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.