Introducing Digital 'Advisory Services': A New Way to Use Visual Engagement to Drive Revenue
The use of visual engagement technology is not a foreign concept to many enterprises. Solutions like screen sharing and co-browse have long been staples in contact center operations, where agents use visual engagement to deliver a much more personalized and efficient service. This has resulted in faster resolution times, higher Net Promoter Scores, more productive agents, and reduced contact center costs. Every single one of these metrics matter to contact center managers, who are constantly challenged to reduce costs while simultaneously defending the brand and keeping customers happy.
Too Boring for the Board Room?
Do these benefits in the contact center represent the total value of visual engagement to the enterprise? Are businesses deriving the maximum impact of visual engagement just by achieving contact center efficiencies?
The candid answer is most assuredly “no.”
Businesses that deploy visual engagement specifically in the contact center are surely reaping tangible benefits, but these successes often do not register with executives outside of customer care operations. It’s a mundane topic for the boardroom, where executives are more focused on strategic initiatives like growing revenue, building loyalty and lifetime customer value, and becoming the disruptive force in your competitive market.
However, the common perception of visual engagement as a contact center-only tool is about to turn completely around. Market leaders in technology, financial services, healthcare, retail, business services, and other markets are using visual engagement to digitally transform “advisory services”—the digital delivery of consultative services such as wealth management consultation, CPA services, medical consultation, and concierge sales services—creating an entirely new digital channel to efficiently sell products and services, deepen customer relationships, and grow revenue.
Advisory Services: Taking Visual Engagement to the Next Level
On an elemental level, visual engagement empowers an enterprise to create a much more intimate and effective conversation with digitally connected customers. There’s no logical reason that this capability should reside solely within the contact center. Other essential workgroups—inside sales, account managers, financial advisers, consultants, medical professionals, and so on—can easily leverage the profound benefits gained by integrating visual engagement solutions into their apps, websites, CRM systems, and customer engagement infrastructures.
Through the integration with an enterprise’s digital customer connection points, knowledge workers can walk customers and prospects through a consultation using screen sharing, mobile app sharing, and co-browse. They can highlight key onscreen elements and answer questions in real time. The webcam or mobile device camera can even be used to show the friendly face of the knowledge worker throughout the discussion, building trust and raising satisfaction scores, or to show something from the end user, like range of motion for an elbow injury, or the room in which a to-be-purchased sofa will be placed. Visual engagement delivers a much more heightened level of service that demonstrably resonates with consumers.
Total Access, No Friction
The best advisory services solutions enable agents and consultants to immersively engage consumers without any friction. This means that every visual engagement session can be launched with the click of a button and be accessible to customers on any device and on any operating system without requiring a disruptive download. The user experience for the customer and the agent should be consistent across all digital channels.
Advisory services should integrate with the enterprise CRM or back-office systems that give the representative immediate access to customer histories that display preferences, propensities, and past experiences. Likewise, with proper integration, every consultation session can be automatically logged in the CRM. And these solutions must have the highest degree of data privacy and security to ensure that all personal information and payment details are protected.
The Transaction: Removing a Major Point of Friction
The ultimate goal of delivering advisory services via visual engagement is to close a business transaction—without inserting unnecessary complications into the interaction. Because visual engagement can be embedded into a desktop, browser, or mobile app, the knowledge worker can transition smoothly from presenting a proposal to guiding the customer to perform digital transactions based upon the recommendations provided in the conversation. This is incredibly powerful and sets visual engagement for advisory services apart from the common virtual meeting. A visual engagement solution tailored to the agent’s workflow and the customer’s digital engagement channel can close the loop and directly boost transactions, revenue, and lifetime customer value.
Visual engagement has long been a staple of the contact center, but leading businesses are quickly appreciating its value as a solution that grows revenue and builds loyalty and lifetime customer value. Digital transformation of advisory services engagements can become a significant point of competitive differentiation as a new and appealing channel. As businesses evaluate these technologies to create their own advisory services, they should look to cloud-based offerings that maximize ease and access, mitigate friction, comply with data privacy and security policies, and integrate with existing core systems. Once these solutions are implemented, and revenues climb, there’s every indication that visual engagement will get the attention from the executive suite that it richly deserves.
Tom Martin has served as chief executive officer for Glance Networks since 2013, and is responsible for the company’s strategic direction, market expansion initiatives, and development activities. Under his tutelage, he has guided Glance from a small business screen share tool into a global provider of omnichannel visual engagement solutions for some of the world’s largest enterprises.