How to Build Customer Trust with Video Streaming

Building customer trust has never been easy, but it used to be relatively simple. Make a great product or service and your customers will trust you. Make an awful product or service and you won’t have any customers. Those days are over.

The information age has fundamentally changed how businesses need to think about customer trust.

Before the internet, the only things most customers knew about the businesses they patronized were whatever those businesses shared with them. Today, your CEO’s salary, investments, charitable donations, criminal record, and even high school GPA are accessible (legally or otherwise).

With politics and values more divisive than ever, any information about your business can be used as a weapon. That’s a narrative not even the best product or service can control.

Thankfully, there’s a silver lining amid all the distrust. According to Edelman's 2022 Trust Barometer, business is the most trusted institution, ahead of the media, government, and NGOs.

Distrust might be “society’s default emotion,” as Edelman put it, but customers are looking to businesses for societal leadership. This presents a huge opportunity. If businesses can address the concerns of today’s customers, they will not only win their trust, they will inspire more trust for business as an institution.

Trust is no longer a transactional relationship between business and customer; it extends into social issues and values. To earn that kind of trust, businesses need to address not only how their customers engage with them, but how their customers engage with society. And the best way for businesses to engage customers is through video.

Why Video?

Because it’s more engaging. Because it’s more effective. Because it’s the 21st century.

There are plenty of reasons why businesses should engage customers through video, but the most important is because video builds trust and confidence.

According to recent Brightcove surveys, 93% of B2B buyers say that video builds trust in a brand, and 85% of consumers say videos are essential to online shopping. It’s the go-to medium that customers use to evaluate a business.

Sure, video isn’t the only way to build customer trust. But not using video today would be like not having a website in 2010. Customers expect it. And if you’re gonna use it to earn their trust, you’re gonna need to use it right.

Invest in a Secure Video Streaming Platform

Social media is quickly becoming a cautionary tale in how not to build customer trust. According to eMarketer, user trust declined year-over-year on all of the Top 9 social platforms in 2022. Furthermore, nearly all saw a corresponding decline in platform use as well.

A major key to social media’s fall from grace is security, with 78% of users naming it among their top three trust factors. Data and privacy protection had been making headlines for several years. (Remember when Apple refused to unlock an iPhone for the FBI?) But the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal brought the issue too close to home for most people.

Tech companies have been hurriedly addressing privacy issues ever since, from Apple empowering users to block open rate tracking to Google deprecating third-party cookies.

For marketers who relied on data for their digital strategies, privacy changes reinforced the need for first-party data. And against the backdrop of declining customer trust, securing first-party data needs to become part of every business’s brand promise.

Most businesses already store customer data in secure CRMs, but that isn’t enough to secure first-party marketing data. Every potential ingest point needs to be secured, including marketing automation platforms (MAPs) and streaming platforms—especially if you’re using interactive video for name capture.

Not all streaming platforms provide the same level of security. If you want to earn and keep your customers’ trust, make sure your platform offers these minimum security features.

• Encryption. Data should be encrypted using the industry standard AES-256 algorithm and enforced via TLS when in transit. Furthermore, each user should be identified with a unique session and stored in a secure, encrypted session cookie.
• Single Sign-on. Single sign-on through an Identity Provider (IdP) should include identity mapping (based on full email addresses, not just email domains), streamlined user provisioning (allowing new users to inherit the SSO setup), and password requirements.
• Privacy Compliance. Business policies should be compliant with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
• Certifications and Assessments. Certifications should include the Digital Production Partnership’s Committed to Security program as well as Privacy Shield. The platform should also engage third-party security research firms to perform annual vulnerability scans and penetration testing.

If your streaming platform offers all of these security features, consider adding a security watermark to your name capture videos. Statements like “Secured by Brightcove” can reassure your customers that you take their privacy seriously.

Build a Customer Testimonial Video Page

Another important part of earning customer trust is accepting that you can no longer control your own brand narrative.

Customer testimonials used to be a marketing tactic that businesses manufactured, but smartphones and social media changed all that. Videos about your business can be produced and distributed at any time, without your involvement.

