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Customer Video Calls: Go Beyond the Skype Vs. Zoom War

We saw many businesses switching to a remote working setup during the COVID-19 pandemic while governments have been supportive in enabling remote work. Some of these businesses might never have imagined working from home due to multiple reasons, like infrastructure limitations, nature of the business, security concerns, and the list can still go long. However, sitting today we can say that many of them adapted well to these changes. An obvious factor in the success of this transition is the use of technology.

We saw employees relying on video conferencing apps to have their standup meetings as an alternative to traditional usual face-to-face interactions. Video conferencing tools, such as Zoom, Skype, Google meet, etc. made things somewhat easier, but do they address every challenge when it comes to building a relationship with customers?

Challenges with Basic Video Calling Software: Contact Center Perspective

While most businesses have found themselves in arguments over which is better among Zoom, Google Meet, and Skype, there has been negligence towards unscheduled walk-in meetings by customers. These tools enabled employees to connect with each other virtually, but they have their own limitations – especially when the customer wants to initiate a call. Some of the challenges of using these basic video meeting solutions are:

Lack of integration with your CRM for a unified view
No agent monitoring or quality check available
No option to route the incoming video call to the most qualified agent
Lack of proper collaboration mechanism – no call transfer

This is where contact centers need to up their game and adopt channels beyond voice and texts. Looking at these challenges it is safe to say that contact centers need more than these basic video meeting/conferencing solutions – they need something more sophisticated and advanced that helps them up to their customer experience game, improve customer satisfaction and boost loyalty.

The Need for Video-Enabled Contact Center

Contact centers have to handle numerous customers in a day. The agents are busy throughout the day managing (inbound) customer support requests while also working towards increasing their sales conversions (in an outbound call center). This leaves little room for experimentation and those standardized responses can more often than not spoil the customer experience.

That’s where video-enabled contact centers come into the picture. Having video chat added as a communication channel to your existing omnichannel customer engagement strategy can be the best thing that you can do today. If this pandemic has taught us anything, it is to make the most of every situation. The same goes for this new technology. Customer-centric organizations that take resolving customer queries quickly and effectively without compromising on their experience have already adopted this technology.

The question remains – when can we leverage video chat the best for their business?

When Visual Assistance is Important

Video calling particularly comes in handy when dealing with situations when showing is better than telling. For instance, if the customer/caller is stuck on assembling a product, it would be much better to show them how the product is assembled rather than just telling them over a voice call or sending a product manual. Similarly, in the case of elderly care, video live assistance will be easier and more effective than written directives.

When Delivering High-end Customer Support

No business wants to mess around with their high-value customers. They want to make an extra effort to delight these HNI (High Net-worth Individual) customers. So, rather than making them wait in a queue or having to bounce around for answers, it is better to have their relationship manager get on a video call with them and resolve the issue faster. This is particularly useful in the banking industry where the relationship manager can view the customer’s financial portfolio using CRM and other digital banking systems to better understand the concern and provide an effective solution.

When Dealing with Sensitive Customer Information

We all have gotten photocopied of our address proof, or identity, or some other document for one verification or another. This is not just inconvenient but a security concern too. You might lose some important documents or someone gets hold of your personal information that can be disastrous. Now, imagine you can get these documents verified, authenticated, and approved virtually – while sitting at your home or workplace. Won’t that be more secure and convenient?

When Making Decisions about a Product or Service

Humans usually like to research, think, check out options before making the purchase – especially if it’s a big investment. Being able to show them the product, or even give a live demo increases the chances of purchase than an email or a website browse. Similarly, visual representation helps in a better understanding of the customer while allowing them to resolve any doubts there and then.

Benefits of Video Contact Center

Now that we have seen where all video chat can be useful for businesses, let us also look at some of the benefits of having a video-enabled contact center.

Humanize your Customer Support

Video chat software for contact center allows you to bring the human touch to your customer interactions. When the customers/prospects can see your agents, it instills a sense of accountability. They can now put a face to the person rather than being a voice on the phone or just an email signature.

Reduce Operational Cost

By eliminating the need to physically go meet the prospects you can face face-to-face discussion over a video chat. At the same time, you get to save up on spending on toll-free numbers and can actually route your incoming video chats via your website or the mobile application.

Decreased Complaints and Higher FCR

By converting your voice calls into video calls, you are not just improving your First Call Resolution (FCR) rate but also easing things for the customers. Reduced wait time, average call duration, and collaborating with visitors to share documents and co-completing forms further help to ensure first contact resolution.

Immediate Gratification and Feedback

When visitors or customers are happy with the service experience, they tend to give more positive feedback. This also provides the agents with an opportunity to get the feedback while on the call rather than after. This ensures more customers provide the feedback and since all of these video calls are recorded, the supervisors can always verify the score.

Video Sales Consultations

Armed with both verbal and non-verbal cues, the agents are in a much better position to boost their sales conversions. More so, when the customer has reached out themselves. This is an amazing opportunity to cross-sell or upsell – especially if you are dealing with complex products or services. At the same time, by allowing people to schedule the video call at their preferred date and time further adds to the whole experience. That shows you care about the customer rather than shoving your product down their throat.

Omnichannel Customer Experience

One of the most effective ways to ensure customer delight is by offering them convenience. If you make it easy for them to reach you on the channel of their choice, if you provide them timely updates about their request or proactively help them with support – your customers will love your brand. All of this is possible by having an omnichannel ticketing system that for eg., creates a ticket for every interaction, irrespective of the channel of communication. That combined with CTI integration allows the agents to access all the customer details and have contextual conversations.

