These past 2 years, businesses in basically every industry have – to one degree or another – made the switch from in-person to remote customer contact.
Under the pressure of the pandemic, organisations relying on customer contact were forced to move to digital CX channels and protect business continuity. So they jumped to readily available solutions for video calling – software like Microsoft Teams and Zoom. These generic video conferencing tools did the job, helping to stay connected with customers.
But fast forward 2 years, and the companies successfully doing remote advice are the ones who understand they need to deliver exceptional experiences via video.
That’s because not all those tools for internal video conferencing are necessarily the right fit for interacting with customers 👇
What factors DO make for video call technology that will help you make remote customer contact successful in the long run? We’ve put together a list of the 3 trends you should look for when searching for video call technology this year:
1. Customer experience
2. Agent journeys
3. Compliance at scale
The ‘big shift’ in remote advice: Taking a scalable and strategic approach with video customer service
Now that the world is steadily opening up again, remote customer contact is here to stay.
And it’s about more than simply establishing a live video connection with your customers.
Your organisation needs to make a shift from deploying any technology that ‘does the job’, to taking a strategic and scalable approach with customer contact via video.
This is what we like to call the ‘big shift’ in remote customer experiences:
- From stand-alone to embedded customer journeys
- From an isolated, manual to an integrated, automated and AI-driven agent experience
- From compromising on as-is, third-party software to customizable, compliant technology (that is secure by design)
3 trends in video call technology
The 3 trends that we see in technology for remote Customer Engagement this year are customer experience, the agent journey, and compliance at scale.
1. Customer experience 🏖
Your customers are expecting you to offer video calls these days.
The reason is that plenty of businesses offer remote advice via video. Video is no longer seen as an ‘emergency’ or ‘fallback’ channel, but as a mature CX channel.
That also means that consumers expect to be served an extraordinary video call experience, and that they’re comparing you with the competition.
So the one question you should ask yourself about the video chat technology you use, is 👉 Can you offer customers a simple, secure and branded video call experience – that works with 1 click on a link, also on mobile?
- Are you able to customize the journey for video calling?
- Can you offer customers the interaction type they prefer in an omni-channel mix – giving them the choice between a video call and other CX channels?
- Can you easily embed video calls into your own website or app?
- Can you create more than 1 journey to start a video call? From booking a video appointment in advance, or escalating live chat to an instant video call, to adding a co-browsing session?
- Rather than sponsoring the brand names of big techs, can you add your own branding?
- Does the technology allow you to host video calls on your custom domain,
- Does your video call technology work without downloads on any browser and any device, desktop as well mobile?
2. Agent journey 🏎
Previously, when most companies were merely piloting video chat as a channel for customer interaction, their priority was definitely NOT on developing efficient, integrated processes.
Now, however, video calling has proven itself as a sustainable CX channel.
And so agents are demanding ease-of-use, efficiency and smart workflows around video calling. Plus, you as a business also want to collect valuable data insights on video calls, and connect those with business intelligence data from other channels.
In other words, you want to integrate video customer contact into your internal workflows.
Your video call technology has to ensure that your agents can schedule, start and log a video call from a central platform – i.e. the ‘1 source of truth’ that they’re working from 👉 Can you integrate the video call technology with your CRM, Customer Engagement or Contact Center software?
- Is there a booking module that you can configure with your own input fields? So that the information in your CRM about a customer who planned a video call is always complete, and up-to-date?
- Does the booking module have a calendar integration, to enable smart routing of incoming video calls to the right agent?
- Can you automate tasks, like sending reminders or creating a transcript?
- Does the technology help to make agents’ jobs easier with AI too? For example, can it create AI-generated text reports of a video call to save time on writing manual reports?
- Does your video call technology collect data on video calling specifically, segmented per meeting type/type of video service you offer?
- Can you connect specific data insights on video calling with your wider BI tooling, to create a central overview and compare video call performance with other CX channels?
You might also like 🔗
Discover all ways to integrate 24sessions' video chat platform into your workflows >
3. Compliance at scale 🔒
Before, companies would compromise on working with big tech, third-party software simply to have a live video connection up and running.
However, that also meant they compromised on the security of their agents and customers.
Internal video conferencing tools like Microsoft Teams and Zooms have been featured in the news multiple times about causing security risks. That’s mostly because these tools lack the right configurations to guarantee the best security and compliance for every type of conversation you’re having with customers over a video call.
So now, in the post-pandemic era, businesses that want to scale remote advice while staying compliant choose video call technology that is made for Customer Engagement.
Such technology is configurable and compliant – allowing you to assign user roles with different authorisation rights to any employee involved in video customer service, and to configure different journeys and workflows for each type of video meeting.
👉 The technology you use for Customer Engagement has to be secure to use for customers, as well as guarantee that you comply with international regulations like GDPR:
- Does your video chat vendor have the security basics right?
- Is the technology end-to-end encrypted? And GDPR, MiFID, ISO proof?
- Are the links used to start a video call 100% secure? Meaning a video call invite can only be sent by a verified user who's logged in – and that meeting links are unique, can only be used once, expire automatically and are different for agents than for customer?
- Does the video call technology work browser-based, without requiring any downloads of third-party software?
- Using third-party apps is a risk for phishing and hacking
- Can you configure settings to ensure each type of video service is compliant with internal rules and (inter)national regulations?
- For example, are there settings to allow you to show a custom privacy disclaimer that is different for a mortgage advisory call than for processing an insurance claim via video?
- Are you allowed to manage user roles?
- Can you choose whether to record specific video calls? And where to store recordings - locally or in the cloud?
Like to know more about compliance for video calling? 🔒
Discover 6 ways to guarantee secure & compliant video calls with clients >
Video chat as a main channel for Customer Engagement
Video calling is one of the fastest-growing channels for Customer Engagement. Globally, consumers are now using video calls to communicate with businesses 67% more than 2 years ago (Vonage 2021).
In 2020 video calling first appeared as no. 9 in the Top 10 of customers’ most preferred channels to engage with businesses (Salesforce). And Genesys found that video calling was the CX channel with the highest customer satisfaction rate in 2021 – with 44% of consumers selecting it as a ‘highly effective’ channel to interact with customer service.
👇
In other words, it’s not a question of whether you are offering remote services via video– it’s a question of how you are scaling video chat for customer contact to the fullest, for maximum business impact.
How are you making maximum impact with video services?
We’re curious – how are you using video chat to interact with customers? Is video on of your main CX channels, are you piloting, do you offer it for 1 specific service?
To see more ways to use video calls for customer interaction – and how to successfully scale video as interaction channel, check out our e-book on the State of Video Customer Contact. With 4 real-life examples of use cases 👇
🏦 Are you in Banking? Then our Video Banking Benchmark report might be for you!
