Video in the Contact Center: A Solution Looking for a Market and Finding Modest Niches

Ken Landoline

Summary Bullets:

• Video applications are flooding the marketplace, making large gains in mindshare if not market share.  The technology has become better, simpler to implement and manage, and less costly to maintain.
• Despite the popularity and growth of video in general, video conferencing penetration of the contact center has been minimal at best.  Implementation of the technology remains limited to niche segments of the customer care/helpdesk marketplace.

It seems video conferencing technology is infiltrating just about everything we do today.  Immersive telepresence, desktop video, room-based video, and mobile video on smartphones and tablets are becoming commonplace as the technology gets better and the cost and complexities of video solutions diminish.  Given this increasing acceptance of video in our lives, I wonder if and when video-enabled contact centers will become a reality.  As I discuss the topic with customer care executives and vendors of contact center applications, most tend to agree that there is a value proposition for video in the customer care environment.  The future benefits they see include video’s potential to enhance personalization, promote customer loyalty, and improve sales effectiveness as agents and customers see each other eye to eye.  Others mention video’s potential to enhance self-service functionality with pushed video clips as well as improvements in the wait in queue with the use of targeted advertising clips (i.e., video brochures).  In addition, customer care executives generally agree that the proper use of video in the contact center could be a significant competitive differentiator for those that get there first and develop the optimal blueprint for success.