Quality Monitoring and Analytics

Last, but not least is the ability to track the conversation quality and monitor agent performance. A video contact center software allows the supervisors to view video call recordings, monitor the stats on live dashboards, and even provides them with comprehensive reports to draw actionable insights. Having all these data points, empowers the managers to identify the gaps and plan an effective strategy to meet their goals and improve overall efficiency.

Skype and Zoom Might be Good… But there is Something Much Better

There is no doubt that the Zooms and Skypes of the world have enabled organizations to handle virtual meetings during the pandemic. But then they are just that – video conferring tools. Which might be good for your routine sync ups or meetings. However, when we talk about ROI, generating revenue, and increasing sales – it requires something much better. It calls for a holistic and advanced video call center solution to drive exceptional customer service experience at every touchpoint.

Google’s Business Messages: A New Way to Convert Your Prospects Faster from Google Search and Maps

The COVID-19 consumer is forced to stay indoors to avoid getting impacted by the pandemic. In such a scenario, digital/online mediums are the go-to advertising channels for all businesses to connect and engage with this consumer.

As per SmartInsights, Search is still the most important channel driving 68% website traffic, of which organic search contributes to 40% while paid search contributes to 28%

Nearly 46% of all Google searches are seeking local information. The importance of local search will continue to grow with 4 in 5 consumers using search engines to find local information as per Think with Google. Moreover, 18% of local smartphone searches led to a purchase within a day, whereas only 7% of non-local searches led to a sale.

So, how do you convert this organic local traffic faster without increasing the call volume? This is where Google’s Business Messages comes into play.

First, let’s understand what Google’s Business Messages is and how it can help you see unprecedented growth in acquisition and faster conversions.

What is Google’s Business Messages?

According to Google, “Google’s Business Messages is a mobile conversational channel that combines entry points on Google Maps, Search, and brand websites to create rich, asynchronous messaging experiences.”

It adds a “Message” icon to Google Search & Maps on Android devices and allows consumers to initiate a quick conversation with brands using a bot and live agent.

With Google’s Business Messages, you can respond to prospects’ queries in real-time using Human and Artificial intelligence – bot/automation and live agents to convert them to customers ultimately.

When you engage your prospects and customers in two-way relevant conversations and help them with required local information, they trust your business. This results in improved customer acquisition, high customer satisfaction (CSAT) rates, a measurable decrease in call volume, and of course, quick resolutions.

Which Businesses Should Opt for Google’s Business Messages?

Businesses across different industries can find Business Messages exceptionally beneficial for its rich features like carousels, suggested replies, and photos that enhance customer service and support. It lets you expand the conversation to drive loyalty, purchasing, scheduling, and upselling.

Few industries with examples of brands using Google’s Business Messages are as follows:

Financial Services- E.g., Bajaj Finance (Note: Open links on Android device or Google Maps on iPhone)
Insurance – E.g., Bajaj Allianz General Insurance
Healthcare – E.g., Metropolis Lab
Ecommerce – E.g., Netmeds
Retail – E.g., Fabricspa

When you integrate Google’s Business Messages with a contact center software, you enable your customers to reach out to you directly from Google Search, which otherwise is a multi-touchpoint journey since they search for your business, find your website, fill up a form there and then keep waiting for an executive to return to them. This process might be frustrating at times when a customer would want to hear from you sooner.

Remember, as customers, we all are impatient and expect immediate responses from businesses, be it a purchasing or a support query. Companies that meet these expectations in a quick and meaningful way build strong relationships with their customers. And for this, businesses prefer to have a proactive chat channel to interact with their customers, resolve queries faster, and witness a remarkable improvement in conversions. Google’s Business Messages is highly recommended for such businesses.

Benefits of Business Messages

Connect Directly with your Local Business Searchers

Local searches can turn into high conversions if responded with appropriate and insightful information. This is a unique opportunity that can lead your business to improve your overall experience for local prospects.

Answer Queries in Minimum Time

You can serve more queries via messaging and even integrate a bot for common or usual questions to save your agents’ time; however, the bot can transfer the chat to a live agent for precise resolution in minimum time for complex queries. With Ameyo’s omnichannel customer engagement platform in place, you can implement intelligent routing algorithms.

Boost Customer Acquisitions

Since it is the most comfortable and most convenient way a prospect can get in touch with your business, you can resolve their queries while sending relevant attachments (images, gifs, videos) with its rich media support. This builds trust and reliability in your prospects and improves your customer acquisition.

Witness Faster Conversions

Business Messages enables you to answer business queries in real-time and build trust with your prospects by showing expected wait times, name, and a picture of the live agents, which allows your customers to know that it is a human-to-human interaction. This enhances your brand reputation and gets you higher and faster conversions.

Google’s Business Messages is built on a sheer understanding that customers expect a seamless, smooth, and convenient way to connect with your business, and that’s why it leverages you with exactly that and even more with these additional capabilities.

Customize your Welcome Messages
Receive Notifications
Update your Business Hours
Add Photos
Respond to Reviews
Add Agents’ Profile Name and Picture

The Business Advantage: Why Ameyo for Google’s Business Messages

One Platform for All Channels, Including Business Messages

It is essential to have a unified view of all queries coming through different interaction channels. This saves your agents’ time by avoiding any need for toggling between different screens or interfaces and adds to their productivity. Ameyo’s omnichannel customer engagement platform helps you optimize the customer experience across the entire conversion journey from Message to Bot to a Human Agent.

