Improving the video experience is key to tackling OTT churn

Changing consumer behaviour, increasing competition and new business models make OTT subscription services especially vulnerable. Outside of the obvious churn reducers of content selection and price, I believe that a good user experience naturally leads to improved engagement with the service – leading to increased customer satisfaction as well as more usage.

Compared to other churn reduction actions, it’s a cost effective way of addressing this problem. Getting the video experience perfected does require a few things:

Understand the user data
It is clear that if a consumer is not using the video service, then churn likelihood is high. It is equally clear that a very frequent user is unlikely to churn.

However, for the majority of users who are in the middle, a deeper analysis of usage patterns is required. Usage patterns combined with available demographic information and comparisons with historic churn can lead to very interesting conclusions and identification of the high-risk consumers.

The data is there for most video service providers, but my opinion is that most are not analysing this data correctly. Once analysed it is then possible to do something about it and measure the ROI after testing different activities.

Make it easy to discover content
Consumers who find more content to watch will stay with the service, while consumers who try find something to watch but fail may leave the service frustrated with the perceived lack of attractive content. The reason may not be lack of content but simply that the user doesn’t find the content that he likes.

All of this may seem obvious, but since there are multiple purposes with the user experience it’s tricky to get the effect you want.

The underlying challenge is that there is not one optimal user experience to suit each and every user in each and every use case. I believe that it is possible to define different user experiences depending on the user and what the data has told us about that user.

Experimentation and testing is vital to find out the right way to communicate with users, and the user experience is no different. From Accedo’s point of view all of our products and solutions enable the possibility of a dynamic user experience.

Use marketing and promotions to drive loyalty
Finally, let’s touch upon consumer communication. I find it surprising how few marketing and user campaigns for existing users are undertaken by video service providers. Almost all efforts go towards getting new subscribers.

Video providers should consider their existing users as much a target as potential new users, but they’re obviously in a different stage in the life cycle. To communicate the right messages to the right segment will be key.

Churn is inevitable and will always happen to some degree, but improving the video experience is relatively straightforward with the right analytics and video experience platform and can have a massive impact on customer satisfaction and churn.

Michael Lantz is Chief Executive Officer at Accedo