Is Ryan Reynolds Doing Live Customer Support for Mint Mobile or Nuvei?

Isn’t it nice when you can ask a question or solve your problem with a certain product or service within minutes, without going through dozens of minutes of holding the line or waiting for an answer via email “within X working days”?

One could really get into this habit and, depending on the product, especially if it’s mission critical, you should seriously be taking into account a company’s support policy and their promptitude in getting back to you. 

Live customer support - a.k.a. answering customer questions via live chat or, better yet, live video streaming - is a great thing when it comes to companies differentiating themselves from their competitors in a good way. But, sadly, there are only a few companies doing that in the business landscape. Speedify is one of them, with the weekly LIVE Office Hours session on Wednesdays. 

So why aren’t there more companies engaging with their customers like this? And what does Ryan Reynolds have to do with all of this?

Good customer service is the best way you get new customers, as well as loyalize your existing ones. According to this article, 52% of customer service teams use online chat or live support, compared to 81% of customers who use online chat or live support for communicating with a company. And that’s because it’s a way they can get their problems solved within minutes.

For most companies, support is still done via email and/or phone. Think about it: it takes dozens of minutes, if not hours until you get a reply. If you’re using phone support, it’s even more frustrating, because you have to “hold the line in order to keep your call’s priority in the queue”.

As you know, Ryan Reynolds is one Hollywood star who is actively investing in tech companies. Just before the 2020 pandemic struck, he bought a sizable share of Mint Mobile. In March of 2023, the budget telecom company was bought by T-Mobile. The actor’s next venture is Nuvei, a Canadian fintech company, as announced back in April 2023.

Ryan Reynolds did commercials for both Mint Mobile and now he’s preparing to go onboard as a face for Nuvei. So, why doesn’t he help with customer support? At this time (May 2023), you can get in touch with a person at Mint Mobile only via phone. For Nuvei it’s email and phone.

Picture this: Ryan Reynolds being part of a monthly AMA-type session on the company’s social channels, like YouTube, Facebook and whatever is popular with their customer base and target audience. 

If Mint Mobile or Nuvei customers know Ryan Reynolds is going to be live on YouTube / Facebook, during the companies’ live support sessions, that would have an immense impact on those brands. 

It would make people tune in and engage with the company and make a purchase, ultimately. 

Or at least becoming more loyal to the brand. It’s a win-win!

As mentioned above, here at Speedify we’re going live every Wednesday for about 30 minutes or so. The benefits of us doing live streaming support vastly outweigh the risks. Here are just a few things we learned along the way:

1. Preparation is key when it comes to live streaming to your users and potential customers. One should definitely look professional on any occasion when live streaming, but even more if your target audience is your user pool and potential new users.
   
   It’s not just jumping on the live stream and answering questions. We want to look professional in every aspect. I wouldn’t trust somebody whose service I use (or consider using) if they were late for the stream, not answering my question or - even worse - if I saw their product being demoed live and not working…
   
   Just so we can avoid awkward “crickets” while people start asking questions on the live stream, we pick a theme to talk about every Wednesday before the stream. For example - explaining the stats on the Speedify dashboard or the connection priorities. Starting from that, we get questions which may or may not be related to them. We answer them all, regardless.

2. Focus on hot support issues to make the most difference. We have a list of frequent support questions and issues - we approach those with priority. As we live stream, we might get follow-up questions for that. But even better - the streams will be available for watching later on our YouTube channel by everyone - so they can check them out.
   
   Bottom line - if this helps even “one person” (read - “all the viewers of the live and recorded stream”) make the most out of Speedify, I am satisfied.

3. We’re all human; live streaming support helps build trust and grow the community. People always appreciate companies with “faces” more than the others, even though some of them might be interpreted as controversial at times (e.g. Starlink / Tesla by Elon Musk). But - bottom line - it proves that there’s people behind the product / service I can relate to, should I have any issues or seek advice.
   
   What we’ve seen is people tune in regularly on Wednesdays. And it’s not just the people who have questions to ask, but also those that want to hear what we have to say. It’s possible they get ideas on how to better use Speedify to their benefit. Those people start following us on Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, reacting to and sharing our posts, interacting with us, etc.

4. More business opportunities appear when you answer questions live about your product or service. Since we started doing these Office Hours, some of our enterprise clients and prospects have been tuning into our stream as well.
   
   We’ve had different people from the same company we were in discussions with reach out and ask more questions about specific inquiries that were discussed during the live stream. This translates into more business opportunities on the table for us and them.
   
   
5. We learn about what our customers need. We get a lot of messages about new feature requests by email and by DM. We also get those during our live streams. By correlating them across the various channels, we can better decide what to prioritize in our development queue so that we make our users happy with our service.

6. Live streaming customer support gets viewers quick answers and advice while you get valuable feedback from them. There’s a high volume of people with advanced questions and setups engaging with us. This is probably because they either need extra validation for the solution from someone knowledgeable with a face or they find it more comfortable and quick to get their questions answered as they ask them.
   
   Plus - it’s not all questions. Many viewers share their experience with the service, which is very valuable feedback we take into consideration.