Solutioning Expertise

Ameyo has been recognized as a reliable name in the contact center space for over 17 years now. With advanced contact center technology, the intuitive platform empowers you with distinguished monitoring and supervising capabilities to keep a stringent track on your business operations. You can manage and monitor all your Business Messages queries through Ameyo’s robust contact center software.

Implement in Less Than 5 Minutes

Ameyo’s cloud offering for Google’s Business Messages empowers you to get started in less than 5 minutes.

The Enterprise Security Shield

We understand our customers’ potential privacy issues; Ameyo is PCI DSS compliant with certified public cloud environments across India, Asia Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East regions. We are ISO 27001 as well as ISO 27018 certified to offer end-to-end security.

‘Pay as You Go’ Option

Ameyo offers a ‘pay as you go’ payment model to reduce the CAPEX costs and scale in a cost-effective way as per your business requirements.

Trusted by Global Brands

2,000+ brands across 21 verticals have trusted Ameyo in 60+ countries, including marquee brands like HDFC ERGO General Insurance, Sridhar Insurance, Apollo Health and Lifestyle, Zolo, BYJU’S, D.Light, STC Channels, LR Data, SP Madrid, Toppr, Jubilant FoodWorks, Spice Money, Rebel Foods (Faasos), and VistaPrint

To conclude, Google’s Business Messages can prove out to be a valuable tool for a business. Direct messaging with the power of influencing local searches can get you an immensely improved customer acquisition, faster conversions, as well as a strong brand reputation with excellent customer experience. So overall, it offers you an excellent return on investment and is a truly recommended new engagement channel for businesses.

Why should you move from Legacy PBX to Modern Contact Center Software?

If your legacy PBX system is making it difficult for you to keep up, resulting in poor customer experience, it’s time that you upgrade to a modern contact center software. Now, you do not want to rely on an age-old system that is just because the installation is cheap.

The world of contact centers has come a long way. Businesses are transitioning from legacy PBX with Phone systems to a modern contact center because of high inefficiency, lesser hardware and maintenance costs, and exceptional customer experience. If you are experiencing low agent productivity, heavy IT dependence, high turnaround time, broken customer experience, and inefficient or siloed interaction channels, then you need to upgrade your legacy PBX system to a modern contact center software.

So, before you think of sticking to a PBX system, here’s what you need to ask yourself and your team:

Do you want your teams to be doing more in less time?
Do you want to fast track your telesales and collections process?
Are you a no-excuse customer experience provider?
Do you want to convert more and sell more with automated software?

If yes, then read along as I walk you through the reasons why you should have moved to an Omnichannel Customer Engagement Platform and let go of your PBX, yesterday.

Provide an Omnichannel Customer Experience vs Voice only PBX

According to the Aberdeen Group, businesses that provide consistent customer service quality across multiple channels will retain 89% of their customers.

And while I am just stating the obvious here, providing omnichannel customer experience is the key to deliver an experience that the customers demand. Reaching to the customer service department of your brand should be effortless for the customers.

If a customer is requesting immediate assistance, they will look through their most preferred/used channel. Instead of putting the customer on hold for long, you can simply provide the customer with a chat channel such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to find a quick resolution to their problem.

How is it going to solve your problem? Your brand will then get to increase First Contact Resolution (FCR) and reduce the Average Handling Time (AHT). It is really not an option for you to provide a broken customer experience.

Reduce the Cost of Service with AI Readiness

You must be experiencing a surge of almost 30-40% in inbound call volume for the past six months. So, what’s your solution? Are your agents doing more in less time, or are they overloaded with calls each minute of the day?

Augmenting Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in your communication stack can streamline your customer interactions. Integrating chatbot and voice bot can resolve 80% of first-level queries, even without human intervention. This will significantly save your agents’ critical time while bot solves most of the first-level queries.

And it is not limited to that. It gets better with infusing human intelligence, allowing the bots to transfer complex queries to an agent, providing an end-to-end solution to the customers.

According to Forrester, 63% of customers are happy to be served by a chatbot if there is an option to escalate the conversation to a human.

With a chatbot or voice bot, you can serve more customers with fewer agents in less time, thus reducing the cost and delivering superior customer experience.

Automated Dialer Technology to Save Agents’ Time

Your current legacy system does not provide automated dialing flexibility, and the agents are, more often than not, stuck with manual dialing.

With a modern contact center software, you can increase your agents’ efficiency as the dialer takes care of mundane tasks. It increases your connect rates and conversion rates for outbound calls. An auto dialer filters the calls with answering machine detection (AMD) to connect the agents only when a human answers the call. This helps the agents focus on quality leads and skip the part where they have to wait for a busy tone, call not answered, or answered by machine to jump to the next call.

By automating the calling process, you can see a dramatic improvement in agents’ efficiency and fast track your telesales and collection process.

CRM Integrations to Preserve the Context of the Conversation

Take my word; customers do not like to repeat their problems to 10 different agents. If a customer’s call needs to be transferred from one department to another, it should be flawless. But, if your legacy system does not incorporate an integrated communication channel, the conversation’s context gets lost, leading to poor customer experience.

Now, with CRM integration, your agents can transfer the context of the conversation, ensuring that the customers do not have to repeat their problem. Additionally, the agents can gather the context from previous interactions and provide a disposition or outcome of the call for future references within the CRM.

This is achievable when you transcend from a legacy contact center to a modern approach.

How to Deliver Differentiated Customer Experience with Video Contact Center?

