We recently sat down with force.com developer, Lawrence Tijerina of Ventas Consulting, to hear more his experience publishing video directly inside of Salesforce Service Cloud using uStudio's video APIs. Below Lawrence shares some of the groundbreaking solutions the team at Ventas has been able to develop to improve Customer Service with video. 

 

Tell me about Ventas Consulting.
We are a Salesforce.com consulting group. We serve small, medium and large enterprise customers, helping them implement salesforce.com and develop any sort of customizations that they may require for their business.

What has been your experience using video inside of the force.com platform?
Video is something that has been in high demand for a number of years, but I would say the implementation of video in force.com does present some challenges, primarily where the video is going to be hosted, who is going to maintain that video, how it's going to be deployed to users. Before uStudio, it was extremely difficult to deliver turnkey video-enabled solutions. With uStudio, we can find all sorts of way to integrate with force.com.

Give us a specific example of a video solution you have built for force.com using uStudio APIs.
A specific use case of that would be integrating with service cloud. We have actually developed an integration where, as the user is typing in information about an issue that the customer is having, uStudio is hitting the API, finding any videos that could potentially be related to this particular customer's issue, and then serving those videos within the context of the case record directly in salesforce.com.

Because we can hit the uStudio API to determine videos that would potentially resolve the customer's issue, they're immediately served within the case, they can immediately be shared with that customer. Along with sharing that information with the customer, they can also immediately track whether or not that video did resolve the issue, and the metrics around how many of the videos that are being suggested are actually resolving the issues.

How is this improving the way customer service leaders can use Salesforce?
As a customer service leader, you want to reduce the amount of time your customers are waiting to receive service, and then you want to resolve that issue as quickly as possible. Handing somebody a video is dramatically going to decrease that turnaround time, and increase the number of initial responses that resolve their issue.

Have you gotten any feedback on video-enabled customer service?
In terms of the response from the business, I've actually heard it described as "transformational." Through uStudio, you can actually capture analytic information pertaining to how far along your customers went, you can capture information about whether or not resolved their issue, and this is all information that is extremely useful in terms of decreasing your service agents' time with the customer, increasing customer satisfaction and also resolving their issue on the first call.

Has uStudio changed the way you work with video overall?
It’s spectacular because, previously I would have to go to the business and say, "This is going to take a month or two. We're going to have to go through this whole process." That's never a good thing to the business. Now I can say, we can make fully-interactive video experiences within force.com.

It sounds like you would recommend uStudio to other force.com developers.
If a developer would ask me what they should be using for video, I would definitely recommend uStudio. It is extremely intuitive and any time I've ever come up with a particular use case, or particular information I'd like to learn about video, it's always been available to me via the API. We all resist change, and I saw a video as something that was daunting and maybe something that I wasn't quite ready for, especially being a force.com developer, you're kind in a silo and certain things seem unattainable to you. My experience with uStudio has been any use case we can throw at it, we've been able to satisfy.