ROI of Video Collaboration is Larger, When It Faces Customers

Collaboration for employees has long been the driver of ROI for innovative companies. Companies started using video collaboration to increase that ROI, and they can grow it even larger by using it with customers as well.

The value of video collaboration

Companies use video in collaboration, because it helps them:

• make faster decisions
• improve employee decisions
• provide a more personal experience
• improve teamwork within and across departments
• exchange ideas seamlessly.

Essentially, face-to-face (F2F) video allows high-growth companies innovate quickly.

Also, using video in meetings help companies get the following benefits:

• build trust and positive relationship
• facilitate stronger customer relationship & engagement
• make decisions faster
• keep the team focused and minimize multi-tasking
• help participants retain important information.

Interestingly, the reasons late adopters seek video collaboration is because they want to catch up with the market leaders in terms of decision making and innovation speed. This might explain the discrepancy in new technology adoption I wrote about earlier.

Using video collaboration with customers

The Techaisle research on video collaboration (PDF) found that SMBs can companies can achieve higher ROI, when employees use video collaboration not only with their coworkers, but also with their customers:

The key ROI drivers of video collaboration within departments.
Source: the Techaisle’s whitepaper, “Video-enabled collaboration and business growth: a winning combination”.

Turns out, video collaboration also helps customers in the same way it helps coworkers by:

• building trust and relationships by providing rich in-person experience
• providing better customer support
• achieving high customer satisfaction and retention.

The Techaisle’s research ends with 2 conclusions:

1. Using video collaboration is not about generic upgrades, but a matter of achieving business goals.
2. The data shows that using collaboration is clearly better, than not, and that using video in various functions across the company helps that.

and an inspirational quote:

Pursue the outcomes associated with high-growth, highly innovative businesses. Don’t settle for the outcomes, objectives and technologies targeted by low-growth firms. If collaboration is important to business success – and the data presented here clearly shows that it is – it’s important to align collaboration strategy, activities and investments with the best case outcomes of high levels of business growth and innovation.

Using video chat to improve customer experience

In 2015 Gartner predicted that by 2018 100 of 500 largest companies would’ve used video chat.

“Video chat provides customers with a richer sense of presence, personalized experience by helped coordination of communication and the support of emotional expression, and the real-time sharing of content,” said Brian Manusama, research director at Gartner.

Since customers are becoming more and more familiar with video chat themselves, companies should probably provide this channel to their customers.

While a 2011 Forrester study said that:

• 80% of customers prefer to reach support by phone
• only 7% and 8% prefer to use web chat first or when phone isn’t available,

whole 36% of customers said they’d have liked to use live video to talk with a contact center agent.

If you choose to follow Techaisle’s advice to start using employee and customer collaboration now, then it might be a good idea to look for a customer-facing video chat right now.

If you want to see our click-to-call video chat in action, try it live between 3am and 12pm GMT or schedule a demo, where our expert can help you define, how best to use it in your business case.