Video in the contact center. Team Nay or team Yay?

The use of video calling in the contact center. When I talk to industry analysts and veterans I see two very colliding opinions.

Team Nay ???♀? “We’ve tried video for over 15 years now. It has never worked and it will never work because video calling simply doesn’t fit in the dynamics and purpose of a contact center” 

Team Yay ???♀? “Video in the contact center is the next wave. With video, contact centers can add more high-value interactions to their omnichannel mix and own a larger piece of the customer relationship”

Obviously, I’m in team Yay, However, I also understand team Nay:

Video had several hypes before. And so far it didn’t really find its way to the contact center successfully. Why would it be different this time? Well, I believe there are 3 reasons why it will:

1. The technology is ready

For video to work in a customer contact environment it needs to be effortless and reliable for both the end customer and your agent. The technology simply wasn’t ready for that 15, 10 and even 5 years ago.

With the arrival of WebRTC, video gained the potential to be effortless, meaning no installations, no plugins, no accounts.

But even though WebRTC has now been around for quite some years, video calling technology still remains extremely hard to get to a truly reliable state on a large scale. This is especially true in a customer contact setting where it needs to work the first time, every time - on all devices and networks for each user, regardless of their technical know-how.

Anyone with some basic coding skills can now build a working video prototype that can handle 80% of the requests. But getting the remaining 20% to work flawlessly takes up 99% of the development work as well as a rigid focus on video for customer contact.

5 years ago specialized video calling solutions for customer contact did not exist. Now there are solutions that can provide effortless and reliable video calling for cx.

2. Your customers are ready

Not a lot of your customers will actively ask you for a video call. However, did people ask for faster horses or cars? Customers might not ask for video calls, they do ask for interactions that are personal and effortless. And video is the perfect means to achieve just that. 

5 years ago, no-one asked their banker if the mortgage conversation could be via video instead of over the phone or at the branch. But today, some of our banking customers do 70% of their mortgage consultations via video. Phone and face-to-face together counted for 100% of all mortgage consultations 5 years ago and has now been marginalized to 30%.

Across our customer base, data reveals that video, when applied on high-value, high-complexity interactions, scores significantly higher on CSAT and NPS than phone and even in-person face to face. And as you scale the channel, at some point, your customers will start to demand video as it becomes ‘the new normal’. Video has now reached that point in banking. 

3. The scope of video is far beyond the traditional contact center

Video has already become a significant customer contact channel, except it’s been without the contact center industry realizing. The interactions via video calling are not (yet) owned by the contact center but rather by the CRM.

We have customers that have 200-400 contact center agents and over 3.000 video agents. Whilst the contact center is answering inbound service calls, emails and chats, the video agents are selling high-margin products and services. 

We see our customers deeply integrating video as they scale the channel. At the moment, the typical integration point is with the CRM, whereas, in my opinion, it could just as well be with the contact center software. This does however requires a different definition of the contact center.

My 2 cents - let’s change how we see the (role of the) contact center

Whether video CX will find its way to the contact center is not dependent on whether video will reach scale. Trust me, it will. It depends on how we see the contact center. 

If we continue to see the contact center as a call center handling inbound support requests, video will remain insignificant. There’s no value in video for basic questions about your bank account or a purchase you’ve made. But if we start seeing the contact center as the heart & soul of all customer interactions, including those interactions happening decentrally in branches or even from your employees’ homes, there’s a whole world of customer interactions that the contact center has been missing out on. Then the scheduled, high-value, high-complexity personal interactions that we used to do face-to-face and have now transitioned to video also belong in the contact center.

In the coming years contact centers will transform from massive centralized call center floors to digitally connected, truly omni channel, specialized capability hubs. In that vision, video no longer gets a ‘Nay’ but a loud and clear ‘Yay’.

How do you feel about video for the contact center?