It can’t be overstated how influential the customer’s voice is on your business. According to Brightcove’s study, Using E-Commerce Video to Drive Sales, customer videos were the most trustworthy type of video according to over half (51%) of global consumers.

In other words, your customers are more likely to trust a poorly shot customer video about your product than any of your well-produced product demo videos. Slick advertising doesn’t impress them anymore, and they’re more and more likely to scrutinize who’s making the claim and why.

If customers are more inclined to trust each other over brand communications, it’s time for businesses to democratize their brand narratives.

Rather than letting customer testimonials breed trolls on social media, what if you brought them onto your site? You heard that right. Embrace what your customers are saying about you and package it for everyone to see—warts and all.

Showcasing customer testimonials demonstrates transparency, but it’s also an opportunity to address your customers’ concerns. Customers are more likely to trust businesses that listen to and act on their feedback. Brand page social comments aren’t enough, but a repository of resolved feedback builds the kind of track record customers want to see.

Enterprise-grade streaming platforms offer several features that can make a branded customer testimonial video page easy to build and maintain.

• Web Portals. Portals for videos should include customizable, responsive templates in a no-code environment. They should also offer lead forms, social sharing, and MAP/CRM integrations and allow users to configure SEO settings.
• Dynamic Ingest. Upload options should include pull-based retrieval (pulling source files and metadata from HTTP/HTTPS, S3, and FTP systems) as well as media RSS feeds for continuous ingestion monitoring and integrations for push-based workflows.
• Smart Playlists. Playlists should not only have manual options but automatic options that build and grow playlists based on tags, custom fields, descriptions, and dates.

If your streaming platform offers all of these features, consider adding interactive elements like viewer sentiment. Letting viewers “like” a video will allow you to quickly see which issues are most important to your customers.

Learn more in our PLAY episode, “Getting to Know Gallery”.

Promote Ethical Values with Live Video

Building customers’ trust requires more than securing their data and addressing their concerns. Those things are just the minimum requirements for not being untrustworthy. If you want to set your business apart as worthy of customer trust and loyal patronage, you'll need to talk social issues.

Customers don’t just shop for products anymore; they shop with their values. And they don’t just want businesses to share their values—they expect those businesses to demonstrate their support.

While Edelman noted that businesses were the most trusted institution, they also found that the public doesn’t think businesses do enough for society. Climate change (52%), economic inequality (49%), access to healthcare (42%), and systematic injustice (42%) are all top issues that people expect businesses to do more about.

Paying lip service to the social issues of the day isn't enough to earn customer trust. Customers are looking to businesses to lead in areas where they feel the other institutions are failing. The occasional press release on your business’s latest charitable donation won’t cut it either. Businesses need to show that they live their values beyond token photo ops.

Chances are, your business is already living your values, just in ways the public can’t see. Perhaps you’ve organized company volunteer trips, attended cultural events, or engaged in other charitable activities. Those things aren’t just good for your employer brand; they show customers your values in action.

Livestreaming is one of the best ways to promote your values. Sharing an event after the fact has less of an impact than telling your customers you’re doing it live, right now. The best streaming platforms should have all the features you need to do it successfully.

• Live Redundancy. Livestreams should include multiple backup streams with automatic failover to ensure uninterrupted, reliable playback.
• Cloud DVR. Playback should include the option to pause, play, and rewind livestreams with a single click.
• Direct-to-Social. Publishing should not only include social media platforms, but the option to publish to multiple platforms at one time.

One advantage of using a streaming platform rather than social media is you can create an on-demand library to memorialize your business’s commitment to its values. This can easily be created using the same features used to create customer testimonial pages.

Furthermore, you can choose to keep customer interactions on owned channels, rather than social media. Streaming platforms like Brightcove offer a number of event-based interactive features, including moderated Q&A, chat, surveys, and polls.

Centralize Your Video Streaming Strategy

Building customer trust through video in today’s climate is a non-negotiable for businesses. But it doesn’t have to overextend marketing teams cobbling together several products and workflows. Brightcove’s Marketing Studio has all the features you need to ensure customers feel secure, heard, and supported in their values.