You don’t have to worry any more about whether or not video
chat is a true driver of revenue for
your business. That battle has been fought, and the war is over: video chat is
here to stay as a must-have feature for businesses, and your competitors are
adopting it faster than you think.
20%
of the top 500 corporations around the world are going to be using video chat
by 2018, according to research
performed by Gartner
If the biggest companies in the world are largely jumping on
video chat, then why isn’t your business? It may just be because you don’t have
a good reason to add it yet, but fortunately for you we’ve compiled a great
list of reasons why business owners should want
to take advantage of video chat to improve customer experience and drive sales.
It’s
More Convenient For Your Customers
At the end of the day, having live chat capabilities just
makes your customer’s lives easier. After all, the internet is all about making
things more convenient, and while online commerce is easy, getting answers to common
questions during the pre-sales process isn’t always as easy as it should be.
In fact, your customers already want video chat, even if
they aren’t aware of it yet. In research
conducted by Forrester, 44% of customers said that having
their questions answered by a live human during the purchasing process was the
number one feature that a website could offer. Remember that, almost half of your actual customers may
consider video chat more important than all the other features that you have on
your website combined.
It Increases
Overall Sales
Beyond being an important feature for your customers, having
live video chat increases the amount of sales that you are able to get for your
firm overall. Live chat is regularly
considered the best way for customers to get their questions answered
immediately, which improves conversions on your site in general.
The capability of online video chat to increase conversions
only improves the more complicated your product is. If you have an extremely
complicated product, or one that is high end, then having the ability to walk
through the product’s features and answer questions or solve problems with a
customer in real time is going to be a key driver in allowing you to get the
sale more easily.
It Cuts
Down On Your Expenses
If making more money from video chat wasn’t good enough, having
video chat capabilities can also cut down on your expenses as well. When video
chat is done properly, you can replace an expensive trip to meet a client with
an inexpensive video chat, or reduce the amount of times that you have to
interact with a customer during the sales or support process, reducing your
call center expenses.
The key to this is that you need video chat to work properly
in order for it to make an impact with your customers. This means that you need
to be careful when it comes to the quality of your chat. Frameworks like
WebRTC, which offer a secure method of video chat, are barebones when it comes
to their Quality of Experience (QoE) capability, which may compromise the video
chat between two networks of varying speed.
One way you can get around this is by using a more stable video
chat solution like Agora.io, which powers everything from language
learning applications to telemedicine solutions, and can handle poor connection
quality on either side of the video chat by virtue of its 65+ datacenters
throughout the world.
Tony Zhao, the CEO of Agora.io commented
in an interview that “Our 65+ data centers around the world create a
virtual overlay network on top of public Internet that optimizes routing and
transmission for real-time communications sessions. We are compatible with WebRTC
standards but also provide extra support including a powerful real time
communication backbone made up of our 65+ datacenters. Our proprietary routing
algorithms running inside those data centers support the QoE assurance required
for WebRTC applications. Agora also provides enhanced SDKs and codecs for iOS
and Android mobile devices.”
Providing a great quality of experience ensures that your
video chat actually does reduce
expenses, and that it doesn’t create a pain in your side and require more regular interactions with the
customer.
It Improves
Employee Collaboration
While most of this article is focused on the benefits that
can accrue when you use video chat to drive sales, offering this type of chat
on an internal basis can also do a lot to drive employee collaboration,
particularly across locations.
The International Journal of Business and Management states
that up
to 90% of communication is non-verbal, meaning that you are losing out on
90% of the communication that happens when you rely on text or audio to
interact within an office. Adding quality video chat is a great way to bridge
that gap and improve collaboration when video chat isn’t available.
Live
Chat Gives You An Edge On Your Competition
The ultimate goal of business is to create positive marks of
differentiation between you and your competition, and while up to 20% of the
top 500 companies are going to be using video chat by 2018, you have the opportunity
to implement this now.
You may not be one of the top 500 companies in the world,
which is even better, because you can all but guarantee that your competition
is also sitting on the sidelines and waiting to integrate video chat because
“no one else is doing it yet”.