We live in a world where connecting with friends, family, colleagues, and brands have become more critical than ever. Now that the world has lost the privilege of physical meetings, the communication between brands and consumers is reduced to voice and digital channels. People today are shopping for clothes online, booking a consultation with doctors online, and even requesting for opening an account digitally. The physical interactions removed from the picture have invariably affected consumer behavior, and now consumers seek remote human interactions with the brands.

While existing communication channels like voice calls, chat, email, and bot can’t replace the physical meetings, a Video Customer Service Software is the closest to bridge the face to face meeting void. Video chat has been a part of our interactions then why not implement it for business to consumer communications?

Different business verticals like Edutech, Healthcare, BFSI, and BPOs are transitioning towards and adapting to the digital channels where Video Contact Center will play a leading role in customer engagement.

Video-powered Contact Center will play an important role in digital sales, relationship management, and customer service. Few verticals that can be early adopters of Video chat are Edutech for discussions with parents about learning programs for their child’s future and BFSI vertical for personal discussions during a loan approval process or relationship management.

Prince Singh, VP, Product Management, Ameyo Tweet

Let’s, without wasting time, discuss how businesses around the globe are benefiting from Video CC.

Video Contact Center Solution for Education Sector

The education sector is going through a paradigm shift post the COVID-19 outbreak. The shelter-in-place teaching has become the new normal as most of the schools and EdTech companies operate digitally.

Tech has begun to virtually bridge the educational gap, providing daily academic experience to the students, and creating a classroom environment. With a Video Contact Center, the schools can onboard students, engage with parents, and replicate the physical classroom environment.

Video Takes Centre Stage in the Banking Sector

For an anxious customer who has lost a debit/credit card, a mere chat or call will not solve the problem; video collaboration will.

Video supports highly critical or personal cases where the call center agents can build quality relationships with the customer, assuring them that their problem will be solved immediately. The agents can also share their screen or co-browse with the customers to assist with critical issues. Video communication, in itself, is a rewarding experience where customer satisfaction is significantly higher.

Banks enjoy higher FCR and NPS with video banking services.

Live Video Chat Platform for Healthcare

Connecting face to face from afar is the prime concern for most patients. A video call comes closest to the traditional patient-doctor interaction, helping the patients communicate with the doctors virtually from their homes’ comfort.

Now, this has manifold benefits for patients and doctors alike. Patients can seek support from their doctors from far apart, eliminating the need for traveling to meet the doctor physically. The patients can also share their reports using screen sharing; the doctors can closely monitor their health status and provide appropriate consultation.

With a Video Contact Center Software in place, the patients can easily schedule or initiate a video call, even with a low internet bandwidth of 150 kbps.

Video-Enabled Contact Center for BPO

With video chat, BPOs can go a step further by humanizing each customer interaction. Agents can engage with the customers on video chat to provide additional information and reduce the time to address their concerns. For instance, if a customer requests co-browsing with the agent to understand the features of a product, the agent can immediately share the screen and assist them.

In the Long Run

The value of customer service goes beyond text messages and voice calls. We are headed in an era on omnichannel customer engagement, and giving your customers the option of video chat can resolve their problems faster. Businesses realize that the contact centers can be turned into profit centers by implementing the right technology and video contact center to reduce cost primarily with the manifold benefits of improved FCR & NPS and increased efficiency with voice call analysis.

So, are you looking to set up a video contact center for your business? Book your demo to hear from our experts on a live call today.

Reimagining the Post-Pandemic World with an Outbound Call Center Software

The pandemic has brought in many challenges for us. The most common challenge includes, but is not limited to, sheltering-in-place and working remotely. With it, there’s a crippling effect on the economic slowdown and the higher competition is adding a new wrinkle to it. In times of crisis, if we can create technology to stay connected with our customers, we can win this game.

Mankind is more anxious today than ever before and the consumers are readily waiting for you to reach out to them with a probable solution. People do not visit bank branches anymore but they still need to apply for loans. Patients need to consult with their doctors for ongoing medical issues. Students still need a classroom environment to learn and grow.

And we cannot achieve that without an Outbound Call Center Software that helps the agents to reach out to their potential customers with ease.

So, how does an Outbound Call Center Solution make a compelling difference?

With an effective outbound contact center, your agents can ensure that the customers find the right solution to their problems without any delay.

Automate Remote Calling Process with an Outbound Dialer

Let the agents have meaningful conversations with the customers while the outbound dialer takes care of the manual tasks of dialing and connecting only answered calls to the agents.

With a dialer software for outbound calls, you can automate your dialing process and increase the call connect rate significantly, giving the agents extra time to have qualified conversations with the customers.

Reduce Manual Errors with Click-to-Call while Working Remotely

With click-to-call functionality, agents can place a call with just one click. Make your agents efficient with their work and reduce the possibility of manual errors.

Integrate your click-to-call solution with your CRM to place calls directly from the CRM and eliminate the need for switching between multiple tabs.

Now that agents are working remotely, they can place a call to their customers from their smartphones or desktop within the CRM.

Let the Remote Agents have Qualified Conversations with CRM Integration

Equip your agents with the right tools to excel at each interaction. Let them access customer information like past interactions, purchase behavior, unresolved complaints, etc. to ensure that they are not shooting in the dark. With this information, they can work on their script before reaching out to the customer and customize it according to the customer’s requirements.

For instance, if an agent is having an interaction with parents who are looking for the right course for their child, the agent can quickly take a glance at the information and prepare for the call to understand their concern.

The same agent could also be talking to a student who is looking for a PCMB course, the agent can have a different kind of interaction with the student, thus increasing the conversion rate.

