Whether delivered through contact centres or field service teams, customer service has usually been seen as a cost centre for businesses. The focus has been on improving NPS scores and lowering costs rather than as a revenue contributing department. This is despite the recognition that customer service teams’ proximity and interaction with customers and access to their data offer a fantastic opportunity to sell or at least contribute to the sales process. However, the trend towards customers experience, changes in channel usage for customer service, the need to drive down costs and the availability of new technology like remote visual assistance, means it is now possible, and a good opportunity, for businesses to revisit and plan to make their contact centre a profit centre.
Read on to find out how remote visual assistance can positively influence customer satisfaction, costs and sales to push your business closer to being a profit centre.
What is Remote Visual Assistance
Remote visual assistance and support is a technology that allows your contact centre agents to utilise their customers’ smartphone cameras to resolve service questions. Customers are sent a link and if they click on it the agent can then zoom in and use AR to annotate on their screen to guide the customer to solve the problem. While extremely useful pre-pandemic, the technology has seen accelerated use because of its ability to solve problems without needing to send an agent.
Relationship Marketing
With getting sales becoming ever more competitive, customer experience has become the area where businesses are focusing their attention. As part of that focus has been a move to hyper-personalisation and how a business can maximise delivering customer satisfaction at every stage of the customer journey. With this new trend, contact centres and field teams have an incredible opportunity to prove their value to a business and will be asked to step up to do so.
Remote visual assistance is key to helping businesses build a better customer experience. This ability for your agents to see the problem through the customer’s smartphone enables them to solve the problem faster and improve customer satisfaction. For example, in many calls, a device is not actually broken but just needs resetting, but when the agent can’t see the device, the conversation breaks down and the problem is not resolved. When a customer can visually follow instructions on the screen and see the problem, they are more likely to have the confidence to solve it themselves. The result is that first call resolution rates are higher, and the speedier resolution means customers are more satisfied with your service. This is the case for both B2C and B2B customers as remote visual assistance can also improve the uptime of equipment by allowing service agents to check what part needs to be changed without visiting and, in doing so, make the change on the first visit.
It is an established truth that satisfied customers remain more loyal to a brand and are more inclined to spend and try new products. And from a cost perspective, it is at least 5 times cheaper to keep a customer than get a new one.
Branding
That improvement we have described above in customer satisfaction and NPS invariably has a knock-on effect for the brand in many ways. If this is the first time a customer has had a business resolve their problem with remote visual assistance, they will be left with the impression that that business is forward-thinking and going the ‘extra mile’ to provide better customer service. There is also an opportunity to position the business as more environmentally conscious as you have reduced the carbon footprint associated with sending out engineers.
Digital Channels
While consumers using digital channels to get information and solve customer service questions has been common for some time already, the pandemic has accelerated this trend. According to the IDC, the two fields attracting the most AI investment are automated AI-powered customer service agents at $4.5 billion and sales process recommendation and automation at $2.7 billion.
With this usage of video now an expectation for many people, remote visual assistance will drive can help a business optimise results through digital channels.
Cost Optimisations
With labour costs accounting for 70% of customer service costs, it is important to try and find ways to be more efficient. One of the ways to do this is by pushing customers to utilise self-service channels, but this should not be done at the expense of those elements of customer service that are contributing to brand loyalty and driving sales. For example, while self-service is good for optimising costs, it may reduce the opportunity to engage your customers and ultimately reduce the effectiveness of customer service.
Remote visual assistance can again contribute here as it offers ways to reduce costs while at the same time, offering customers a personal connection. Remote visual assistance has been proven to significantly reduce the need to send an engineer and make it possible to resolve cases faster and with fewer calls. If technicians aren’t having to travel so often and problems are solved much quicker your businesses’ operational efficiency is much improved.
Reduce Product Returns
Often advisors will ask customers to return the product so that it can be analysed. In the USA, each year, the product returns represent the equivalent of 260 billion dollars (NY Post). Remote visual assistance can be used to resolve the incident instantly and thus save money on the processing of product returns.
Drive Sales
All these factors above help drive down costs and contribute to improved customer service, however, to really become a profit centre the contact centre must contribute to sales, whether that is directly through signed deals or through a quantifiable contribution to the sales process. For example, similar to marketing where measurables around MQLs show marketing’s influence on sales revenue. Remote visual assistance can help considerably to impact both areas.
As we mentioned above, contact centres have a unique opportunity to do this as agents have access to customer data and the interactions that provide an opportune time to upsell, extend warranties etc. To succeed, businesses should invest in technology that makes it possible for service staff to take over from and cooperate with sales. Intent prediction is one of those technologies as is chatbots, co-browsing/screen sharing and remote visual assistance. Remote visual assistance can drive sales in the contact centre and the field.
Remote visual Assistance in the Contact Centre
When a customer is calling in to ask a question related to their product, they are most open to advice, offering an opportunity to drive more sales. For example, if they phone because they have accidentally locked their washing machine and can’t open it. Using remote visual assistance, the agent can tell them how to do it by annotating on their screen. The customer is likely extremely happy and impressed by this new solution. The agent can take this opportunity to have a look at the machine, its age, and the standard of the parts. They can suggest an extended warranty or introduce a new model which may have an easier to use a control panel or be more efficient, earning the company a sale.
Field Service Sales
When an agent is in the field there are also opportunities to make a sale. For example, a plumber may be sent to a home, but while there, realises that the tap is broken beyond repair and needs to be replaced. He can then use visual assistance to call back to the sales rep, show him the customer’s kitchen and get a recommendation that matches the kitchen.
The Solution
Want to learn more about Remote Visual Assistance, see the solution in action here: https://www.hostcomm.co.uk/sol...