There were some excellent customer service demos shown in Atlanta in June at the WebRTC Conference and Expo, including ones from Requestec, Genesys and an incredibly detailed “high value” castle rental demonstration shown on stage by Ian Small of TokBox. It is easy to see why using WebRTC for customer service applications is becoming a “holy grail” for potential market growth because, as Willie Sutton supposedly once observed, “That's where the money is!” The theory is that organizations are more willing to spend on applications that can demonstrably enhance their customer’s experience versus just cool things or even internal productivity enhancement. But is it that easy? I believe that the challenging the 15-year history of “Internet-based” customer service shows this is an application area that requires very careful navigation to be successful.
The WebRTC opportunity that customers can “just click with no plug-in to get video and audio access to support” has to deal with the fact that customer service, for most organizations, is much more about business processes, training and cost control than it is about the access technology. For the past 15+ years, customers have been able to “just click” to send e-mails, have an online chat, talk to someone (with a plug-in for audio), send an SMS, and more recently send tweets and establish a video session through Flash. Yet most organizations today have implemented only a very few of these choices and there are very few organizations with an integrated customer service approach across multiple different media channels. This is despite the fact that the first integrated Web-facing multichannel customer service system was launched around 1997 (for those interested in history, I personally believe this was “Acuity WebCenter,” now long gone) and every major contact center vendor today provides rich multimedia capabilities – take your pick from Cisco, Avaya, Genesys, Interactive Intelligence, Mitel, RightNow, Five9 and many more. All of these experienced vendors are likely to add a WebRTC-based video/audio channel in the near future. So what’s the problem?
The first issue is that formal contact centers are driven by cost control. Yes, delighting the right customers at the right cost point is desirable, but this cannot be done in a way that drives up the average cost of all interactions and drives you out of business (or gets you fired as the contact center manager). Many cool new customer access technologies have proven to dramatically drive up costs without any corresponding revenue benefits. So e-mail, for example, is useful for initial requests but is much more expensive for problem resolution than a phone call. Online chat is useful when it supports closing an online transaction “right now” but is much more expensive than a decent search engine and better Web design for helping someone just find your information online. Twitter is useful to capture the fact that a customer is in trouble, but trying to resolve issues through open tweet exchanges is much less effective than escalating this to a voice call-back. A key metric for contact centers is “one and done” – how many interactions/people are involved before the customer interaction is resolved? Anything more than “one” is bad and so the question becomes whether new access methods help or hinder this.
The second issue for contact centers is multichannel integration and agent training. Many organizations today still have separate e-mail response teams and if they have online chat, it’s often a specialized agent team. The technology, as well as the people, is often siloed with minimal information shared, so trying to add yet another channel, like WebRTC video, will just make this all worse. Contact centers have to finally get serious about deploying integrated multichannel systems and cross-channel agent training before they can easily add “just one more” channel. Most organizations still cannot meet the needs of the customer saying “I am calling you today, now over WebRTC, about my e-mail from yesterday, concerning my Web interaction from a week ago…” (an obvious integration need unfortunately also identified 15 years ago). So the tendency for larger contact centers is to go slow and not add new access channels until they sort out their cross-channel integration strategy.
Aiming for efficient one-and-done customer interactions does not mean these cannot move between different channels. If I start on your website, use a great product selection tool, get offered a chat session as I order something, and then get offered a callback or audio/video WebRTC session as I close on various complex ordering choices – then this may be a cost-effective and revenue generating “interaction” that smartly mixes the right access channels for the job. However, it won’t be cost-effective to simply try and video chat with everyone who turns up just for fun! Any WebRTC use has to fit within an overall “customer experience design” for the organization and be used for the right use cases that deliver added business value.
Sometimes the best design involves not talking to the customer at all! I am a huge Amazon.com customer and fan – but I never talk to the company (does anyone know its number?). It delivers what I call “process loyalty.” I don’t need to talk to Amazon because its website, the recommendation community, its deals, my Prime membership and its consistency and reliability all just work. If I get it wrong, it has a simple no-questions-asked returns process. I “talk” to them, in a sense, through UPS, FedEx and its website, and I don’t see that a real-time WebRTC video interface on its site would do anything except massively drive up costs. Now, if some part of its site gets into really high-end luxury goods, then maybe we will see a video interface for that particular use case, but right now I can order a $10,000 engagement ring without even a chat offer in sight, just the “process” assurance of Prime and “free returns on jewelry.”
So I am saying that general deployment of WebRTC video interfaces for general customer service is unlikely. It will all depend on the use case and the business value of that moment of interaction. What was clever about Ian Small’s conference demo was that he picked a “high value” interaction (Castles) to make this plausible. In real life, the kind of “enough business value” video contact center use cases I have seen have included in-store complex-product resolution kiosks, financial services deal closure, remote tele-medicine, medical patient translation needs, complex field-service support via tablets, high-value global customers leasing airplanes, yachts and villas, and a few others – but not that many. I would be interested to hear what others have seen.
So where’s the silver lining? I would like to recommend that early WebRTC use cases perhaps start with customer service opportunities outside the formal process-driven, cost-sensitive and integration-challenged contact center, where I also think the established contact center vendors will dominate anyway. There are many sales people, advisors, consultants, brokers, real-estate agents, local retailers and similar people across all kinds of industries who work directly with their customers face-to-face and, today, through phone calls and audio conferences. It is not more costly for some of those one-to-one customer interactions to become video calls through their own custom Web page, especially if embedded in a useful domain-specific information portal where customer status and joint work-items can be easily accessed. These kinds of customer interactions are typically not big video conferences so less cloud-conferencing is needed in the cost equation. The infamous WebRTC data channel is also key here to support rich information sharing – customers want to see information more than just your face! Today, I can do pieces of this by signing up for WebEx or GoToMeeting or a cloud video conferencing offer, such as Blue Jeans, Vidyo or Vidtel, and training my customers to use this. The WebRTC challenge is whether this can be made much simpler and more integrated by adding the right real-time capabilities within the industry, domain and even organization specific website designs that facilitate better one-to-one customer interactions with every-day customer-facing workers?
The conclusion is that we need to navigate WebRTC-enabled customer service use cases very carefully!
Image via Shutterstock
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
