Whether to create their own custom solution from scratch or go with an off the shelf provider is something that businesses from all industries wrestle with when they need to expand their technology infrastructure.
Any decision to do so must be made with a careful examination of the company’s resources, strengths, and the wider environment. Often it is not only a question of whether your team can but whether it is in the company’s best commercial interests. Fact-finding from the Project Management Institute (PMI) indicates that in-house IT projects have a very middling success story: 14% of IT projects fail outright, 31% don’t meet their goals, 43% exceed their initial budgets, and 49% were delivered late.
Remote Visual Assistance
The above is no different for contact centres when they are seeking to improve customer service through a remote visual assistance solution. Remote visual assistance technology enables support and customer service teams to view the problem through the camera of the customer’s smartphone and guide the customer to solve the problem with AR and onscreen instructions.
A relatively new technology, its use has steadily grown over the last few years, accelerating significantly in the last year when companies have been required to solve more customer problems remotely. But it is not just a solution for COVID times - Take up is projected to continue to increase as COVID19 has successfully demonstrated its value in solving customer problems remotely at any time. It solves customer problems faster, leaving happier customers and reducing field visits and costs for companies.
If you are thinking about getting a remote visual assistance solution, then read on to find the key reasons it is better to work with a solution provider rather than creating your own.
Development Costs
When you develop your own solution, you have costs beyond just the staff time, there are license fees, integration costs, migration costs, and maintenance and upgrade expenses. Referring to the report from the Project Management Institute it is also likely that your project will overrun, and you will have to find additional funds. However, if you choose to go with a remote visual assistance provider your costs will be fixed and totally clear from day one.
Time to Market
If you have assessed the situation and made the decision that remote visual assistance would benefit your organisation, every minute you are not using it your business's customer service and productivity is suffering. Unfortunately, if you develop your own situation, it will be several months before you can have a solution in use. However, with an off the shelf solution you can be ready in potentially minutes.
Integrations
No software solution is an island. To drive higher user adoption across your business, it must integrate with all your other business solutions like ERP and CRM. This is incredibly challenging for an internal IT team to achieve given the expertise and amount of work needed - comparatively a specialist provider will have already done this over a range of key third-party solutions.
Training and Change Management
Similarly, if you are to drive that adoption and ensure your remote visual assistance solution is used across your business to its full potential, you need to effectively train your employees. Specialist solution providers have the expertise to ensure remote visual assistance is a success in your business.
Ongoing Support
The browsers and operating systems your software is designed for are continually being updated, meaning you will have to also update your application. In addition, your application will be a work in progress with customer feedback and data, resulting in you having to make further updates. This is costly, whereas working with a remote visual solution provider will mean these parts are done for you.
Advanced Features
A good remote visual assistance product has AI, AR, co-browsing and screen sharing among other features. To create these features to the meaningful level that makes them deliver marked improvements in customer service and productivity for your business, takes a large investment of resources.
Intellectual Property
Many visual assistance features are patented and therefore trying to develop them may mean you end up with legal issues or expensive licensing fees. The only alternative is to develop another way to do it and that can only be time-consuming and expensive.
About Hostcomm
Hostcomm provides a range of solutions to enable contact centres to improve customer engagement and productivity. Hostcomm’s remote visual assistance product is market-proven; there is no app download necessary and it integrates with key contact centre solutions.