As Dr James McQuivey of Forrester Research once said: “A video is worth 1.8 million words.”
Indeed, video enables a more colourful, authentic conversation, enhancing customer experience and building brand advocacy.
Moreover, the channel helps educate and support customers. It brings stories to life, which is not only great for marketing but for customer service too.
After all, customer queries reaching the contact centre are increasing in complexity. With additional golden nuggets of information, service teams can cut through this and simplify conversations.
How Are Contact Centres Using Video?
First, take a step back from using video as a customer service channel. Note that it also complements technical and educational content.
As such, it is often well-placed inside a knowledge base or product guide to help agents and customers to understand new ideas.
Of course, these are often simple “how to” videos, but higher-level explainer videos can help customers more quickly grasp challenging concepts.
Cost often isn’t an issue here. Animation and screen sharing help brands explain how to accomplish a task more easily.
Such screen sharing is also excellent in one-to-one customer conversations to help customers complete online processes.
Alternatively, as Peter Broeckx, Regional Sales Director of Contact Centres at AudioCodes, suggests:
“Customers can submit a ticket, and a rep can respond with a pre-recorded video, showing the customer how to overcome their query.”
The contact centre can also add more interactive elements to these videos. For example, a pop-up often works well, asking the customer: did the video help solve your issue?
If the customer selects “yes”, the contact centre can close that ticket faster. If they choose “no”, the agent can offer further support to ensure a resolution.
Either way, agents can close tickets more quickly as they engage in much less back-and-forth communication, which often comes with email, chat, and messaging.
One final, more generic use case is a video triage. Such solutions sometimes work by asking customers to scan a QR code, record a video of their issue, and send that to agents. Seeing this – first-hand – the agent has more context available to solve the customer’s problem faster.
All this is possible without offering video as a formal customer service channel.
Sector-Specific Use Cases
Before implementing a channel, a business must ask itself: why? This is especially true for video, as there are more efficient channels for handling transactional queries.
Assessing demand drivers will help the contact centre find use cases where video may add value. It allows businesses to isolate where a human touch may advance customer acquisition, increase retention, and – in some cases – cut costs.
An excellent example of the latter is in utilities. Sharing this, Broeckx notes:
“By asking customers to show an engineer the issue over a video call, they can often solve problems remotely, saving them time and the business considerable expense, as the engineer does not need to travel to the customer’s home.”
Such a use case is also powerful across other sectors. Take the insurance industry – a car insurer, perhaps. They can run remote audits by asking customers to show damage to their cars over video.
Changing lanes (pun intended!), consider how video can bolster retention. For instance, telebanking is helping financial institutions accentuate the human touch – in an industry where reassurance is often critical.
Indeed, by using video and centralizing their talent pools, stalwart banks can differentiate themselves and stay ahead of agile, nifty digital disruptors while lowering office costs.
Telehealth is another excellent example, which highlights how businesses can harness video to leverage subject matter expertise from across the enterprise.
Finally, think of real estate. Nowadays, video property tours and customer follow-ups are all the rage to forge more intimate relationships with prospective buyers.
While this last example is perhaps a little detached from the hustle and bustle of the enterprise contact centre, video use cases are often best kept specific.
After all, video for transactional queries is unlikely to be cost-efficient. Moreover, agents may shy away from the camera, limiting the available resource.
Building Video Into the Customer Journey
Although video is not ideal for simple, transactional queries, it is often an excellent platform for the nitty-gritty contacts that make or break customer journeys – as the above use cases suggest.
As such, it is often best to insert click-to-video links across the business’s website or app in places that indicate the customer has a particular query in mind, on that is best-suited to video.
Expanding on this, Broeckx adds:
“Through click-to-video links, enabled by WebRTC, it is often easy to embed video into customer journeys, even for legacy contact centres.”
The additional benefit of these click-to-video links is that they carry over context from the customer’s digital journey – so the agent can immediately gauge customer intent.
Moreover, it is often possible to link that customer to a profile in the CRM so that the agent has critical information to solve the customer’s query already at their fingertips.
Also, allowing agents to shift to video – with the customer’s permission – through their desktop is powerful when they cannot grasp the issue. It gives them extra visual context that allows agents to quickly get to the crux of the matter.
AudioCodes is supporting such video experiences. Providing click-to-video links and a native video channel through its Voca Conversational Interaction Center, the vendor leverages the capabilities of Microsoft Teams for customer service.
In doing so, it also spreads CCaaS capabilities across the organizations, enabling external SMEs to use video to help customers with complex queries and specific use cases.
To find out more about AudioCodes and its video offerings, visit AudioCodes.
