Reducing Support Tickets by Answering FAQs

Sylvane is an online retailer for air quality products. Swamp coolers, otherwise known as evaporative air coolers, aren’t exactly the most common household item.

When Sylvane saw that many customers were returning their swamp coolers, they had a hunch that people were misunderstanding the product. Sylvane had already written an article that answered questions about the cooler, but they decided to produce a video to answer even more questions for their visitors.

In their own words:

“This video quickly became one of the most-watched on our site (29.3K plays to date). That’s 856 hours of watch time — hours saved for our support team, who would have explained this info over the phone. We also performed a usability test on this article and received qualitative feedback that viewers found the video helpful — which is awesome! We’ve actually seen a drop in returned swamp coolers since the video was published! And while we can’t know for sure whether this resulted from the video, we think it stands to reason that the addition of the video helped people understand whether a swamp cooler was the right solution for them before purchasing. Also, the video might have helped boost rankings for the article where it lives. This page now ranks on the first page of Google for short-tail terms like “swamp cooler,” “portable cooler,” etc. Before we had the video, it did not. And while it’s hard to say if that was directly caused by the video, which was added over a year ago, it definitely added value that Google recognized.”

Allison Book
Multimedia Manager, Sylvane