It’s no secret that due to the increasing number of screens in the average American’s life, visual engagement is becoming paramount in sales and customer service. Visual engagement involves communicating with customers visually in the form of screen sharing, CoBrowsing, or face-to-face video conferencing. This form of engagement is particularly helpful when a customer needs help troubleshooting a software issue or has a question about a transaction. With visual engagement gaining momentum, how can it become a consistent tool to help give your business a competitive edge?
Relevance of Visual Engagement
Visual engagement has become increasingly important as online businesses vie for our shortened attention spans. A Microsoft study found that the average attention spans of a person is a mere 8 seconds. So, how to do we capture attention and keep people engaged in such a short amount of time?
Microsoft researchers singled out the mobile revolution, and the arrival of multiple forms of visual stimuli as the main reasons people have a harder time concentrating now than in the past. However, they reiterated that a person’s ability to multitask has improved since the beginning of the smartphone era. In short, engaging customers visually has become much more important in ensuring relevant service and customer satisfaction.
With the endless possibilities of the internet constantly at a customer’s fingertips, their expectations for instantaneous customer service have risen exponentially. Customers expect immediate answers that are tailored to their questions. Having a customer service agent readily available to answer questions and guide the consumer through a complicated sales process, reduces customer frustration and increases online conversion.
Types of Visual Engagement
Forrester released a detailed report examining the fundamentals and impact of visually engaging customers. In their analysis, there are four main types of visual engagement that are gaining momentum in the digital age.
The four types of visual engagement are:
- Video: one way or bi-directional video calling.
- CoBrowsing: An interactive way of assisting a customer where a representative can see the customer’s web page (with sensitive information hidden from their view).
- Screen Sharing: This involves the representative or the customer allowing the other to view their screen.
- Screen Annotations: The representative adds notes that would be helpful to the customer over a web page that both the representative and customer can view.
Gaining Momentum
With a variety of online platforms such as smartphones and laptops, levels of visual engagement today are higher than they’ve ever been.. Google research found that 34% of online retail purchases now occur on mobile devices. Customers have grown accustomed to the convenience and immediacy of the digital age and expect the same of companies they do business with.
The good news is that businesses are responding to the changing trends and adapting to what customers want. Now that customers are shopping on multiple platforms, having a way to engage these consumers cohesively and effectively has led to companies prioritizing visual engagement. Over 59% of companies surveyed by Aberdeen Group have incorporated visual engagement techniques into their customer support.
How Visual Engagement increases ROI
Businesses that employ visual customer engagement methods experience both financial and operational benefits. Website conversion rates are doubled, and customer service productivity is increased. Visual engagement assists customers through the sales funnel and customer service representatives are provided with an immediate visual context for the issue at hand and are able to respond faster and more effectively.
Research conducted by Aberdeen Group discovered that businesses utilizing visual engagement techniques experienced an array of positive growth. Businesses using visual engagement methods saw an 83% increase in annual revenue compared to companies that did not. Customer retention rates for these businesses saw an 8% increase compared to less than 1% for companies who did not employ visual engagement. The data speaks for itself.
Visual engagement is an effective means of increasing customer support productivity and annual revenues. Visual engagement has allowed customer support to evolve while ensuring client issues are resolved in the shortest possible time with the highest level of effectiveness.
Visual Engagement Platforms
Video chat and CoBrowsing are just two of the many ways a company can visually engage their customers. They enable customer representatives to offer a personalized touch for every client interaction and provide immediate guidance directed at the specific problem areas the customer is currently experiencing.
Glia offers the software you need to implement that crucial visual engagement. Providing your agents with the tools to help them perform at their highest level will increase their productivity, subsequently reducing customer support wait times and increasing customer satisfaction.
If you want to see an example of how we’ve helped companies engage customers more meaningfully, check out this case study. This study demonstrates how our video chat software enabled a 150% increase in conversion rates using video chat alone. The company achieved a 300% increase in conversion rates when CoBrowsing was included alongside video chat.
If you’re ready to embark on higher customer retention rates for your company, sign up for a live demo today!
