Welcome to Cast School! 👨🏻‍🏫 🧑🏽‍🏫 👩🏼‍🏫

Join us in our video series where we explain the core concepts of Cast. You'll learn how to craft personalized Cast videos for your customers and level up your digital customer success.

💡

Watch the videos in Cast Youtube channel!

🎬 Cast Videos

Cast app overview 👋

Cast app overview video (click to toggle)

Cast automatically creates data-driven interactive video presentations for all of your customers. They are presented by a virtual CSM, and drive impactful customer outcomes, at scale. You can use Cast to drive product adoption, retention, renewals, and revenue expansion for all of your accounts, in the time it currently takes for just one.

Welcome! I am Samraaj, a Senior Product Manager at Cast.app.
I'll show you how you can use Cast to drive product adoption, retention, renewals, and revenue expansion for all your accounts in the time it currently takes for just ONE.
I'll show you how you can use Cast to drive product adoption, retention, renewals, and revenue expansion for all your accounts in the time it currently takes for just ONE.
They are presented by a virtual customer success manager, and drive impactful customer outcomes at scale.
Let's show you how it's built using the Cast designer.
Each of these blocks represents a different scene in the final video. Let's hop in to one so we can look in to its anatomy.
A scene consists of a visualization and narrations. Allowing cast.app to visually explain insights to your customers.
In this example, Twilio is using an area chart to visualize Product Usage over time. Let’s take a look.
By the way, the insights were automatically surfaced and explained by cast.app.
Let’s move on to narrations.
This is where narrations live within a scene.
You can customize exactly what Cast.app's virtual CSM explains, which is personalized based on each customer's data.
In this scene, we're using the fields "$product_name_1", 2, and 3 to personalize this Cast for Ly Le.
You can change who it is personalized for at the click of one button.
Action scenes can captures customer feedback, renewals, approvals, sales actions, and more directly within videos.
Customer actions show up as Cast Qualified Leads in your CRM or as transactions in your production database. Let’s take a look.
As you can see, each of the options here are clickable right in the video itself. So, when your customer receives a Cast it can directly lead to an action.
Casts integrates with 55 different data sources and destinations in order to empower your videos.
You can deliver Casts over SMS, slack, email, chatbots, or web. Wherever your customers live.
Sign up for Cast today on cast.app to drive impactful customer outcomes at scale!

What is a scene in a Cast? 🤔

Cast videos consist of a set of scenes - but what exactly is in one? In this video, we cover the purpose of a scene, along with its anatomy.

Welcome back to cast university, i'm your host samraaj a senior product manager at cast.app and today we'll be covering scenes.
What is a scene? Well it's actually pretty simple
A scene explains a set of insights to your customers - like sharing product adoption, making a relevant recommendations, or capturing survey feedback and sales actions.
Scenes are data-driven and consist of a visualization, and narrations. Along with a theme and visibility conditions.
Scenes are data-driven and consist of a visualization, and narrations. Along with a theme and visibility conditions.
A scene's dataset decides exactly what data is available when you're configuring a scene. Any data you have imported to cast will be available here.
A scene's visualization determines what is actually shown in the video. These could be checklists, charts, and even graphics.
While visualizations decide what you see, narrations decide what you hear. You can customize exactly what the virtual CSM says, and augment it with fields that change based on each customers unique data.
Conditions allow you to customize the flow of the cast. For example, this scene will only be shown to a specific customer.
Finally, themes. Themes let you take full control over how your Cast videos look.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode! I'll see you again next time.

How to use each scene type in Cast

How exactly do you use an editorial scene? What about a line chart? In this video, we cover what scenes are available and how you would use them.

Welcome back to Cast university, I am your host samraaj, a senior product manager at Cast dot app.
Today, we'll be going over the different types of scenes, and when you'll use them.
The different scene types include Editorial, checklist, visualization, option, and next steps.
An editorial scene is simple a narration meant to speak to your customers. A perfect example of this is a welcome scene!
Next, is a checklist. A checklist scene is perfect for telling your user a list of information, where you can point out each one individually. In this example, it's being used to go over an agenda.
It can also be used to list out product offerings. Next, is a visualization
Visualizations are used to display data and narrate insights to your customers. In this example, a line chart is being used to cover product usage over time.
Next, we have option scenes. Option scenes let your customers take control of their experience. They can select what direction the cast should go in to elaborate what they care about.
Finally, we have next steps scenes. Next steps allow your customers to take actions directly in a cast. They can contact a CSM, rewatch parts of the cast, or even upgrade their account!
As you can see, all of these options are clickable right in the video itself.
thank you!

