How support centers can boost their efficiency and drive customer satisfaction rates up with video assistance

Only 9% of customers are able to resolve their issues via self-service, reports Gartner. That leaves the remaining 91% having to contact a technician or a support center directly to find a solution to their problem. The conclusion is simple - when it comes to customer support, there are currently very few alternatives to actual human contact.

It would seem that, in order to build an efficient support center, one should shift their focus from minimizing the human factor to providing agents and technicians with better, more effective tools that answer their professional needs. One of such solutions, which is recently seeing a spike in popularity, is live video assistance. Let us take a look at how it can influence business goals, KPIs, customer satisfaction rates, and more.

More time- & cost-effective contact

How exactly does video assistance improve customer support efficiency? One of the ways to calculate it is by comparing the number of truck rolls. Businesses that have been using video assistance have noted from 19% to 50% fewer technician dispatches as compared to before implementing this solution. That means a company handling 500 service calls a day, with an average travel time of half an hour, could save up to 980 hours each week. It is equal to hiring twenty-four full-time specialists - and it is not hard to imagine how many issues they could resolve during that time.

The same goes for No Fault Found dispatches, when a technician is sent for an on-site inspection, but the issue takes less than five minutes to resolve. Although it is difficult to calculate the average NFF rate (and some companies admit to not measuring it at all), for some business areas, it can be as high as 20%. If customers reporting such cases had the means to immediately contact an agent or technician ready to share their knowledge and offer explanations, that number is sure to decrease.

Another factor to consider is reaction time. When it comes to faulty products, customers are known to lose their patience easily - but with video assistance, they get an immediate solution or diagnostics. And even if an on-site repair is unavoidable, video assistance can still speed this process up. For example, it eliminates the need to dispatch a technician just so they can take a look at the device, decide a new part should be ordered, and schedule another visit in a week or two when the spare arrives.

Increasing satisfaction rates

Personal, face-to-face contact is crucial in building long-lasting customer relationships and creating a brand that people will want to revisit. Proof? Microsoft’s research shows that 30% of customers became frustrated with their customer service experience because they were not able to reach a real person when they needed to. Video assistance is the way to put the human touch back into remote customer support and to avoid impersonal conversations or tedious attempts to explain the issue over the phone.

The numbers seem to prove that - contact centers that have introduced video customer service have noted an impressive 30% to 45% NPS increase.

While a higher NPS score is already a notable improvement, there is more video assistance can offer - including a boost to employees’ morale. We are talking about one of the biggest challenges of working in any support center - handling difficult customers. It is natural that issues within a product can sometimes evoke strong emotions - but when a customer cannot see the person they are talking to, it often acts as a catalyst for anger. During a video call, however, they can see the facial expressions and gestures or make eye contact with the agent. When clients are aware that they are interacting with an actual human being, it becomes much easier to de-escalate the conflict and successfully resolve the issue.

Environment-conscious approach

Customer contact often results in a need to dispatch a technician or ship a product to a repair center. While sometimes this is unavoidable, it is crucial to remember that transport and shipping is one of the main sectors contributing to greenhouse gases emission. In the US alone, 28% of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere comes from transportation - more than from all of the country’s power plants combined.

Reducing that number is in everyone’s best interest, and video assistance tools are already helping businesses achieve that goal. One of the major global companies admitted in their promotional material that switching to remote video assessment has saved their employees from driving a total of 6.3 million kilometers. If they decided to travel by car instead of using a video call platform, they would have released over 20 600 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere - as much as a European town does in a year.

Visual assistance for customer support

Video assistance provides contact centers or field service companies with tools to make their customer support more efficient. Its benefits include:

• Lowering technician dispatch rate - even 50% fewer truck rolls
• Reducing travel time and costs
• Fewer NFF dispatches
• Improving customer satisfaction rate even by 45%
• Reducing greenhouse gasses emission by thousands of tonnes.
  

This makes software for visual communication with customers a must-have addition to the company’s toolkit for any result-driver businesses.