4 tips for making video work as a service channel

Over the past year, people have become more used to seeing themselves on a laptop screen or smartphone than ever. In turn, this has driven a new consumer demand for video as a viable and accessible customer service option. Organisations are increasingly interested in using video-conferencing to enhance their customer service operations but what do you need to do to make the most of it as a new customer service channel. Here are our top tips.

Make sure your agents are ready for video calls

Contact centre staff will need different skills to manage a video call from the ones they employ to handle an email or a phone call. On a video call, for example, they will need to stay alert to the conversation at all times, as well as demonstrating empathy through facial features. You may want to bring in specialist staff or retrain existing agents to undertake the role. If you have agents working from home, you’ll need to think more about the professionalism of their setting and how that impacts brand image.

Ensure you build in security

If you are offering video interaction, make sure you are doing it securely. Think about who you are engaging with and the sensitivity of that interaction. Mortgage teams operating in contact centres in the finance world, legal advice operations and 111 healthcare advisors all need to be aware of these issues and need to understand, for example, how calls are encrypted, how users and participants are being invited to the call. 

Don’t forget to integrate video into your overall offering

It is vital that you seamlessly integrate video into your overall contact centre offering, in the same way that we have seen other kinds of multimedia communication from web chat to social media integrated into the contact centre in the past. Crucially, it has to be on one platform to ensure that the business has a comprehensive, unified view of the customer they are interacting with – and that they present a more coherent and coordinated brand identity to their key audiences.

Reaping the Rewards

Get the above right and you can reap the rewards of video in the contact centre. Partly it is about cost: think about the reduction in travel expenses that meeting virtually as opposed to in person allows. Video also adds convenience for customers. For instance if they are applying for a mortgage they don’t need to travel into a branch. They can just connect with a central team of advisors who can talk them through their options. They don’t have to travel to travel person, they can Today, video-conferencing is changing the contact centre – and it is very much here to stay.

By Jeremy Payne, Group VP of Alliances at Enghouse Interactive