Get Real-Time Insights with Comprehensive Remote Monitoring

Get real-time insights into call connect rates, campaign data, conversion rates, agents’ performance, etc. and make well-informed decisions like shifting agents between the queues. Analyzing the campaign performance can help you draw patterns like which product is compelling for the customers, what are their pain points, and what are their expectations from the product.

The supervisors can also do silent monitoring of the calls while snooping in and provide on-call assistance by whispering to help the agents qualify the conversations.

(Are you looking for an outbound call center software for your business? Schedule a demo today with our solution experts to learn more about it.)

Video Contact Center- The New Big Thing and It’s Top Benefits

Video contact center software is certainly the next big thing in the world of contact centers. Businesses are already opting for this miraculous customer service software to witness a bumping improvement in their customer service success rate. No matter what business, a video contact center can surely work wonders for you. A report from Delloite reveals, “As voice interactions are expected to drop from 64% to 47%, 31% of businesses think that approximately 8% of customer interactions will be conducted via video chat.”

Let’s quickly start with the major benefits a business can get with an advanced video call center software in place.

Enhanced Real-Time Customer Service

Enable personalized customer service with live video chat as an additional channel in your omnichannel contact center software. With Video Contact Center, a business enables its customers to initiate a real-time and personalized conversation regarding more sensitive issues. Face-to-face interaction with a live agent brings significant improvement in FCR (First Call Resolution), builds trust towards the business, and improves CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) rate.

High CSAT with Quick and Clear Resolution

Live video chat is a great way to enhance customer service by providing quick resolution to customer queries. Since it enables an instant and clear understanding of customer challenges and queries and is also backed up with show-and-guide methodologies, video chat makes it easier-to-understand for the customers. With the right video customer service software in place, your agents can quickly gauge the problems faced by the customers in lesser which otherwise takes a lot of time for a customer trying to explain the problem as well as the agent trying to explain the resolution steps over a voice call. A video chat in such a scenario can lead to a tremendous rise in the overall CSAT rate.

Hassle-Free Cross-Selling and Up-Selling

How a video contact center can help getting more sales is the question coming out from almost all business verticals. Well, the answer is- yes a video contact center software can get you immense opportunities for upselling and cross-selling to grow your overall sales. Here’s how. Video chat with a live agent yields to a deeper conversation about the customer query, which in turn fosters an environment of trust and credibility, building better business-customer relationships. For an instance, the co-browsing capability allows the customers to show exactly what they are browsing. This enables agents in a better position to suggest and guide on some add-on services and products without sounding over-zealous or salesy.

Increased Profits, Sales, and RoI

A video call center software can help you bring not only a significant increase in the first call resolution rate but a noticeable reduction in the average call handling times which together increase the overall profitability of your call center. It helps you align better with your customer expectations. To make this clearer, let’s consider an example of an e-commerce business. As your agent is in a live conversation with your customer, guiding them with their queries on your products, there are very chances that the customer will abandon the cart items. This will make your sales more efficient while increasing the customer satisfaction rate. Overall profitability, sales, and RoI get to see a dramatic increase having the right video contact center solution.

Increased Credibility

A video chat happens between a customer and a live agent who is skilled and has special expertise in the subject. It builds superior credibility when an expert is guiding you through your queries and dilemmas. The face-to-face conversation becomes more credible as the customer feels more comfortable talking to a real, knowledgeable person and can see the facial expressions and gestures of the agent. This adds to the business’s overall credibility as the customer can see the genuine efforts your agents are making to guide and resolve their queries.

Stay Ahead of the Competition

Video chat is a new-age feature of modern contact centers and most businesses are still unaware of its advantages and use-cases for various industries including Healthcare, EdTech, IT, BFSI, Consumer Electronics, Automobile, and Recruitment Firms. To stand out from the market competition and to build an unprecedented reputation of your business, this is the right time that you should learn more about this amazing capability and implement it in your contact center.

With all these definite benefits, there are many more to add to the list. I’m sure this blog helps you identify the areas where you can implement a video contact center solution to see a never before growth in overall sales and customer satisfaction. Ameyo keeps on bringing such advantageous products and solutions that can prove out to be the right fit for businesses as per their specific requirements. In case you want to see the features and capabilities of Ameyo’s Live Video Chat Platform, request a free demo right now!

Stay tuned for more updates on Video Contact Center, its advanced capabilities and features enhancements.

IRDAI Gives Nod to Insurers for Video KYC! Here is What you Need to Know?

COVID-19 has impacted every aspect of our lives and has impacted the overall growth of the country. The face-to-face interactions have reduced and to combat the repercussions of that, businesses are undergoing a digital transformation. Organizations are working towards a new normal, the contactless world with lots of virtualization and digitization.

Circumstances leading to Dwindling Growth of Insurance Industry

The Indian economy contracted by 23.9% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2020. This was due to the lockdown imposed in late March that got extended several times and resulted in pausing most economic activities. A significant and faster-growing sector of the Indian economy is services; comprising trade, hotels, transport, communication, financing, insurance, real estate, business services, and community services. It accounts for more than 60 percent of GDP. Due to the COVID aftermath, finance, real estate, and business services have declined by -5.3% apart from the other sectors like construction (-50.3%), hotels and transportation (-47%), and manufacturing (-39.3%) that recorded the biggest falls.

For everyone, this year is a year of survival. Private spending has shrunk by 26.7%. Wages and salaries are declining. People are thinking and investing in ‘here and now’ first to meet the essentials and then consider spending on long-term goals. When the GDP (gross domestic product) is not likely to do good, people are not focusing on committing long-term plans. One sector that got significantly impacted by the Covid-19 and the changing purchasing patterns of the common man is the insurance industry. The whole industry is facing turbulent times. People are becoming more aware of the importance of life insurance or general insurance but are not investing in policies right now. Moreover, as a relief measure for policyholders, IRDAI provided a grace period of two months to pay the premiums. All of this had a deteriorating effect on the insurance sector.

