If you own a smartphone, tablet, or laptop computer (okay, that should cover just about everybody), then you’re likely familiar with the slick video-recording capabilities that now come standard on these gadgets. And if you’re like me, you’ve been wowed at the ability of face-to-face video conferencing to bridge physical limitations, seemingly bringing people much closer together, even if only in a ‘virtual’ sense.
With technology enabling the world to better capture, store, and share video content, we’ve certainly seen a rise in the number of organizations wondering how they can use video to serve their customers—we’ve even blogged previously about the idea of using self-service ‘how-to’ videos and customer-generated content.
Indeed, the recent and rapid rise of services like Apple’s FaceTime, Google Hangouts, and Skype naturally leads us to think about the potential for service organizations to leverage this technology, and while it’s certainly too early to say for sure, here’s my take on the future of video calling for service:
Employee-to-Employee
Companies looking to at least experiment with the benefits (and limitations) of video calling are likely to first pilot the service internally, using their employees to prove (or disprove) the value in offering video calling to customers. This pilot phase needn’t be restricted to just the call center, though; in fact, the biggest benefits may be found in enabling better communication and collaboration between service and other areas of the organization. For example, we have heard from a few financial services organizations considering video capabilities between branch employees and call center staff. In addition, video conferencing often comes up in the context of coaching and engaging with remote reps. Read More »

Have you ever been browsing the Internet for self-service answers or awaiting an e-mail response from customer support, when instead you decide to turn to your social media chat platform of choice (e.g., Facebook, Google Chat, AOL Instant Messenger) to find a real-time answer from (who else)—your online friends! With the technology’s popularity expected to grow to
Anyone else curious to know what those squiggly box things are? Yeah, me too. Turns out they’re called 




This post was written by Priyanka Kaushal, a Research Analyst with our broader Sales, Marketing, and Communications research team.
