighting specific issue and information is extremely important. The video should be comprehensive in nature and contain a link for further information that might be directed to a specific URL on your website or blog.
How well can you utilize the power of explainer videos to serve as a training material?
1. Empower your sales and marketing team
Sales team is the interface between your company and your valuable customers. Attaining knowledge about the customers, a deep understanding of their needs and forming a suitable proposal, forms an essential part of their job. But are they prepared to do so? Do they lack confidence? Do they conduct themselves well? Are they presentable and self-motivated? Are they able to meet their targets? Are they good in receiving customer feedback and reporting the same to the sales head?
There are so many questions that worry you to ascertain if the performance of the sales team is up to mark. Explainer videos can be effectively used by the marketers to train their subordinates. Every marketer understands his marketing goals and ultimately needs suitable tactics to influence the customers.
Depending upon your target customers, your sales force needs adequate training to pitch your services or product to the customers. Conduct a performance audit of the sales team to find out where they lack and what are the major challenges they face on the field? Create an explainer video that empowers your sales force. Besides serving their training needs, it might also serve as a tool of motivation and inspiration they could always look up to.
Even if your sales team is globally dispersed, an explainer video can be used to explain the functioning of production or service processes (which of course is important) to have a better understanding of their organization.
2. Simplify IT processes for your staff
Information Technology is the most dynamic field of work as the software technology evolves rapidly. In IT industry, there are new versions of software released frequently. In such a case, it becomes imperative for your organization to train your staff on a new version. For this, you plan to develop self-training modules that help you to save significant amount of time in providing physical training to every employee.
It further helps you to save training costs like hiring training facility and professional. But to provide a support that helps in beginning self-training, an explainer video can be used to answer frequently asked questions and provide general instructions. Explainer video can be innovative in its approach by simplifying a complex IT process through graphics and animation, and stimulate the employees to go ahead with the training.
Apart from that, the existing IT processes could be complex enough that it entails you to create a series of explainer videos to help them diagnose and resolve an issue independently. Such videos can include software installation process, software update process, running the software through a security check and so on.
3. Inculcate communication skills across the departments
The process of development of communications skills is not limited to the sales and marketing team. For an organization to function properly and as a cohesive team, all the employees need to have excellent communication skills. Seamless communication enables free flow of information across the organization. It not only helps them to interact with each other with ease but also with the vendors and the customers.
An explainer video focused on the improvement of telephonic communication skills increases the productivity of your customer service team. Apart from that, presentation skills are equally important. An employee is an asset for the organization and carries its brand image. The way the employees present themselves in a meeting or during their interaction with their colleagues, clearly reflects the classiness in their work, organization culture and etiquettes.
Though both communication and presentation skills can be developed through conditioning and experience, an explainer video makes this process more systematic & organized. It can rather hasten the development process with its visually enchanting form. Enhancing the soft-skills of your employees is far easier in a friendly and a jovial environment of explainer video than enforcing them through a circular of strict code of communication without ensuring the implementation part.
4. Relieve your HR department
We quite often observe that the HR department is loaded with unnecessary and unproductive tasks for no reason. Rather than focusing their energies on employee benefit programs and policies, they are caught in answering frequently asked questions by the employees. We are not negating the importance of communication between employees and HR department but when the same is limited to itself, it is a sheer waste of HR resources.
Employees are often confused about procedure for leave application, claims and reimbursements, tax filing etc. If the same queries could be answered in the form of one to two minute long videos, it sheds off massive load from your HR team. Companies with an employee size of 100 or more usually create a self-login HR portal that empowers the employees to keep a track of their salary, leave and attendance, maintain personal information, taxes, profile or any other information specific to their job profile.
To let employees explore all the features, benefits and functions of HR portal, explainer videos come as a handy tool. HR department gets considerable time this way to plan for recruitment, training and development, conflict resolution, performance appraisal, job analysis and job description, employee welfare and motivation & implementing organizational policies.
5. Train new employees and channel partners
Training and induction can be a daunting task for the HR department, especially, for a large organization. It is common to see that new employees have a lot of anxiety about new working environment. They have an urge to understand the company culture and adapt to their respective roles. Explainer video can be used as an induction tool that allows the employees to understand organizational hierarchy and protocols.
Such videos are often driven by HR department who recognize the nitty-gritty of the organization. Furthermore, a company whose supply chain extends beyond its boundaries including channel partners, franchise and dealers, explainer video is employed to provide them information related to product & service training. Similarly, if you have multiple products or a single product with multiple specifications that necessitates thorough explanation to the channel partners, multiple explainer videos can be created to serve as a training medium.
It saves the energy of your marketing and field sales force to manually explain the functioning to every channel partner. Moreover, your channel partners feel empowered as they don’t have to contact your company personnel for every little issue. Explainer videos are easy to comprehend and answer most of their queries.
Conclusion
Explainer videos have been widely used across the organizations whether big or small. Being short and crisp & focused on a particular issue, they turn out to be highly successful in explaining a process to its target audience. The content of the explainer video varies depending upon the target audience and the topic that needs to be explained. Its 24×7 availability over the internet makes it accessible anytime and anywhere.
As we see, the possibilities of using explainer videos as a training material are endless. You can, perhaps, create an explainer video for serving miscellaneous training needs of your employees.
To create explainer videos for internal training, get in touch with the explainer video experts at Oomphbox.
