Post COVID-19, true omnichannel customer experience delivery is only possible with a robust video chat service offering. Successful digital connections now rely on face-to-face interaction more than ever before as people live with ongoing social restrictions.
Here at Activus Connect, video chat has always been an element of our digital engagement strategy as part of our comprehensive approach to SmartVirtual™ CX delivery. From our viewpoint, it’s clear that the benefits video chat provides in the “new normal” are immense, despite relatively low adoption rates in the BPO sector.
Outside of BPO, COVID-19 sent video chat adoption through the roof, especially in telehealth and video banking. Global lockdowns and enforced quarantine forced people to embrace video, accelerating the need for video chat services, but even prior to COVID it was escalating at a high rate thanks to customers’ increasing need for immediate gratification.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the use cases, benefits, and challenges associated with video chat, painting a picture of its true potential in CX delivery.
Business Optimization Benefits
Although video chat has been around for a while, it’s never truly been optimized for business. Personal solutions like Apple’s Facetime, Skype, and Google Duo are now household names, but, until now, organizations have been left behind throughout the technology’s evolution.
At Activus, our partners One Touch Video Chat are champions in this space, offering browser-based video chat solutions that integrate into an organization’s website. With a small pop-up on the website, customers and agents can communicate instantly via a two-way video in 4K quality.
Since adopting these tools, we’ve noticed that video chat has several KPI benefits, such as an increase in customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, a decrease in customer effort scores, a boost to net promoter scores, and more online sales conversions. The technology is still a novelty to most customers, so clicking one button to start an instant face-to-face video with a CX agent is something they’re keen to talk about with friends and family.
For contact centers, BPOs, and CX providers like Activus Connect, video calls are over 50% shorter than a traditional telephone call and significantly shorter than text-to-chat interactions. Using a video chat component on a website also has several benefits related to human science. It helps people to read body language, react appropriately to facial expressions, and quickly build rapport and trust with each other.
All these benefits lead to a competitive advantage in the customer service space, improving company credibility, increasing profits, and building better relationships with customers.
Use Case Examples
There are almost endless use cases for video chat, but the most impactful include general customer service for all industries, shopper assist and fashion assist in retail, and field services for repairs and maintenance in several sectors.
For example, technical support specialists can see exactly what is wrong with a customer’s product, allowing them to suggest fixes immediately and often prevent the need for truck rolls or repair center deliveries. In fact, we’ve seen that companies can prevent around 20% of their truck rolls through the use of video chat, representing massive savings.
Another example is auto repair shops. Both customers and shops can save huge amounts of time and money on estimates by assessing car damage or requesting modifications over video instead of driving into the shop.
When compared to text-to-chat services, video chat is a massive step up. In text-based interactions, customers are first introduced to a chatbot, then when the agent finally joins the chat, they are usually juggling several customers at once. Video chat is an exclusive, one-to-one interaction that enables agents to provide answers quickly and instantly move on to the next customer, outperforming text-to-chat by a huge margin.
Video chat is perfectly suited to work-at-home agents, as they can provide video-enabled services anywhere at any time. With the right work-at-home, video chat enabled partner, your organization can become a digital engagement powerhouse.
Possible Challenges
For BPOs and their clients, the biggest hurdle when adopting video chat is the cultural change.
In retail, for example, customers no longer have to drive to the store, browse products, wait to see an assistant, then queue at the cashier. With video, they can enjoy a buying experience that saves time, allows them to view products virtually, and then check out immediately.
Retails need to prepare to offer an experience that’s entirely different from the traditional retail engagement, which means adapting to a new operational strategy that some companies are uncomfortable with. However, once adapting they will see an immediate competitive advantage in the uniqueness of their CX offering.
From a training perspective, video chat requires an understanding of the basics of human interaction, both conscious and subconscious. For example, agents shouldn’t be looking down at their keyboard during a video session. They need to maintain eye contact just as they would in person. While training isn’t necessarily a huge challenge, it’s essential for getting the most out of video chat, so working with an experienced video chat partner is advisable.
At Activus, our Ambassador training includes guidelines for preparing to be on camera, interacting with customers face-to-face, and delivering enhanced CX through video. With our experience in video chat service delivery, our video chat partners can be up-and-running incredibly fast and start seeing the benefits of face-to-face CX immediately.
Contact us today to learn more about our SmartVirtual™ video chat services.