Humanise your CX strategy with visual engagement

Customer service is the backbone of any company, large or small. An effective customer experience (CX) strategy focuses on empowering service teams with the right tools and training to drive long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty, while also ensuring the best engagement experience for the company’s website visitors and customers. These factors are essential to the success of the company’s brand and revenue growth.

Today’s customers expect to be able to engage with customer service agents from anywhere, on any device and use their communication channel of choice. Therefore, it is imperative to provide them with a simplified, seamless and connected omnichannel experience throughout their engagement journey.

To achieve a successful outcome, companies commonly seek to adopt a unified omnichannel platform that cohesively pulls all channels under the same umbrella and intelligently enables seamless transitions from one channel to another, for service agents and customers. Leveraging visual engagement solutions within the same platform adds a personalised touch and ensures service differentiation while reducing confusion or miscommunication.

What is visual engagement?

Visual engagement is a powerful, real-time collaboration concept that combines video, co-browsing, screen sharing and/or screen annotation experiences. The augmentation of visual channels to a phone call or chat allows the agent and the customer to drive personalised, precise and rapid problem resolution.

The concept hinges on the simple foundation that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and is widely adopted across industry verticals that include retail, field service, finance, telco and healthcare.

Industry examples: real-life scenarios

In recent years, there has been an increase in global adoption of visual engagement solutions among companies across several industry verticals.

For retailers, the online shopping experience is often the deciding factor in converting website visitors into buyers. Visitors navigating a retail website to purchase a product frequently encounter situations that need clarification from customer service. Being able to self-serve using a website’s search capabilities or escalate to customer service and engage with an agent in real-time aids in quicker problem resolution and customer satisfaction.

In the field service arena, contractors or field technicians who are dispatched to remote sites for repairs solely rely on being able to engage with customer service through their mobile devices. These technicians often place a call into customer service for questions — and in complex repair scenarios, may need to engage through video with another technician, in order to show the problematic appliance or product. The combination of mobile and video chat come to the rescue here for a quick and satisfactory outcome and can play a vital role in preventing the customer from returning the merchandise.

Customers of financial institutions such as banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies often rely on collaborative real-time engagement with customer service for form-filling assistance or co-navigating a complex section of the website. Oftentimes, financial rules and regulations can be confusing to a customer. Thus, visual engagement in the form of co-browsing or video chat is an effective tool that quickly assists the customer.

Within healthcare, doctor-patient engagement through video is becoming an increasingly common and preferred communication channel. Patients looking for clarifications to their medical conditions or prescriptions can quickly video chat with their doctor to obtain those clarifications without back and forth email exchange or miscommunications.

(Software-as-a-Service) SaaS companies also adopt visual engagement as an effective tool in on-boarding and training new clients to effectively replace onsite physical training by remote assistance and lower on-boarding costs.

Realising the ROI of visual engagement

Let’s review some of the common visual engagement benefits.

• Higher customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Higher Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Reduced visitor abandonment rate on websites
• Reduced customer churn
• Increased customer loyalty
• Higher first call resolution (FCR) rates
• More upsell and cross-sell opportunities for the company’s products
• Brand recognition and differentiation

Visual engagement with Oracle Service Cloud

I’ve compiled ­five core benefits within Oracle Service Cloud as the top reasons to consider visual engagement in your service enterprise.

Oracle recognises that visual engagement technologies allow for an effective omnichannel customer journey and offers a powerful value addition. With the least amount of effort, companies can easily procure and deploy video chat and co-browse for enhanced real-time collaboration between their agents and customers. For the complete list of features, capabilities and benefits associated with this offering, please review our Video Chat Data Sheet and Co-browse Data Sheet.

No matter the industry or company size, direct communication with customers through visual channels humanises the customer experience by ensuring personalisation and improves problem resolution and precision, which goes a long way in building customer satisfaction, loyalty, brand popularity and revenue growth for your company.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Chaay_tee

Originally published here.