The Need for Video KYC

The major costs that are borne by an insurance industry involve the customer onboarding costs covering the costs in evaluating a lead and qualifying the lead through KYC. Onboarding customers is currently a time-consuming process and as the company has to appoint REs and send them for in-person visits, it becomes a high-priced process as well. Like any other financial institution, the insurance industry is concerned about things like money laundering, tax evasion, terrorist financing, and fraud in general. As a result of this, the growth of the insurance sector is dwindling.

With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing everyone into their homes, there is a growing need for a cost-cutting paperless system for insurance purchasing and KYC. This is to benefit the insurer as well as the end consumer. Similar to RBI Regulations for V-CIP, a system is required in the insurance sector where the person seeking the service never has to come in contact with the organization providing it.

IRDAI Regulations for Video KYC for Insurers

To counterbalance the deteriorating economic environment, supportive measures have been put in place by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI). In a circular sent to all general, health, and life insurance companies, the regulator said that companies can use a video-based identification process (VBIP) as a digital medium to improve the ease of completing the KYC process.

Certain rules have been laid out by the regulator that are as follows:

The authorized person performing the VBIP for KYC should record video.
A live photograph of the customer present for identification should be captured. The insurer should ensure that the photograph of the customer in the Aadhaar card matches with the person undertaking the VBIP.
The authorizing person has to ensure that the video is clear and the customer is easily recognizable.
The customer’s live location need to be captured through geo-tagging to ensure he or she is physically present in India.
The authorizing person has to obtain the identification information and has to ensure that the identification details in the Aadhaar match with the details furnished.
The insurer has to ensure that the conversation is taking place in real-time with a live customer. To do so, they will have to ask a sequence of questions involving human gestures from the person undertaking VBIP to make sure that the interactions are real-time.
To ensure security, the auditor will have to confirm the details collected via VBIP and validate them before the insurance is rolled out.

To Conclude

This process will be a game-changer in the insurance-buying experience. This will open the gates for complete digitization and cut on face-to-face meetings or paper signatures. The onboarding costs would get reduced drastically and will improve the overall experience of both parties. If you are an insurance provider, interested in exploring a robust and low-bandwidth solution for video KYC, then check Ameyo’s Video KYC Solution.

Interested to reduce your KYC completion cost by up to 90 percent with immediate video KYC deployment, talk to our experts now!

Why do you need an Agile Inbound Call Center Software for your Business?

Contact centers continue to be flooded with an increased inbound call volume by 30-40% demanding contact centers to be agile with the technology. Customer service, even before the pandemic, has been a priority for businesses to feed their customers with the right information and provide them with the solution before it escalates.

Today’s consumers are very anxious and it’s important for customer service providers to be empathetic. According to our study and interaction with customers across the globe, consumers look for a human to human interaction and it is essential to address the anxiety of these customers at earliest.

But, how to deliver measurable customer experience even during the pandemic?

To reassure the customers of safety and security, businesses need an agile Inbound Call Center Software to equip the agents to handle a high volume, high urgency customer queries. Customer queries ranging from simple complaints about delayed delivery of a product to complex queries that needs more time can be overwhelming for the agents.

Here’s what you need to deliver agile and better customer service:

Customer Service Automation

Did you know that you can resolve 80% of your routine queries with a chatbot or a voice bot without involving your agents? To suit customer requirements, you can integrate with a chatbot which is approximately 5 times faster than an agent. While the agents are dealing with complex queries, your automated bot will resolve first-level queries, providing breathing space to the agents.

Empathy is the Key

Even if your agents are well equipped with the tools to provide exceptional customer experience, empathy goes beyond that. For instance, if you have an unhappy customer at hand, there’s an opportunity for you to turn it into an excellent experience by reassuring them that your brand prioritizes their concern.

Train your agents to be well versed in empathy and ensure that the agents spend time listening to the customer’s concerns. While the pandemic has created anxiety, customers will remember the brands that turned up to provide excellent customer service long after the pandemic is over.

Stay Connected with your Agents

While most businesses are strategizing about dealing with the surge in call volumes, they often forget to provide support to the agents at this crucial time.

There’s enough pressure on agents to quickly resolve customer issues, team collaboration doesn’t have to be one of them. Provide on-call assistance to the agents, make it seamless for them to communicate with their peers or supervisors. Supervisors can jump in on a live call to help the agents when they are struggling to resolve any query, boosting their productivity and confidence.

An internal chat option works great where an agent can seek assistance from their managers instantly.

Don’t Miss Customers’ Calls

Because of the surge in call volume, many customers have to wait for a longer duration on the call, resulting in customer frustration. You can skip that with a well-crafted strategy. Provide customers with an option to request a callback from the agent while they are waiting in the queue. Converting the missed calls into outbound calls can effectively manifest your relationship with the customers, leaving no sign of bad customer experience.

And if a customer has reached out during non-office hours, you can play an automated message on IVR, ensuring that your agents will reach out to them at earliest, putting customer’s anxiety to rest.

Craft the Experience that you want to Sell

Customer service strategy does not have to be one-size-fits-all. Your agents should provide unique experiences to each customer and to do so, they need to be well acquainted with their concerns. Letting the agents have access to customer information like interaction history, purchase behavior, unresolved complaints, etc. can help the agents craft an experience that meets customer expectations.

