Your customer experience (CX) can make or break your business. These days, your customers, and even your employees, are comparing their experiences with your brand to the best experiences they’ve had with other brands out there, regardless of industry. To deliver on these high expectations, Forrester reported that CX professionals are prioritising creating experiences that build trust and reduce customer effort.
To help deliver these experiences, brands are looking to visual engagement technology. Specifically, co-browsing that lets the customer support agent see what the customer sees online as they offer guidance through various digital experiences.
Is it the wrong link? The wrong tab? Complicated checkouts? Co-browsing is the ultimate tool to provide high quality, relevant customer support in the place they are most likely to need it: your website. It gives agents a real-time lens into what the customer is experiencing, something popular engagement channels like phone and chat cannot do on their own.
Every conversation leads to more insights
With co-browsing, every conversation with the customer is an opportunity to gain greater insights about them. How? Co-browsing reduces customer effort. According to a study by the Baymard Institute in 2019, customers abandon their online shopping cart nearly 70 percent of the time due to buyer uncertainty, purchase process confusion or complicated online forms. And a study by Paypal seeking to understand purchase abandonment revealed that 37 percent of shoppers left to comparison shop.
It’s more important now than ever before for brands to bring the in-store experience online while ensuring a personalised approach for each customer. A co-browsing session with a customer establishes a rapport based on a sense of collaboration, creating opportunities to address features, pricing, or special offers that give the product a competitive edge. With quick help from an agent, a customer can be guided through the steps to purchase completion or find what they’re looking for in a way that’s much easier than figuring it out alone.
An agent can gain more insights of a customer’s need by working through a query together or asking them additional questions to make a personalised recommendation. Being able to view customer journey context helps agents to empathise and build rapport, especially during longer calls. With 90 percent of customer’s interactions starting on a website, a large part of their customer journey context is wrapped up on their browsing session. By collaborating with the customer, for example, to further understand why they comparison shop, well-trained agents can leverage the co-browsing session to reduce the likelihood that the customer will conduct additional research by asking more questions and providing solutions to them quickly.
When checkout time comes, the customer is confident in their choice while the brand benefits from the additional insights obtained which will aid in refining the customer journey for future purchases. Overall, this contributes to a more enriching customer experience, reduces shopping cart abandonment, and builds greater trust and loyalty with customers.
In the case of repeatable tasks, like changing account settings or navigating through a purchase, co-browsing becomes an opportunity to teach the customer how to self-service a similar issue in the future, reducing call volume and instilling customer confidence.
The future of virtual customer experience
Co-browsing has largely been underutilised for customer service, supporting only 0.1% interactions – a hidden gem, according to Gartner. Now that more interactions are online, brands are looking to visual engagement solutions like co-browsing to fast-track digital transformation and help businesses get closer to their customers. Technologies such as chatbots and virtual assistants are vital in helping customers make purchase decisions, nudging them towards closing the transaction, while also refining the customer insights for the brand.
Lindsay Brown is vice president APJ at LogMeIn