Small businesses always strive to boost productivity while keeping costs down. To stay competitive in an increasingly global and virtual business environment, small businesses need to adopt new technologies that make employees more productive, enhance customer experience, cut costs, and improve the bottom line.
With the availability of video chat software, small businesses can benefit from face-to-face communication without incurring the high travel costs and productivity downtime that usually accompanies in-person meetings.
Moreover, video conferencing is much more effective than a phone call is in many situations. It aids in increasing understanding even across language and cultural boundaries as people can see everything from facial expressions to body language. For example, suppose you need to present a product demo to your prospect or troubleshoot an issue that requires data sharing with a customer, video calling would prove to be far more constructive and meaningful than elucidating it verbally through audio conference.
Gartner predicts that more than 100 of the 500 largest global businesses will introduce video-based chat by 2018 for customer-facing interactions. It's high time that even small businesses start reaping the awe-inspiring advantages of this tool.
Let's learn how small businesses and startups can benefit by using video chat for communications.
1. A More Personalized Experience
Today's customers need a deeper and more personalized service from brands, so video chat can prove to be very efficient and quick in this aspect. Through video chat, customers can communicate with companies, which can create a similar experience like a face-to-face meeting without requiring visits to their physical offices. This platform is really effective especially in the banking, education, healthcare, and retail industries where providing exceptional customer experience is the key to business success.
2. Increased Emotional Engagement
Through video chat, businesses can make and maintain that human connection regardless of distance. Customers can effortlessly communicate across this channel and can get immediate attention. Real-time interactions through video chat can turn out to be very efficient; companies can get involved with their customers emotionally and can influence customer behavior, directly affecting their motivation and attitude. That can lead to more of customer engagement, thus increasing revenues.
3. Improved Customer Service
As video communication makes conversations and collaboration more natural and fluid, it improves interactions between customer care teams and their customers.
Customer service reps have more convincing power via video because they can gauge the customers' body language and facial expressions. So, video chat contributes to improved customer satisfaction and experience.
Also, 80% of communication is non-verbal. The absence of visual and non-verbal parts of communication can lead to incomplete and imperfect collaboration. Video chat, however, enables businesses to gain new customers as well as improve customer loyalty and retention.
Customers who use your live chat platform are 3X more likely to buy because the method provides a direct and personal interaction with customers, according to recent research.
Also, companies can improve their customer service levels by recording the video chats. They can later analyze the recordings for quality check and training purposes.
4. Reduced Costs
Small businesses always struggle to lower their costs because of budget constraints. By adding video chat feature, businesses can drastically reduce their customer service expenses.
5. Streamlined Communication
The integration of video chat feature in mobile apps helps in initiating a video call through the application or website. Customer service reps can seamlessly switch from chat to video, if required. If any of the agents is not available to attend the video call, customers can schedule a callback on their mobile app or Web UI.
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There is a need for small businesses to improve the speed and scale of operations to survive in this rapidly changing business environment. Video conferencing is a great cost-effective solution to improve operational efficiencies. When you need to woo a prospective customer, discuss a presentation, carry out a brainstorming session with your globally dispersed team, or conduct interviews, video chat can prove to be a powerful aid. It cuts down expenses, increases productivity, gives you an edge over competitors, and goes the extra mile for your business.
