Remote visual support is a way of harnessing technologies such as live video and augmented reality (AR) to provide remote support for your customers. For some businesses, it's an efficient way of providing real-time support for customers when they most need it. For example, if you have a customer who needs tech support, they can see and engage with your tech support team using a smartphone, smart glasses, tablet, or PC and your tech team can see exactly what they are doing and what the problem is. Providing remote support in this way has real potential for many businesses in the new post-Covid world of work.
Since the emergence of Covid last year, the world has been forced to adapt. For many companies, this means that staff is now working from home. Although there are advantages to working from home, there are also challenges, often involving technical problems that need to be resolved remotely. In addition, customer support teams can work very efficiently from home. This can work well for employees as they don't have to commute but also for businesses as it is more cost-effective to have staff working from home if they don't need to be in the office. For small companies in particular, there are several pros and cons of remote working but, in general, the benefits seem to outweigh the negatives. We'll explore the pros and cons in a bit more detail here.
Remote working has a number of challenges such as:
Small businesses, in particular, need to provide high-quality customer support - one of the reasons why some use qualitative customer service to monitor the value of their customer service. It does without saying that any business that provides poor customer service hinders their chance of attracting more customers. Happy customers mean referrals which means more business.
Quality customer service is all about communication - building a good relationship between the business and its customers. Remote visual support tools can help you achieve that end.
This is why in recent years there has been a move to increase customer satisfaction using visual assistance tools - basically tools that allow customer support teams and technicians to connect to a remote device through the internet. This solves customer problems promptly and also saves your business time and money. Using video, technicians and customer service agents have access to what their customers are actually seeing. This helps agents resolve customer requests faster - important from both the customer service point of view but also a big timesaver for your staff and business.
Once you integrate a visual support tool with your business's IT ecosystem, you can keep a record of each customer's interactions and any problems they might be dealing with. You also have the ability to archive video interactions with screenshots and chat conversations which can be valuable. You can also use this information to create tutorials so that customer support agents can resolve frequently occurring problems. They can look through problems that someone else has dealt with in the past and respond quickly. These archives are also useful for getting new support staff up to speed. They can be used for training and for understanding the most common problems customers face.
For businesses that provide support for customers, especially those who have customers over a large geographical area, remote visual support solutions are worth considering. Also, these systems may benefit companies that have a large number of employees working from home. We hope this overview has given you some food for thought.
by Henri De Braquilanges | 27 Sep 23