What co-browsing can do for online CX

Lindsay Brown explains how co-browsing is transforming next-generation customer service for businesses and customer service agents.
 

Customer service agents have long held the reputation of solely helping customers find a solution or resolving complaints. But when agents are talking or chatting with customers, they often need to cut through the confusion by seeing what the customer actually sees on their device.

“How do I do this?” means they’re stuck and need help using self-service or completing their purchase.

“What does this mean?” means they need help understanding a contract or filling out a form.

“I’m not ready to make a decision” means they can’t decide which service plan or product bundle is best for them.

“How do I use this?” means they’re having trouble setting up or getting the most out of their purchase.

What if customer service agents can become much more than just problem solvers? A new commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting showed that visual engagement technology can solve top customer experience (CX) priorities. These tools will allow agents to create a more personal and secure customer experience at any distance. But not just any tools will do.

With collaborative browsing (or co-browsing), customer service agents are transformed into an educational resource. Co-browse has largely been under-utilised for customer service, supporting only 0.1 percent of interactions – a hidden gem, according to Gartner. Now that more interactions are online, companies are looking to visual engagement solutions like co-browsing to fast-track digital transformation and help businesses get closer to their customers.

Using co-browse across the entire customer journey

Co-browse can help with service and support issues, form conversions, onboarding and training, while creating more self-sufficient customers the next time they have a similar issue. It departs from the traditional delivery of remote support where agents take control of the customer’s device, yet customer privacy is assured as the agent is restricted from accessing other tabs or sensitive areas of a browser screen. By collaboratively browsing a website together, agents can show customers how to do something, not just tell them. It also engages the customer and allows the agent to deliver a more seamless user experience – a key customer expectation now more than ever.

Say a customer is browsing a product catalogue. They use the chat tool on the website to ask a question, and an agent acknowledges receipt of the question. It’s here that the agent can offer up a co-browse session, and if they agree, a screen pops up promptly and the agent can walk them through how to complete a process, fill out a form or show them particular things in a product catalogue. The agent also has the ability to interact with the screen by drawing on the screen to bring the customer’s attention to a particular field or control, or even drop in a video chat to increase the level of engagement with the customer.

Co-browsing enables agents to avoid the tedious back-and-forth questions that are required when the agent is trying to figure out what the customer is actually looking at. Is it the wrong link? The wrong tab? The wrong website altogether? The key is ensuring the right level of collaboration and an understanding on when to introduce specific capabilities depending on where the interaction with the customer is going.

The role of co-browsing in building deeper customer insights

Additionally, co-browsing offers the ability to turn every conversation with the customer into an opportunity to gain greater insights about that person, thus increasing seller effectiveness and sales close rates. Co-browsing is especially useful for technical conversations where prospects or customers may be interested in a specific feature, or if a company has offered them some sort of trial version of the product and want to guide them through the different features.

What better way to teach customers than to have a tool where agents can co-browse and guide them through specific products and libraries of service sales catalogues? An agent gains better insight of their needs by working through a question together or asking them additional questions to solve their query. This leads to a higher percentage of sales conversions, increased seller effectiveness and overall reduced sales cycles.

In addition, companies are able to record and manage all meetings through these co-browse sessions, providing an additional opportunity for training and helping onboard new employees. Examples of how to understand a customer better or collaborating with them to obtain additional insights can be shared for learning purposes.

The future of virtual customer experience

Self-service is king. Gartner’s latest research showed that service leaders are planning to spend more on technology, focusing mainly on customer-facing channels such as self-service and channel optimisation. Technologies such as chatbots and virtual assistants are vital in helping customers make purchase decisions, nudging them towards closing the transaction, while also improving the customer service agent experience.

As companies think about better augmenting their online customer experience to succeed in the current social distancing environment, adopting the right visual engagement technology is critical for companies focused on increasing customer trust and decreasing customer effort as their top CX goals.

Lindsay Brown (pictured below) is Vice President APJ for LogMeIn, a SaaS and cloud-based remote connectivity services provider.