Smart cities start with Miovision. The company, founded in a basement twelve years ago by three University of Waterloo friends, has evolved into the leading authority on traffic data. While it began as a traffic solution company, Miovision has continued to innovate and evolve. Today its dedication to solving real-world problems has led the company to its current positioning: helping cities achieve their smart city visions.
With a company, product line and customer base that is growing by leaps and bounds, Miovision’s ten-person support team is stretched to the max. Led by Brent Rogerson, the team of success managers, support professionals, solution trainers and traffic engineering professionals provide umbrella support for Miovision’s traffic data and traffic operations product lines. The customer experience team is responsible for a wide range of duties, from customer implementation and adoption to workflow optimization, new feature introduction, training and issue resolution.
Customer experience at Miovision is a high touch business. “We have approximately 100+ agencies using our traffic operations platform and 800+ using traffic data. My team talks to them daily, weekly and monthly. We don’t let a customer go a month without contact,” says Brent. The company’s traffic operations customers demand an even higher level of attention. “We have five to ten highly strategic customers we talk to several times a day. Our product is evolving so fast. We need to keep our engagement with customers very high to keep them evolving with us toward their smart city goals.”
Brent and his team are passionate about maintaining a high level of customer engagement as the business grows. “It’s the dilemma that comes with being a successful growing business. We need to get double the output without doubling the headcount. So, we need to be creative in how we find additional efficiency and capacity.”
Brent began experimenting with video as an alternative, more efficient way to touch base with customers nearly a year ago. He used Wistia initially but soon converted to Vidyard, attracted by the platform’s analytics, which allowed him to see when customers viewed or shared the content.
Says Brent, “Vidyard is an efficient way to create a warm touch with a customer while minimizing all the logistical effort. We’re able to reduce tasks that might have taken ten minutes by phone or email and turn them into three-minute tasks. This created efficiency and capacity for our team.”
Brent has found personalized video also helps customers recognize the value of new features more quickly. “In the past, we’d send out an email with information about a new feature, but it just wasn’t working for us. People either didn’t read the email, or the information was too generic and they couldn’t understand how it applied to them.”
Using Vidyard, the team used video to enhance its new feature introduction (NFI) process dramatically increasing customer engagement. “And we did it with very little capacity,” says Brent. “We established an entirely new business process with probably half an hour’s worth of effort.”
Brent uses Vidyard to touch base with the 35 customers he’s personally responsible for on a weekly basis. “In the past, I was able to connect with these customers maybe once a month. I’d estimate using Vidyard has increased my capacity to reach out by a 4X magnitude while allowing me to maintain a constant level of engagement. I simply book a morning in my schedule and create a personalized video for each customer. If I were to try to do that any other way I’d be overwhelmed.”
He also sees the value from the customer’s point of view. “These are busy people. You can’t expect them to find half an hour or an hour in their schedule to meet with you. This way, I can flip them a five minute video they can watch and digest on their timeline, and we can follow up with a quick phone call. We’re getting our message through but not creating an interruption in their day.”
Brent has been a big advocate for Vidyard within Miovision. He was using the platform even before the company was officially onboarded by Vidyard to create videos for his customers. He’s found the solution easy to navigate and use and has been actively championing its use with Miovision’s sales team. “I keep saying to my colleagues, ‘Look how fast you can get a message out to people! Customers are so excited, they are keen to learn more about you through this medium.’”
Working with Vidyard, Miovision’s customer experience team now plans to launch a video hub, accessible from the company’s website, with training material available to customers on a self-service basis.
“This will allow us to reach and train so many more customers,” says Brent. “Our customers will be their own best training mechanism. They’ll be well informed on a regular basis and up to speed on our products and their features. This means my team will be able to focus their time on higher value issues, working with customers to improve traffic flow and on their smart city transformation.”
