Unlocking Scalability:

Level 3: Industry Average

To reach the Industry Average stage, a SaaS company needs resources dedicated solely to the video production pipeline. This means a full team of video specialists screen recording, doing voiceover, and editing.

With a full, dedicated team, reaching a scalable video production workflow is possible but does require adding more headcount. Adding products? Languages? Add more headcount.

And so on and so forth, because even best-in-class video teams still need 8-12 hours to make a single 3-minute video.

Great news, though. With a team focused completely on video production, companies are able to keep their videos updated for major releases, just with a time lag. Still, this is leagues better than the previous two stages. 

Now we’re getting into a more organized, predictable production environment. Teams can plan for upcoming product updates and even get a limited set of videos out within 90 days of a major launch. This is much better for the customer experience than having nothing at all, which is what the At Risk and Lagging stages provide.

Another pro that comes with a con: Industry Average stage means teams can consistently produce videos for other languages– but even the best-in-class video teams still struggle with scaling that globalization. 

Creating multiple language versions of a video still means manually producing new videos:

• Finding a translator who can convert it into another language.
• A voice actor who can speak the language. Editing in the new voice track.
• Re-rendering.
• Re-uploading.

Rinse and repeat for each and every language. 

Even the most affluent companies couldn't afford the amount of work that would go into this endeavor. It's simply too much for workers to do - no matter how much money and manpower you throw at it. 

Companies in the Industry Average stage work around this globalization problem by producing videos in English and translating only the subtitles. It’s not ideal, but it’s doable, and it’s necessary. 40% of customers will not buy from a site that's in another language, and 75% want product information in their native language. So if all you can do is subtitles, do it, or risk your global customers churning.

Which is why, in order to evolve into the next stage of video maturity, you'll need to use automation.

Level 4: Best Practice

The only way to become scalable with your video content is to automate the grunt work. The "boring stuff". 

In this stage, automation and Al generate videos. Text-to-speech generators (which continue to get better every year) create voiceovers. Closed captioning? Automatically generated with every update. 

In this stage, 50% or more of your product is covered by video, and 3-minute videos only take 1-3 hours to make.

Furthermore, this process allows you to make 70+ different language versions, each in a matter of minutes. 

This speeds up the process in general, but the real magic happens when it comes time to update.

In previous stages video creators had to start over from scratch every time their software changed, leading to a massive (and constantly growing) backlog of videos needing to be updated for accuracy. 

Until now, there’s been no way to update dozens or hundreds of videos in time for a product release, major or minor. With automation, you can have a full set of videos available at every major product launch.

Users in the Best Practice stage simply need to tweak their original script (sometimes it's as simple as replacing a word) and run it through the platform.

The time-wasting, repetitive work of manually screen recording and editing is now a distant memory.

Not only is video finally scalable without adding headcount, but your global customers benefit, too. Feed the platform a translated script and it automatically generates a fully-narrated video in the new language. 

Since the platform connects to your actual software to generate the videos, you can tell it to generate the video in the specific native language user interface as well. Now customers can see and hear the how-to video in their own language. However, due to the time it still takes to manually translate the scripts, there is still a lag between the English version and the native language version.

This stage solves a lot of problems and finally enables SaaS companies to scale their video libraries. But there is still room to grow…

Level 5: Next Best Practice

Videate imagines a future that goes beyond the best practices of today, where all your software products are fully covered across all desired languages. 

There’s no lag between translated versions, because we foresee automated translation continuing to get better and better, to the point where you can get a fully, correctly translated script generated instantaneously.

Auto-translation is available even now and can be used in the Best Practice stage, but it's highly recommended you have a native reader check it before making your video. But, one day, maybe even one day soon, you might not have to. 

This phase is also heavily reliant on automation, only now, video production is integrated with the Continuous Delivery (CD) process. As soon as your software updates, Videate would automatically update the relevant videos and notify you that new videos are ready for review. No more trying to figure out what changed and then combing through your scripts to make sure they get updated. It’s done for you, automatically.

In the Best Practice stage, a full set of videos are always available immediately upon a release. The Next Best Practice stage improves upon that, because now you can include customizations for industry and vertical. Imagine having specific iterations of the same how-to concept– say, a dashboard– and being able to provide Vertical A a specialized version and Vertical B with another, rather than only displaying the most generic one possible that fits most use cases.

The idea of having a product, update, or function with no matching video will be a thing of the past. 

In this future Next Best Practice, is there still room for that human touch? Absolutely. Basically, this takes the boring, manual, frustrating elements of a video team's job and leaves them to focus on more strategic, cutting edge, creative work that is both personally gratifying and grows your company's brand. 

There is also the question of discoverability. Daniel Quick, Chief Customer Learning Officer at Scaled Agile, Inc., explains: 

“... [A] lot of teams think predominantly about developing content, which obviously is very important. But they don't really have a consumption strategy. They don't really take the next step to figure out how they're going to get this content into the hands of their learners. So, as a result, a very small percentage of people are actually engaging with the content.”

In the future, Al can help with this as well. Quick continues:

"Al can more intelligently recommend and surface content relevant for you. Al can (also) more intelligently determine what are the kinds of experiences you ought to learn, based on how you're engaging with technology." 

In essence, a company whose video content has been optimized can provide learners with the exact videos needed, when they need it, without the customers having to go on a major quest to find it.