Vocal Video is a video testimonial software that makes it easy to collect video and audio testimonials remotely from customers.
You can also use it to collect video reviews, patient stories, promotional videos, training videos and other kinds of videos.
Vocal Video helps you collect videos, edit them and publish them on different platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube or your company website. Anyone, even those without a tech background, can use Vocal Video.
It also makes it a lot cheaper to create professional-style videos. You don’t need to hire anyone, pay for expensive editing software or buy fancy camera gear.
Here is my full hands-on review of Vocal Video.
Signing Up
The signup process is easy and smooth. To get you started right away, some basic tasks that you need to do to start collecting videos are included during signup. These include adding your logo, choosing your brand colors and adding team members who will help you collect and edit videos.
You can always change these details later.
The dashboard has a clean and easy to navigate layout. You can get started right away without having to fumble through a clutter of features and settings.
There’s a quick start guide with a checklist of the most important things you need to do to make full use of Vocal Video. On the left is a vertical menu where you can access your video collectors, responses, galleries and analytics. The main dashboard also shows a quick snapshot of your latest stats.
Creating a Video Collector
Note: If you already have testimonial videos, you can skip this and go straight to uploading your own videos.
The most important tool Vocal Video offers is a video collector. This is what your customers will use to record and send their video testimonials. It makes the whole process easy, smooth and fast.
This is much better than asking customers to record videos on their phone then upload them to your website, which is tedious for them and results in a low response rate.
The ‘Create’ button is the most prominent one on the dashboard. Click on it to start a new video collector.
Vocal Video has several templates complete with ready-made questions. You can also create a new collector without using a template.
The setup wizard takes you through the entire process, step by step. There’s help available throughout in case you get stuck or need tips on how best to do something like write questions.
Anyone, even non-tech people, can easily create a video collector on Vocal Video.
Because most of your customers will likely submit a video using their smartphone, Vocal Video shows you a preview of your video collector as it will appear on mobile devices. You can also select a desktop preview.
The first step when creating a video collector is configuring the welcome page. Here you can set the title of your collector, edit the welcome message and add an incentive (contest, giveaway or donation) to increase customer response rate.
The next step is adding questions. You can add up to 10 questions, though Vocal Video recommends no more than five.
When you first start using Vocal Video, it’s a good idea to click on the ‘How to ask the best questions’ help guide (it’s right there on setup wizard). It has advice on the best practices for creating the questions that your customers will find easy to answer and which will give you the best testimonials.
Under each question, you can add tips for respondents to guide them. There’s also an option to set the max recording for the video response (30s to 5mins).
Next, you configure settings for the attribution page (info from respondents such as name, company and job title) and edit the thank you message.
Your video collector is complete and you are ready to collect customer responses.
You will get a link that you send to respondents. To make responding as easy and smooth as possible, customers don’t have to download anything or create an account. They just click the link and answer the questions by recording video or audio (you can disable audio-only responses).
You can also create a personalized link for each customer, create links for use with your CRM software and generate a QR code that respondents can scan to go directly to the video collector.
Collecting and Editing Responses
This is what customers see when they click on the Video Collector link.
The collector includes tips to record video or audio, answers to any questions they may have, and more info about their data, privacy, prizes and more.
The focus is on making the process smooth and putting respondents at ease.
The collector takes customers through the process step by step. Unlike some testimonial collectors that send customers the full list of questions to answer in a single take, Vocal Video lets customers answer one question at a time.
This allows them to provide the best answer to each question and avoids overwhelming them. They can do as many retakes as they want until they are happy with the recorded video.
Once the customer has finished answering all questions, the video is uploaded automatically.
Back on your end, you will get a notification on your dashboard when you receive a response. You’ll also get notified by email or whichever Zapier integration you have enabled (more on that shortly).
Vocal video automatically generates a video draft of the response complete with motion graphics, licensed background music, captions and professional transitions. All you need to do is edit and customize it to fit your brand.
You can see my sample video response here. I barely did any editing; this is the draft that Vocal Video created for me. As you can see, it looks and feels professional and I didn’t have to do anything.
For audio-only responses, Vocal Video creates an audiogram that’s just as engaging as a video.
Editing Video Responses
You don’t need any video editing experience or software to edit video responses.
Vocal Video has easy to use editing tools that let you trim the video, cut out dead space, adjust the theme and colors of the video, and more.
One of my favorite tools is the ability to select different formats for the video. You can choose between portrait, square and landscape. You can have duplicate videos in different formats.
This is handy for posting the videos on different platforms. You can use the portrait format for social media and the landscape for your website or YouTube.
Another awesome feature is AI effects. This allows you to blur the background, replace it or remove it. This gives you more control over what people see in the video once it goes public.
Publishing
Once you are happy with your edits, hit publish.
Vocal Video renders the video for you in HD and creates a public page for it. You can also embed it on any website or upload it to social media like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
If you have a paid plan, you can also download the video and upload it to YouTube, Instagram and other platforms.
Note: When embedding the video on your website, you can add a featured quote to the embed card. Here’s an example with my sample video. Vocal Video lets you choose which featured quote you’d like to use, or you can let the software pick one from the transcript.
Galleries
Once you have several videos, a great way to showcase them is by creating a gallery. You can choose from several gallery designs including wall of love, carousel and slideshow.
As with videos, each gallery gets a public link that you can share anywhere. You can also embed it on your website.
Here’s a great example of Vocal Vide’s own gallery consisting of testimonial videos from their customers.
Integrations
Instead of independently offering select integrations like Facebook and YouTube, Vocal Video instead integrates with Zapier. Zapier has thousands of integrations that allow you to do automated tasks and ease your workflow.
Here are a few practical examples:
If you have a Shopify store, integrate Vocal Video with Shopify to receive updates about new responses and published videos in your store.
The Microsoft Teams integration automatically sends a message to Teams when there’s a new response or published video.
The LinkedIn integration automatically posts new published videos on your LinkedIn company page.
Pricing
Vocal Video has a free plan that lets you publish up to 5 videos, gives you 20 minutes of video processing each month, 1 video collector and 1 brand.
Once you sign up, however, you get a 14-day free trial of the Pro plan with extra features like AI effects, white-labelled video collectors and a kiosk mode for collecting testimonials at live events.
After the trial period, you can stick with the free plan or upgrade to one of the three paid plans.
Essential at $69/month - 4hrs video processing, 3 video collectors, no watermarks and more
Pro at $139/month - 6hrs video processing, 10 video collectors, additional themes & fonts and more.
Enterprise starting at $1,000/month - custom limits plus additional legal and security controls.
Overall, Vocal Video is higher priced compared to most other video testimonial software like StoryPrompt and VideoAsk.
But Vocal Video offers more features, a more friendly workflow and more customizability than the alternatives.
Final Thoughts
With so many tools now available to businesses, collecting video testimonials has gotten easier and cheaper than ever.
Vocal Video stands as one of the best tools for collecting video and audio testimonials from customers.
It’s easy to use (even for non-tech people), it increases response rate and you get sleek professional-style videos for an yearly subscription that costs less than what a pro might charge you for editing a single video.
Start your 14-day trial to see if Vocal Video is right for your business.
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