By

Why Using Live Video Is Untapped Potential For Your Business

In case you haven’t realized it yet, live video has in fact come to the forefront of online communication today. Gone are the days of text-based chat or even VOIP communication, live video is the option that your customers are turning to in droves to connect with each other, and to connect with the greater numbers of businesses that begin to implement this technology as well.

video chat to improve your business
Image by Stefan Erschwendner

More businesses should in fact be using live chat, and particularly live video chat. It’s being adopted by 100 out of the top 500 businesses by 2020, according to Gartner, and it will be more quickly adopted by countless businesses in your industry before that.

Are you stuck on how you can use video chat to improve your business? Here are a few simple reasons why you should get started.

It’s Easier for Your Customers

When you have a problem, you want it solved immediately. This type of immediate gratification one of the reasons why so many people are turning to the internet in the first place, so why wouldn’t they want to immediately be able to get access to someone that they can see so that they can explain their problem?

Making things easier for your customers is always a good idea, and having a live chat feature that includes video will not only make your customers enjoy asking questions more, but according to one survey it made 63% of customers more likely to return to a website when they were offered live chat. That same study found that over 90% of your customers think that live chat is a positive.

While live chat (and particularly live video chat) is important, at this point the quality of the video is still a key metric by which your customers will define the service that they get. A poor quality video (also known as a bad Quality of Experience or QoE) will reflect badly on your firm. Tony Zhao, CEO of video chat company Agora, notes that “The big problem for easy, hassle-free embedding of real-time communications within Internet-based applications is the lack of quality of experience (QoE). If connections are unreliable, voices keep cutting out, and video images break up, then people will not use these embedded real-time capabilities.”

They would know, since Agora.io operates over 80 data centers around the world, strictly to battle this ongoing issue with video streaming and to fill in the gaps between dropped data packets, creating a higher quality video stream regardless of connection.

Live Video Increases Your Sales

If the improvement in customer service isn’t enough to get you interested in using live video in your business, then what about the prospect of making more money? That’s right, as study results and anecdotal experience both show that customers are more receptive to upsetting and cross selling when they talk to you over live chat or video.

If you are struggling to reduce your abandoned cart rate, or you are running into roadblocks with adding video to support queries, then why not take it over to the sales side and see what they can do with it? Live video is a great way for your sales team to reach out to far away prospects or customers to provide an additional, more personal layer of support during the sales process as well.

It Lowers Your Expenses

When you do transition your sales staff over to a hybrid approach of using video and selling in person, you can also see a decline in the amount that you are spending on expensive parts of a sales process, like travel to a client’s office.

Using live video will never fully replace the face-to-face sales meeting completely, but it can provide an added touch to help close the deal, and minimize the wasteful spending associated with long business trips and taking your team out of the office for more time than they have to be.

It Gives You an Edge Over Your Competition (For Now)

When you operate in a competitive industry, particularly one where it can be hard to differentiate your product or service, then you need to rely more heavily on your customer service to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Using video chat before many of the companies in your industry will help cement you as the more responsive, more customer focused business, and it will make it easier for you to win over new customers, or keep your current customers with you for longer. After all, why would your customers want to shift to one of your less ‘modern’ competitors that still rely on email based support or training?

It Can Even Improve Internal Communication

Video chat is something that can be used in a variety of ways outside the organization, but it also can provide plenty of benefits to internal team dynamics, particularly in large organizations or ones that use remote staff.

Being able to see your colleagues gives you a stronger sense of working as a team, and it can help you personify those people that you might not otherwise see more than once a year.

It can also help to ease communication, which can be stressed when done primarily over email. 93% of communication is nonverbal, so utilizing video chat can help you really get your entire message across.

Are you considering using live video chat in your business today, or do you use it already? Let us know what you think about it in the comments.

Written by

Jyotsna Ramani is a passionate writer and an avid globetrotter. She had a knack for writing since her early years, though that was mostly letters to her penpals and jotting her thoughts down in her "Dear Diary". Over the years, she realized how her hobby could turn into a full time career and she started writing web content, books and pieces for local magazines. There has been no looking back ever since. Follow Jyotsna Ramani at Google+

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *