Providing excellent customer service is at the forefront of every B2C business. With hundreds, if not thousands, of other businesses that can do what you do and exert the service you provide, you need to find a way to make your business stand out from the crowd - and customer service is the way most opt to do this.
Not only can it separate your company from the rest, but quality customer service can also help you retain customers. Positive customer service is directly related to customer satisfaction, and satisfied customers keep coming back, so it’s imperative that you do everything you can to provide an efficient, cohesive service at all times. Co-browsing is one of the ways you can do just this.
In this blog, we’re going to talk more about how co-browsing software and tools can excel your customer service and enable you to provide outstanding customer support to each and every one of them.
What Are Co Browsing Tools?
Co-browsing tools are advanced pieces of software that allow you to see what your customer is seeing on their screen. Once enabled, you can navigate together with your customer and even engage interactive elements like annotation and clicking buttons. Co-browsing and screen sharing often get confused, but they're different functionalities. Co-browsing allows you to be interactive with your customer, whereas screen sharing allows you or them to simply observe them.
How Co Browsing Tools Can Help Improve Your Customer Journey
Every B2C business will have a customer service hub, and it’s important to provide your team with the tools they need to be able to help your customers in the best way possible. When it comes to issues with customers filling out forms, installing software, or learning how to use your product properly, it can be hard to articulate instructions or advice. This can slow down the user journey and contribute to a poor user experience overall.
Co-browsing tools, also known as collaborative browsing software, can help mitigate this issue by providing a real-time insight into the steps your customers are taking, enabling you to provide more targeted support and guidance in less time. This reduces the length of the customer journey overall and helps to provide a much smoother ride, and this is beneficial for both your customers and your team.
Challenges Faced By Customers & Support Agents
There are a number of problems faced by customer service staff that you will likely be aware of. From communication lapses to extended ACHTs, there are several problems customer-facing businesses run into when trying to provide support - and there are multiple grievances customers can have along the way, too. Some of the most common include:
Long wait times
One of the main objectives for any business is to solve their customer’s queries in as little time as possible, but if you provide a somewhat complex service, this might be more difficult. Talking customers through the problems they’re facing isn’t always easy, especially if they’re new to your service. Long wait times to solve issues can be frustrating for your customers and reflect badly on your business, resulting in poor customer satisfaction.
If your business is to not just survive, but thrive, it needs to be able to retain its customers, and if they’re not satisfied, this won’t happen. Co-browsing allows for more accurate targeting of problems and enables you to see the issue much faster. There’s no long, convoluted conversations that may or may not give you an accurate representation of what your customer is seeing and what they need to do - you can see the problem for yourself and resolve it.
Co-browsing technology allows you to navigate on your customer’s browser and use your cursor to take actions on their behalf, such as clicking buttons and filling in forms. Because your team knows your service and product better than anyone, they can quickly solve any problems whilst talking customers through what they’re doing and explaining how they’re navigating the issue so customers know for future reference. This greatly reduces the time it takes for you to reach a satisfactory result for your customers, and therefore improves their experience overall.
Not just this, but implementing a co-browsing solution also helps with ensuring customer service agents can help more people in a day. With a reduced timespan to help each customer, you can close cases and move on to the next much faster, increasing capacity and helping to streamline the experience overall.
Multiple touchpoints
Depending on the service you provide, you may find that it’s difficult to solve the customer’s issue based on the fact there are multiple touchpoints that could be causing the problem. Whether it’s needing to provide system access to your app or service on their main computer drive, or if it’s a problem within the app or service page itself, it can be tricky to know what the problem is and where it can be solved.
Co-browsing allows you to see the customer interactions on their computer, and with access granted, you have full access across several touchpoints to identify the problem and resolve it. Again, this goes a long way to helping to reduce the time it takes to resolve any queries and creating an efficient and overall positive customer interaction and service journey.
Another aspect to touchpoints is having multiple people or options for help for customers to navigate through. If you have several customer service departments, it can sometimes be the case that a customer has to go through several colleagues and departments to find the right type of help. This can be frustrating for them and elongate the help process, and it can also cause issues with service fluidity and efficiency on your side.
By introducing co-browsing as a first port of call, you can see the precise issue the customer is having and direct them to the correct person to help them immediately. This provides a much smoother experience for everyone involved.
Communication issues
One of the biggest problems faced by customer service teams is patchy communication. Whether this is from poor phone signal or simply not being able to articulate the problem in the best possible way that both parties understand, communication issues can be a major sticking point in getting problems resolved.
Provided both the customer service agent and the customer have an adequate internet connection, a secure co-browsing session offers a fast solution to this problem. You can annotate on the customer’s screen and use your cursor to show them what you’re doing on the web app or window you have open, all whilst verbally explaining to them the actions you’re taking. Visual learning is a great tool and one most people respond well to, making this form of communication less problematic and more understandable than others.
If you provide a service or an app where some issues may be more likely to crop up on several occasions, showing customers what’s happening, explaining why the issue has occurred, and giving them a visual, real-time tutorial on how to solve the problem can work wonders in terms of helping to learn something new and not need to contact you for help moving forwards. The best co-browsing software does just this.
High service costs
Customer service can be costly based on the number of staff your business employs. The longer the customer service journey is, the fewer customers each agent is able to help, and therefore the more people need to be employed to help deal with the backlog and keep things moving.
As a result of the efficiency of co-browsing, you can reduce your business overheads dramatically. This means you can redeploy staff because your team members can handle a higher volume of calls and queries each. Bringing your service costs down means you can invest money elsewhere in your business, be it in innovation or investment to further your offering.
Benefits of Using Co Browsing Tools in Customer Service
Co-browsing can solve many different problems in customer service and be advantageous across many aspects of your business and the support you’re able to offer. Here are some of the main benefits which we touched upon above:
More streamlined service
There are several reasons as to why co-browsing can help to provide a streamlined customer service, with the main one being that you can see your customer’s screen in real-time and solve the problem then and there. There’s no back and forth with emails or extended phone calls trying to understand each other - you can instantly gain access to your customer’s computer and show them what you’re doing, fulfilling actions on their behalf to help them faster and solve their problem in record time.
Increased customer loyalty
It’s often said that in customer service, it’s not the problem that’s the issue, it’s how you handle it that counts. The last thing a customer in difficulty wants is to be stuck for an extended period of time with a problem, nor do they want to be passed between multiple customer service agents and have to explain their problem again and again.
Due to the nature of co-browsing and being able to directly see what is happening, you can help customers in a short time-frame and increase the chances of a single call resolution. This will improve customer satisfaction and make them more likely to return to your business, despite the initial problem they faced. Customer loyalty is imperative to every business, so if you’re struggling with retention based on customer service, co-browsing could be the solution you’re looking for.
Better team efficiency
It’s not just customers who benefit from co-browsing solutions; your team does, too. Co-browsing takes an element of guesswork out of trying to resolve queries, allowing customer service agents to directly see what the customer is seeing. With cursor control and the option to click buttons, fill in forms, and even annotate on the screen, issues are resolved much faster. This means customers are out of the queue in record time and your team has added capacity to help more people.
This can ease pressure for customer support agents in terms of staring down the barrel of a long backlog, and it can allow your teams to work more efficiently together by directing customers to the right department first time.
Find out More About Co-Browsing with Vizolution
If you’re still unsure as to the benefits of co-browsing and how it can help your customers and agents alike, please contact us. We will be more than happy to talk you through our co-browsing tool and the ways it can benefit your business and your clients.
