Intenresant article on @lemagit.fr
The customer experience can be enhanced by adding a video-based communication channel. Several vendors are pushing this option. Often with good reason, given the advantages of video technologies for call centres.
When you call your operator because the internet is down and you can't watch Netflix, it can be hard to find the right words to describe what's going on behind your box. Most customers are not technophiles: they don't know the difference between an RG58 and an RJ45 cable, and they don't want to know.
This example is a perfect case where the use of video can help solve a problem. A video conferencing tool integrated into the desktop of the contact centre agent, and a simple to launch application on the customer side, allow the end user to show, not tell, their problem.
Video in customer service is not just for the telecoms sector. On-demand contact centre (CCaaS) providers such as Genesys, Twilio, Five9, Talkdesk, Nice inContact or Salesforce (which has partnered with AWS to complement its CCaaS offering) have introduced video channels, even with Zoom integrations, in their tools for call centres of all types: small or large enterprises; B2B or B2C, or B2B2C; providers of goods or services (or anything in between).
And Zoom itself has just entered the CCaaS market, in the US and Canada, which tends to confirm that video in contact centres is indeed the future.
In a recent interview with our colleagues at Search Unified Communication (a site of the international TechTarget group, to which MagIT also belongs), Genesys CEO Tony Bates explained how, when he was CEO of Skype more than ten years ago, he already saw the "video revolution" coming. It seemed obvious that everyone (in work and in private life) was going to be able to mix and match digital conversation types according to location and need, juggling SMS, email and therefore video.
What Tony Bates did not foresee, he says, was that a pandemic would give a major boost to the unification of communications, making video a familiar part of our lives in the process. Today, absolutely everyone - from children to grandparents - knows how to "Zoom". It is hard to imagine an after-sales service not adapting to this new situation.
Why add video to your contact centre?
According to a Metrigy study cited by Zoom at the launch of its CCaaS, the combination of unified communications and traditional contact centre tools would "improve agent efficiency, deliver new services and provide a quality customer experience".
By 2023, 65% of businesses are expected to use visual engagement applications to communicate with their customers, according to the same study.
Specifically, video would create a better customer relationship for 59% of companies surveyed, help agents "read" the customer's sentiment on their face for 52%, make interactions more efficient by resolving issues faster for 51% and improve customer relationships through more personal interactions for 49%.
Salesforce and ServiceNow also anticipate that remote support technologies - which allow a customer or technician in the field to send a video to a contact centre agent or expert - will herald the convergence of field services and video customer care.
Finally, while video can create a more personal experience for the customer, internally it is also an asset to the employee experience. It is an essential training platform for integrating new agents into 'fragmented' teams, at a time when many contact centres operate with people working remotely.
The call centre on the road to video
With these important developments, although the CCaaS market already seems very competitive, there is still room for innovation. For both consumers and business users, the demand for face-to-face video is growing.
A Vonage survey of 5,000 consumers in 14 countries shows that consumer appetite for video chat increased in the first seven months of contention and restrictions to a level of adoption not expected in four years.
While only 10% of customers now say that video is their preferred channel for purchasing a product, the number of consumers using video has increased since 4 years ago.
