Posted by For a very long time, customer support has been associated with call centres and phone support. It is the closest one can get to personalized customer support.
Contact centres went out on a limb and brought email, chat, social, and phone under one roof have been trying to deliver a stellar customer experience. However, there is still a tangible gap between customer expectations and customer experience.
While all other mediums of customer support have grown exponentially, both in terms of accessibility and intelligence, there is a new trend on the horizon that is witnessing rapid adoption.
Live video chat support.
A decade ago, live video was a novel concept. It was restricted to high-flying sports events, news, government announcements, and so on.
But, all that changed within a few years, thanks to the massive proliferation of smartphones, internet connectivity, and live video technology, now it is possible for anyone with a smartphone to start and relay their own live video.
This statistic from Acquire clearly shows us what implementing a video chat in your business can do for you. According to Acquire, 79% of customers found their queries solved in no time with live video chat support.
Live video customer support became more popular with the onset of the pandemic and due to mandated working from home.
The whole world was forced to put a pause on face-to-face meetings. That’s when video communications pretty much saved the businesses for internal and external communications.
Businesses across the globe started implementing live video chat support to serve their customers on a deeper level and solve their problems quickly.
This tool has helped businesses in both – providing excellent CX and retaining their customers in a tragic time.
Why Live Video Chat Support?
If you are running a business for which customer experience is the major differentiator, then live video chat support is the facility for you.
It can fill the gaps that other channels in an omnichannel customer channel ecosystem cannot provide. In the process, it will also solve several problems that businesses could be facing while providing customer support remotely.
Personalized 1:1 customer support
Automated IVRs and AI-powered chatbots are efficient at giving instant feedback. They are programmed to handle dozens, if not hundreds of conversations simultaneously. This mass handling of conversations is a boon for customer service.
While it can help improve FCR, it can also drag down customer experience to significant depths if personalization is missing.
No customer wants to repeat himself, giving the same contact details. They want the bots to remember these details. Customers want to solve their problems quickly, so they can move on with their lives, and that’s where chatbots need improvement.
Live video support can help you provide the exact personalized 1:1 customer support. Agents can hop on to direct video calls with individual customers and help them with contextually relevant responses.
This personalized support can amp up the CX by notches and keep the customer loyal to the business.
Co-browsing for quicker identification of issues
Co-browsing is a technology that came into existence in recent years. It allows two individuals to access the same window/desktop and share conversations while working on it.
Co-browsing is extremely beneficial for use cases related to education, training, product demos, and so on.
The biggest benefit of co-browsing is that it enables quicker identification of issues and their resolution.
This is typically useful when the customer is using the product for the first or has relatively minimal experience of its interface.
With the help of co-browsing, the agent can easily guide the user with video instructions, thus arriving at a quicker resolution. In a call centre or contact centre context, this would be the result of umpteen numbers of calls, emails, or chats.
Video chat support can eliminate all that.
Faster onboarding of complex systems
Let’s take the case of an ERP solution; they are, by nature, complicated systems with intricate functions and workflows.
Traditionally, a user will visit the client office; take care of installing and commissioning the software. They will also undertake the process of training and onboarding users.
However, when in-person onboarding is not possible (especially in scenarios like 2021), it is necessary to do the onboarding through remote means.
Live video chat comes to the rescue!
It can enable both parties to discuss the finer details of the ERP system using the same screen as if they were seated next to each other. This can cause a dramatic shift in the onboarding process.
Not only this makes the onboarding process easier, but it can also contribute to an excellent CX journey.
Targeted Customer Training
There are several modes through which brands try to train and enlighten their customers. The most common channels are support articles, instruction manuals, instructional videos, and so on.
All the classic stuff you see on a support section of a website.
However, there could be times when customers seek verbal communication, rather than a written document.
It’s like I’m teaching you by your side, instead of sending a PDF to you on Contour Integration! Not that I’m a Math pro, but just to give you an example. I just Googled it.
There are so many reasons knowledge base articles are not enough.
It could be due to changes in the product that have not been updated in the content. Irrespective of the reason, the customer is not going to find them useful.
However, live video customer support can turn around the situation. It is provided by agents who are well-trained and are have adept knowledge in the updated feature list of the product.
Also, they will be able to help out customers who might be still referring to older feature sets and expecting to use them in the present-day context.
Live video ensures that there is a bridge between the old system and the new system. Such user-centric support can definitely contribute to a better customer experience.
Should Your Business Consider Live Video Customer Support?
Times are changing. Customer expectations are changing. It is necessary for every business to keep up with the changing times.
Live video support offers the perfect solution for this age. It gives every business an opportunity to engage in 1:1 conversations with customers and deliver a personalized customer experience.
Furthermore, it is the easiest way to provide customer training when there is a complicated system for which training cannot be provided in-person due to circumstances.
In a way, it can also be training a specific set of customers with common traits. The focused approach to training will save a lot of time and effort enabling the business to scale its customer experience without any hindrances.
Final Thoughts: Video Chat support Is The Future Of Customer Experience
Brands like Ikea and Cadillac have already started offering video calling support to their prospects and customers. Goldsmiths Jewelers – a UK-based luxury jewellery brand has also stepped into video customer support to show products to their customers during the pandemic.
These brands, along with many eCommerce brands have understood that this is the future!
Such businesses have realized that if live video customer support is integrated properly into the customer support strategy, it will lead to a huge improvement in customer experience scores. It will earn loyalty and will also keep customers away from being poached by the competition.
One comment