On Sunday this week Seth Godin published a post titled Please, go away. It talks about what we all feel when contacting customer care.
Hard to get to a live agent
Hard to get professional answers
He talks about how companies lose money by trying to save money and how they hurt their brand while doing that.
Seth also suggests some technical tips for a low cost way of improving the experience.
WebRTC will not save the day
WebRTC is a technology many associate to contact centers when asked to choose the one segment on which it will have the greatest impact.
I believe that bad user experience when interacting with customer care has nothing to do with technology and WebRTC will not make the difference.
The challenge is in the state of mind!
Most contact centers are making at most to move customers to other channels, website self service, user forums, Facebook, chat…just don’t call us.
The willing to invest in quality, professional agents and having enough of them is the first required step in improving customer experience.
Amazon demonstrated this in their Mayday button. While they are using WebRTC on their tablets, at least for the video part, they are using it as a media engine. Getting WebRTC to run on mobile devices is a challenge and they could have licensed a media engine instead. But all of these technical details and investments are the small part. Their biggest investment was in the people, getting enough well trained agents to answer these calls.
It’s not a one size fits all
While many contact centers are viewed by companies as a cost center thus, best would have been to get rid of them all together if that was possible, this is not always the case. The introduction of WebRTC based video calling to contact centers will first come in the following use cases:
- The contact center is used to drive sales and accelerate upselling – this is the easy use case
- Premium customer care is viewed as one of the company’s core values and competitive advantage of the company – requires forward looking and investment
- Selective premium service to high value customers
The segments and companies that fit into one of these cases are those who should be first on your list when trying to offer WebRTC based services for contact centers.
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