When the idea of video interaction with customers in the call center first hit the trade press, many were doubtful. Why would customers and agents want to look at each other? With the wild success of Amazon’s instant customer video help application, the “Mayday button,” no one is really asking that question anymore. Market research finds that more than 60 percent of human interactions are non-verbal, so the company that uses video to service its customers has an immediate advantage over those that don’t.
At the recent WebRTC event held in Atlanta, Matt Cockett, executive vice president of global messaging and cloud communications solutions provider Acision, noted his company’s heritage in messaging and the fact that it has always been a pioneer in mobile. At the conference, Acision was offering a first glimpse of its new SDK, or software development kit, and an idea of how it can help companies improve the customer interface with WebRTC, or Real-Time Communications.
Acision's Technical Director, Peter Dunkley, offered a demonstration of the company’s newest solution.
“What we’ve been launching here this week has been the Acision SDK, and this consists of an authentication subsystem which allows you to connect to existing identity providers, the WebRTC component for voice and video, messaging and a presence system as well,” said Dunkley. “As part of this SDK, we have Android and iOS native client libraries, and we have a Java Script library for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, as well.”
Maria Hudson of Acision’s marketing department played “the agent” during a demo of the solution that made use of some of the features described by Dunkley. She began by logging on to the Salesforce.com Web interface to support a customer via video.
“This Web interface is integrated with Salesforce and our WebRTC SDK,” said Hudson, who logged in and was quickly able to see her own video image on the screen as a representation of what a customer would see. The agent can also see what pages the customer has been on before initiating the video call, as well as the customer’s history with the company, including recent purchases.
The company presented the demo through the lens of its call center Web interface, Acision Engage, which took home a best of show award from the event. Dunkley used this application to log in as “the customer” for the purpose of the demo.
“Today I’m going to call in because I’ve got a problem with a recent purchase,” he said, his video image appearing on both his own screen and the agent’s screen, initiating a two-way real-time video session with the call center. “So I’ve started the call now, and Maria can see all my details.”
After listening to the customer’s problem, the “agent” was able to recommend a product, show the customer a photo, and “push” the product onto the customer’s interface. Should he choose to purchase the recommended product, he can simply put it into his virtual shopping cart from there, where he can process the transaction and check out.
It’s a way to add a personalization element to the customer support process…a human touch that the telephone alone hasn’t been able to fully grasp (let alone extremely impersonal channels such as e-mail). If the goal is to make the customer feel valued, then video is one of the best ways to do it. For the omnichannel contact center of 2014, video is likely to become a necessity when it comes to retaining and motivating customers.
For more information about the WebRTC Conference & Expo, visit the Web site here.
Edited by
Adam Brandt