How to set up a narration in Cast 🎙

One of the most powerful parts of Cast videos is the narration of the virtual CSM. Cast allows you to configure exactly what they say - in this video we'll show you how.

Welcome back to Cast university, I am your host Samraaj, a senior product manager at cast dot app
Today, we'll be starting our series on narrations - how do they work, and what makes them so powerful?
Cast narrations can be generated and personalized for all of your customers, at scale. You can surface interesting insights that would otherwise take hours of time to uncover and present them by using conditions and fields.
Let's hop in to one of our narrations, so you can see what I'm talking about.
Cast narrations allow you to customize EXACTLY what the virtual CSM says, and personalize it at scale by using fields. As you can see, the field "first name" is currently being used, which will be set to Hayley, as you can see right here.
You can add more fields by typing a dollar sign.
Wow, look at all of these fields. Some of these are created automatically from contact lists, and some are created based on data through the fields section. Refer to our video on fields for more information about that.
You can also configure conditional narrations. Sometimes, you want your virtual CSM to say things only if certain conditions are met. For example, you may have some information that is only relevant to a Head of Sales. Or, only for a specific customer, like we have in this example with contact ID = 12. These are configured by clicking the eyeball.
Visual highlights let you key in to data to emphasize certain insights for your customers. For example, if the virtual CSM is talking about a product feature, it may be a good idea to highlight its adoption.
In this example, uses a visual highlight to emphasize the success rate of a feature.
As you can see, the visual highlight accompanies the narration to bring attention to a key metric.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Cast university! Tune back in as we continue our series on narrations and discuss how to effectively communicate.

Best practices when communicating in Cast narrations ⭐️

When utilized properly, Cast can empower your customers with data to make awesome product decisions. In this video, we'll cover how to effectively communicate through the virtual CSM.

Hi and welcome back to Cast university! I'm your host, Samraaj, a senior Product Manager at Cast dot app.
Today, we'll cover how to effectively communicate using Cast narrations.
Cast allows you to use videos to automatically present to your customers - but why does that matter?
Well, video is actually the best medium to explain insights. Recent research has shown that the human brain can process visuals 60,000 times faster than it can process text. Also, viewers retain 95% of a video's message comparative to 10% in an equivalent block of text.
An example is this video itself! Being able to watch content increases both the speed and quality of your learning many-fold.
Let's take a look at how you can empower your customers with data using Cast videos.
This is a scene that shows the Twilio month-over-month usage, visualized as a set of line charts. Each metric is graphed over time.
Imagine that you were presenting this chart directly to your customers. What might you say out loud to accompany the chart? Maybe you'd talk about their average numbers - or perhaps their usage growth over time. Or, you would highlight the underlying reasons that the numbers are higher or lower in specific months - such as adoption of a new feature or an increase of inbound volume.
Cast refers to all of these interesting data points as "insights". Insights are surfaced automatically using Cast, and you can utilize them to have an effective narration that customizes itself for all of your customers.
Whenever you're creating a scene with Cast, you should think about the visualizations as the underlying data and the narrations as an opportunity to explain insights to your customers. Let’s take a look.
An effective way to do this would be to follow a basic narration structure.
Dedicate one narration to introducing the scene, that also briefly introduces the chart. An example of this would be "This is Twilio's month-over-month usage over the last seven months"
Next, you should surface 2-3 points or insights related to the visualization.
In this example, Twilio has set up insights that reference the growth rate of key metrics. They're communicating these by referencing the chart automatically.
Finally, you should conclude the scene with a transitionary sentence to what comes next.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Cast University! I hope you enjoyed, and come back for further learning.

How to capture feedback using Cast surveys 📝

Cast empowers you to collect contextual feedback from your customers at any point in a video presentation. Customers will be able to voice their questions and opinions right when it makes sense - just like they would in a human interaction. In this video, we'll show you exactly how to configure surveys to collect feedback.