Integrating your inbound call center solution with an in-house or third-party CRM application can allow the agents to retrieve customer information and cultivate a personalized experience for each customer.

In a Nutshell

The current pandemic has challenged the businesses across the globe to rethink and reboot their ages long customer service strategy, presenting many loopholes in the system. Starting from the challenge of inadequate infrastructure to business operations and team collaboration, businesses are now settling down with the soaring demands of the customers. Now is a great time for you to invest in an inbound call center software that stands out and has the capability to unlock any challenge.

(Are you looking for an Inbound Call Center Solution for your business? Talk to our experts and find the right solution today!)

Remote Contact Centers & Conversational AI – Restructuring CX in the Contactless World

In the contactless world, businesses are on the lookout for enhancing the customer experience with Remote Contact Center & Conversational AI.

In our JAPAC webinar, our speakers, Ravi Saraogi, Co-founder and President (APAC), Uniphore Software Systems, Kalidas Ghose, Vice Chairman & CEO, FE Credit, Bilegt Tumurkhuyag, CX Senior Specialist, Khan Bank, and Sachin Bhatia, Co-founder and Sales & Marketing Head, Ameyo, have unleashed the secrets to stay ahead of the pandemic.

Sachin Bhatia firmly believes that the problems in emerging markets need unique solutions. With this propelling thought, he goes on to say that empathy and personalization will be the new KPIs that businesses need to track while providing excellent customer service.

Q1 How to streamline Customer Experience in the post-pandemic world?

With the increased call volumes and decreased physical meetings, customers are more anxious today than ever before. And to handle this anxiety, businesses need to understand the value of human to human interaction. To the rescue is the world’s greatest technology: Conversational AI.

With conversational AI, you can provide the experience that your customers want while also enhancing agents’ efficiency and business productivity. Conversational AI helps you in the following ways:

Improves agents’ efficiency by assisting them on a live call and provides real-time suggestions
Resolves first-level or routine queries, helping agents focus on critical queries

On the subject of increasing business efficiency, Kalidas Ghose adds, “We would have needed 25-30% of more employees were required but AI solved our purpose.”

Q2 What are the top of the mind challenges that businesses face while working remotely?

During COVID-19, nearly all industries pivoted towards remote contact centers. But, there are significant challenges that need to be addressed. The biggest challenge that remains across industries is to build a high trust no excuse environment. While remote is here to disrupt the businesses, let’s look at the challenges and solutions.

Remote IT Governance

In a remote contact center, building a high trust environment is very important and to establish that, you need to be prepared with some of the challenges like agent reporting low internet connectivity, unsupportive devices, poor network, etc.

Now, what do you trust here, the network, the device, or the agent? While Work from Anywhere is becoming the New Normal, these challenges will continue to arise.

To identify the reasons for low productivity, you need a network & device management report that can help the call center managers track the agents’ activity, the health of the device, and the network problems.

Data Security

For businesses, the first priority is to protect the customer’s data. With Work from Anywhere becoming the norm, most contact center agents are using their own device to handle calling operations, putting customer’s data at high risk. Especially for BFSIs, data security is their primary concern.

Khan Bank, the largest commercial bank in Mongolia, equipped its agents with multiple layers of security and tools to monitor and protect customer information, using Ameyo’s Remote Contact Center Solution.

To further protect the data, you can restrict the call recording or screen capturing at various levels.

Virtual Onboarding & Collaboration

In a physical contact center environment, agents learned from their peers and managers without any barrier. The agents could freely ask their peers whenever they were stuck with any complex query. But, how do you share the tribal knowledge in a remote working environment? How do you onboard and train agents to be equipped with the right knowledge that they require to resolve customer queries?

The managers and supervisors can provide on-call assistance to the agents. Let the agents communicate with their peers using internal chat to help them resolve the customer queries and increase First Call Resolution rate.

Q3 Is Remote a reality or Hybrid a reality?

“In the time of need, if the technology is an enabler, people will latch into it,” says Ravi Saraogi. And with the latest technology, we can see that remote and hybrid present huge opportunities for tech-first businesses.

According to our contact center survey, 65% of people believe that the remote contact center is going to be the new normal in a post-pandemic world.

“With our 100% outbound agents working remotely, our telesales agents’ efficiency increased by 114%,” Bilegt Tumurkhuyag mentioned in the webinar.

He further adds, “With the help of Ameyo’s Automatic Dialer System our telesales agents are doing more sales and connecting to more customers now.”

Q4 How can we digitize more and maintain optimum quality for the calls that are transferred to agents?

“With almost 30-35% increased calls, the pressure on agents has also increased,” Ravi Saraogi mentioned in the webinar. “This has also led to an increase in average wait time for each customer, sometimes resulting in bad customer experience and lower customer satisfaction,” he adds.

What can you do to ensure that the customers do not wait for long in the queue and agents are also not burdened with a lot of calls?

Convert Inbound Calls to Outbound Calls

Our expert, Sachin Bhatia, has explained how converting inbound calls to outbound can help increase customer satisfaction. If the wait time has triggered a high number, you can play a message to give an estimated time to the customer for a callback. As we stated above that the customers are more anxious today than ever, this turns out to be really helpful for the customers.

Introduce a Digital Channel

While the customer is waiting in the queue, send them a message on WhatsApp, Chat, etc, and play a message that we have sent you a message, we hope that resolves your problem. If you have another query, you can write back to us on WhatsApp for your query. When a customer receives this message on their preferred channel, they are more likely to be open to chatting with the agent for their queries.

This, in turn, resolves the problem of increased call volume, minimizing it to a level where the agents can concentrate on critical issues and also helps increase customer satisfaction rate. You can also automate first-level queries using IVR, ChatBot, VoiceBot, etc. and help the agents resolve cases that require more attention using Conversational AI.

Q5 How is Remote Contact Center beneficial for business?

Working from anywhere is an opportunity for businesses to leverage technology and scale their business without compromising on efficiency and productivity. Contact centers are the only human interaction touchpoint between the customers and brands in the contactless world. Contact centers are going to play a pivotal role in sales, service, collections, and onboarding, providing an opportunity for businesses to move from cost centers to profit centers.

Remote CC can become a real game-changer for businesses:

Reduced Cost Pressure

With remote contact centers, businesses can reduce the cost of setting up an office, and investing in infrastructural facilities, amounting to approximately 12-15% cost of the contact centers. Providing the flexibility to work from anywhere can significantly reduce the cost pressure on contact centers.

Hiring Diverse Workforce

Businesses can hire from a large pool of talent across the geographies and verticals. This also presents opportunities for companies to scale up or down as per the business requirements without worrying about operational overheads.

For instance, a company headquartered in India is scaling its business in the Middle East can easily hire local people from the Middle East virtually and provide the local flavor to its ME’s customers.

Watch the Complete Webinar on Restructuring CX in the Contactless World

How Can Advanced Chat Solutions Uplift Your Customer Engagement?

COVID’19 Pandemic has changed the way we work and communicate with each other. Consequently, businesses are rapidly advancing their strategies to sustain and thrive in these turbulent times. While personal visits have taken a backseat, remote working, and online engagement is the new trend. During this time of intensified uncertainty and isolation, people look forward to digital channels as a quick means of communication. As a result of all of these, customer service organizations are struggling with unpredictable call volumes, troubled customers, raised levels of agent absenteeism, and a shift towards home-working.

Why are chat channels in Contact Centers attaining attention?

Contact centers these days are striving to provide satisfactory customer service in current business situations. As a quick escape to this, many organizations have started diverting their inbound traffic to chat platforms to support high volumes of parallel conversations better and to diverge phone calls to remote agents further.

In times of increased volume, a ticketing management system, or a customer engagement software with an effective chat platform in place can allow brands to cater to customers’ demands flexibly. With modern chat solutions, agents can build conversations around resolutions, not just sessions, whether the customer needs real-time help or extended help over several hours or days. Quick chat responses mean happy customers and a reduced burden on your customer success team. The logic behind this is straightforward – your customers resent waiting!

Now you must be having a lot of questions like How you can improve your customer’s chat experience? Or What all your ticketing management system needs to deliver remarkable results via chat?

Here are a few key turning points outlined below:

Intelligent Bot Integration: AI-based Bot integration with the routine chat platforms that are in working can automate mundane query handling. As a result, agents would be relieved from the regular queries, and they would have more time to revert to the complex ones. An agent can be assigned a chat that needs a more close conversation. The agent can have the entire context of the chat with a quick transfer of previous chat history. Furthermore, to help supervisors with better demarcation on chats handled by agents and by the bot, the dashboards can have separate widgets to notify Served, Missed, Not Responded chats for bot and agent. Extensive chat dashboards would help build the chat handling strategy and improve its effectiveness.
Powerful Internal Chat Option to Collab with your Team: Taking the example of the BPO industries, as in current times, they have moved their daily chat or call handling operations to available WFH solutions. Numerous customer support staff is directly working and doing login from their home locations. To get a one-on-one status update or to communicate an essential announcement to the agents about various things, supervisors or team leaders need an effective internal chat option. Supervisors, while relaying the message, require an acknowledgment of the broadcast messages to have active remote communication with their team and to check the status of message dispersal. Internal chat with fellow peers would also help the teams to collaborate better and perform as a team.
Comprehensive Chat Specific Dashboards: Contact center operations specialists often rely on traditional metrics — such as the average speed of answer and average handling times — to determine the effectiveness of their operations. While these statistics help in assessing how well agents are performing, it does not provide comprehensive information on the customer experience and agents’ productivity and overall operational efficiency. The market is changing; henceforth is the need to change the working strategy and the KPIs to check the effectiveness of it. Dashboards with a custom refresh time showcasing updated average wait time and average resolution time can help in planning the workforce allocation and their training to improve the numbers. Moreover, detailed analytics on the state of tickets, the users working on them, the source chat channel they came in through, all of these can help in planning the operational execution strategy, and how things need to be improved.
Streamlined Feedback Collection: One way to improve customer satisfaction is to send a follow-up email after the chat has ended or to ask customers for their feedback. This voice of customer data can be compelling. Ticketing dashboards providing a detailed view of data on CSAT score with a bifurcated count of feedback requested and count of feedback received can help improve the customer experience as well as the methods to collate more accurate feedbacks. It gives direction to the next plan of action with positive feedback meaning things are going right, but any passive or negative comments need an immediate address.

In the nutshell

Customer engagement via chat channels, be it Whatsapp, live chat, messenger, or twitter dm, is now a “must-have” communication point for any business. By enabling your customer journey with chat channels, you could provide more express customer support, and deliver more loyal customer experience. Considering that chat is one of the faster customer communication tools to implement, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be using it to serve your customers. Ameyo’s helpdesk ticketing system has all the advanced features that are needed to transform your customer experience via chat.

If you’re not using chat in your ticketing management system already, then now is an excellent time to start! Book your demo to hear from our experts on a live call today.