Hi and welcome back to Cast university, I am your host, Samraaj, a senior Product Manager at Cast dot app.
Today, we'll be teaching you how to capture feedback from your customers directly within Cast videos by using the survey feature!
Cast narrations provide the ability to contextually collect feedback and other information from your customers using a feature called "drilldowns"
Let's hop in to an example. We just finished designing a Cast for people dot AI where they can talk to their customers about product adoption. People dot AI wants to learn more about how their customers are responding to their new Casts, so they want to collect general feedback during the conclusion.
We’re currently in the editorial scene for people dot AI’s conclusion.
In this scene, let's quickly configure a narration. We want the virtual CSM to briefly conclude the Cast, and then ask for feedback.
Now, i'll simply click the drilldown button here to open the options. Once here, i'll select "survey" and provide a prompt.
Awesome, now that this is done, let's take a look at the result.
All feedback that is received in this Cast will be added to the analytics section and can be sent back to you via Cast webhooks.
Now, let's quickly see how this can be done contextually!
In this Cast, we have a conditional narration set up that will only trigger if we believe the customer is in a position where they would benefit from an upgrade.
In this stage, we've created a survey that will directly ask the customer for some more qualifying information related to their data and an upgrade.
Let's take a look!
Now, you can clearly see how feedback surveys can be utilized to have a more effective Cast for your customers.
Thanks for watching this episode of Cast university, and I'll see you again in the next one!

How to drive call to actions through Cast 💥

How to drive call to actions using Cast

Cast allows you to enable and capture customer actions directly within our videos. Actions can be configured to take the customer to a link, contact a CSM, create a "Cast qualified lead" in your CRM, and even create a transaction in your production database.

Hello, and welcome back to Cast University! I am your host, Samraaj, a senior product manager at cast dot app.
Today, I'll be covering actions in Cast. What actions can you call for your customers to take, and how are they tracked?
One of the best parts of Cast is that it allows you to automatically drive actions for your customers at scale. For each customer that receives a Cast, they can be contextually prompted to take actions that are benefitting to their specific business case.
For example - if a customer is experiencing a lot of month-over-month growth, you can highlight that data and prompt them to upgrade their account to make use of features that work better at scale.
Other examples include getting an approval or to follow up with a CSM to discuss an outlier.
Let's take a look.
This is an action scene.
On the left, all of the different possible actions a user can take are listed out. In this example, we have 2 main options. Option 1 prompts the customer to connect with their account manager to upgrade their account. Option 2 briefly asks the user to check out a relevant case study.
These options are each configured to click through to different links. Let's watch.
As you could see, each of those options are clickable right in the video itself. So, when your customers receive their Casts, it can directly lead to actions.
Finally, let's check out a sales actions.
In this action scene, we have the option for a sales action. Sales actions can include renewals, upgrades, recommended upsells, and much more. This one is an upgrade.
When the user clicks through on this action, an entry is added to salesforce or your CRM as a "Cast qualified lead". Let's watch it.
That's awesome, Cast lets you configure these to however you like, and integrate with tons of different CRMs. They can even be configured to create transactions in your production database!
Thanks for tuning in to this episode! I hope to see you again in the future.

How to configure custom fields for your Cast videos

Custom fields allow you to customize your narrations and visualizations for each different customer. Fields are computed values that are based on the data you have imported to Cast. In this video, we'll show you how to configure a new field from scratch.

Hi, and welcome back to Cast school! I'm your host, Samraaj, a senior product manager at Cast dot app.
Today, we'll be going over fields. What are they, how do I use them, and why do they even matter?
Well, fields are pretty awesome. They're essentially variables for your narrations, so you can customize exactly what the virtual CSM says and make it change based on your customer's unique data.
Let's take a look at an example to illustrate this.
This is the product adoption cast, which is a Cast I've been working on meant to illustrate exactly how our product is used across our customers' organizations.
Our product has a set of different features, and I want to tell them across that set of features what is the average adoption for each customer's organization.
Fields make that pretty simple. Let's actually make it.
Once you open the Cast in the project editor, in the upper right under the project dropdown, select the "fields" option.
Let's add our first field here, and call it "avg_usage" and select the type.
There are two options - dataset based and formulaic.
Formulaic allows for computations based on other fields and dataset actually looks at the data you've imported to Cast. Let's select data based for now.
Over here, you can select dataset, and in this case it'll be "use case adoption".
And now, we can see a visualization of the dataset. These are the different features we offer, and here are the adoption numbers for a specific organization. I want to take the average of all of these fields.
All I have to do is select the function "average value of specified column", and then select the target column which in this case is "value".
And now, I'm done! As you can see, the preview changed to 44, which is the average in the dataset above.
Let's see how we can use this.
For the sake of the example, we're going to open up the narrations on the welcome scene. Over here, we'll see the narrations.
All you have to do is hit the dollar sign "$" and the different options will pop up! As you can see, "avg_usage" which we just created is now an option.
Now, for each of our customers it'll calculate the average usage and the virtual CSM will say it outloud for them.
Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode, and I hope to see you again soon.

How to finalize and share your Cast videos with your customers 🏆

Now that you've built a beautiful Cast video, what's next? In this video, we'll show you how to generate your casts and create a link to share them with your customers or team.

Hi and welcome back to Cast school, I'm your host, Samraaj, a senior product manager at cast dot app.
Today, I'll be sharing with you how to generate and send your Casts to your customers.
This is the product adoption Cast, a cast meant to explain exactly how our product is being utilized across our customers' organizations.
I am pretty confident in this cast at this point. I've been working on it for a while, and I want to get some feedback from our customers. So - how would I do that? Well, Cast makes it incredibly simple.
All you have to do is open the Cast in the Cast editor and in the upper right click on the "generate" dropdown.
Over here, you'll see four main actions - change, generate, preview, and copy link.
I'm actually going to change the target of this. So, I click on it and I'll see a dropdown of all of the different customers I have imported. I'm going to select John from See's candy.
Now that I've selected the target customer, I'm going to click the "generate" button! As you can see, it takes basically 1 second. We actually have the capability to generate 500 casts a minute.
Now that the cast is generated, I'm going to hit the "preview" button to see what I'm about to send. Check it out!
Awesome, now in order to actually send this to your customer, John in this case, all you have to do is hit "copy link".
Now, the link to that cast is in my clipboard. So, all I have to do is paste it in my chat with John, wherever I'm already talking to him.
That may be over email, your chatbot, intercom, or even text. Anything will work, just go to where your customers already live and where you already speak.
Let's see what John actually receives.
When John clicks the link, this is where he will be brought. You'll see he has the option to share this Cast with other members of his organization. He also sees more information about Cast.
Once he plays the Cast, the transcript will appear here.
Awesome, thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Cast school, and I hope to see you again in the future.

How to manage your Cast projects for your customers 🏆

How to manage your Cast projects for your customers

Understanding what customer interactions can be made in to a Cast is difficult. We're here to help you decide how to split up your Casts so you can build as generically as possible to scale your customer success organization.

Hello and welcome back to Cast University! I'm your host, Samraaj, a senior Product Manager at Cast dot app.
Today, we'll cover projects. How should you think about Cast projects and how do they relate to your existing Customer Success workflows?
A single Cast project is meant to mirror an end-to-end customer interaction that would normally be run by a CSM. Instead, with Cast, you're able to generate these interactions with all of your customers at once.
A good way to think about splitting up your Cast projects is to make a different project for each "Business-case" you want to cover with your customers. Examples may be "product adoption", "onboarding", or "renewals".
As you can tell from the names, each of these casts are meant to convey a different set of information and encourage different actions.
Basically, you should think of the outcomes you want to drive for each customer, work backwards, and explain, make recommendations, and capture actions.
You may also have different videos for each cohort of your customer base. Cast allows you to split across projects based on Cohorts.
Let's take a quick look at how Comcast organizes their Cast projects.
Notice how they have two separate projects - "comcast camera cast" and "comcast EX cast". Both of these Cast projects have different purposes.
Comcast camera cast is meant to guide a customer through troubleshooting a problem with their xfinity/comcast camera set up. Let's take a look.
Notice how the whole cast flows within itself - it covers key insights and is oriented around a single goal.
Now, let's see how they approach EX - which is an overview of their short term disability program.
This scene is actually built using one of our templates. A CSM at Comcast cloned our generic EX Cast and modified it to fit their business case.
Comcast replaced our demo data with their own data and then proceeded to modify the narrations. Let's take a look.
Pretty awesome! Let's quickly see how to use templates.
Start by clicking to create a "new project". Now, you'll see a new screen slide in from the right.
In this screen, you should be able to see some pretty awesome projects to clone templates for. I'd recommend checking out the product adoption cast, the onboarding cast, and twiliocast.
We also have Cast videos covering the full end-to-end of creating these Casts from templates, so be sure to check them out!
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Cast School, I'll see you next time!

How Cast integrates with your data 📈

How Cast integrates with your data 📈 (coming soon)

How to use a dataset in a Cast scene

How to use a dataset in a Cast scene 📊 (coming soon)

How Cast interacts with your customer data using tables 🧑‍💻

How Cast interacts with your customer data using tables 🧑‍💻 (coming soon)

How to import your contact list in to Cast

How to import your contact list in to Cast 📞 (coming soon)

Turning an Business Review (EBR/QBR) in to a Cast

Turning an EBR in to a Cast (coming soon)

Cast.app | Cast Corporation

San Francisco, California

school.cast.app