Fri, 14 Nov 2014 22:00:00 -0500
Mike Hibbard
In the fall of last year, e-commerce behemoth Amazon introduced its newest Kindle Fire tablet together with a feature that some industry analysts have called “the shot heard round the world,” in comparison to the first shot fired in the American Revolution at the battle of Lexington. While the Revolutionary War started a trend of freedom throughout many nations of the world, the Kindle Fire “Mayday” button has launched a compelling new trend in customer support: easy browser-to-browser real-time voice and video communication. The Mayday button is an instant live video customer support widget that allows Kindle Fire users to summon an Amazon agent into a free video session within 15 seconds. It’s safe to say that the Mayday button has caused a few sleepless nights for marketing and sales executives of competitive device makers.
Easy browser-based communication is a hallmark of WebRTC (Real-Time Communications) technology, an open-source Javascript API currently working its way through the lengthy World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards process. It allows users to engage in voice calls, video conferencing and file sharing without the need to download special plug-ins. While the Mayday button may not be using all elements of true WebRTC (here’s a very technical analysis of the matter that concludes that elements of WebRTC are probably being employed, at least for the video component), the idea is the same.
WebRTC for the Next-Generation Customer Experience
For the contact center, WebRTC presents next-generation customer support opportunities that will allow browsing customers, both wired and mobile, to engage in easy voice and video communications directly from a company’s Web site. To date, Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox and Opera browsers support WebRTC. Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are still notable hold-outs for native support, and although there are plug-ins available to facilitate WebRTC in these two browsers, this lack of adoption by two prominent browser makers may be causing WebRTC to linger on the outskirts current practicality.
Today, customers usually begin their journeys on a Web site, even for purchases made in brick-and-mortar stores. GE Capital Retail Bank’s second annual Major Purchase Shopper Study, conducted last year, found that 81 percent of consumers today go online before heading out to a retail store to make a major purchase. It’s also safe to say that the vast majority of online sales – all $40 billion of them last year in the U.S. alone, according to eMarketer – begin on a Web site. It becomes vital, then, that companies today fashion their Web sites to become the foundation for the next generation of customer experience that will be required to succeed.
How WebRTC Works
Imagine that a customer is shopping for a new video camera. He begins by researching on a Web site, perhaps reading a features list and checking out customer reviews. If he has unanswered questions, he’ll need to pick up the phone and call a contact center, at which time he must essentially begin his support journey all over again. If he wants a video chat session, he’ll need to fiddle with Skype or enter a Google Hang-out: a process that may simply be beyond the customer’s technological skills. In either case, the browser session and the voice or video call remain disconnected from one another, with the somewhat confused customer existing as the only link between them.
Now imagine the same customer interaction between a customer with a WebRTC-enabled browser and a contact center that supports the same version of WebRTC. The customer roams a Web site, looking for information. When he has a question, he can click on a button and launch a voice over IP (VoIP) call that will summon an agent into a live telephone call while remaining within the context of the customer’s browser session. The agent would be able to see what the customer’s looking at the on the Web site, and the two could even engage in a co-browsing session, with the agent temporarily taking over the customer’s browser to show him what he’s looking for. In the context of a very complex product, the customer could launch a video chat session that would result in an agent who could offer a live demonstration of the video camera’s features.
What’s Been Gained
Customers today expect support experiences to be easy and fast, with near-instant resolution to problems. They also expect that traditionally self-service options – such as browsing a Web site – will provide an easy path to live support should it be required. Meeting those expectations is critical, but to keep costs under control, companies need to ensure that their agents are working in the most efficient way possible. WebRTC provides a low-cost resolution to both scenarios: it can raise the quality of customer service by making it faster, easier and more personal, while at the same time improving workforce utilization and eliminating error and duplicated effort.
What Needs to Happen Next
As we are still in WebRTC’s very early adoption cycle there remains a broad lack of knowledge in the industry regarding its status. It’s possible to gain insight into how long it will take for WebRTC to penetrate the market in a big way by examining the introduction of another standard in our industry that went through the WC3 standardization process in parallel with its market adoption. When VoiceXML (voice extensible markup language) was proposed to the W3C in 2000 by the VoiceXML Forum, it was intended to make voice-based phone services easier to develop by replacing proprietary languages with a standard that could be learned easily by any web developer.
VoiceXML became a standard (a recommendation in W3C terminology) in 2004, and it took another two years before it displaced the proprietary technologies and became widely deployed.
As of this writing, WebRTC is still a working draft in the W3C. A “last call working draft” is scheduled for 4Q 2014, and if all goes well it could become a formal recommendation as early as 2Q 2015 – but there are no guarantees on the timeframe if the W3C gets conflicting comments or resistance from major vendors during the last call. We are still likely two or three years away from WebRTC becoming a formal standard that achieves widespread adoption in the market.
Additionally, there is a lack of expertise in the enterprise IT world when it comes to WebRTC. This will need to be cured with education, both on the technology side and the business benefits side. Companies will need to gain an understanding of how beneficial WebRTC can be in their ongoing customer service strategies.
While some large contact center platform providers such as Aspect, Genesys and Avaya have implemented WebRTC to some extent, they’ve done it in a very agent-facing way. This may help, to some extent, but it’s critical to remember that WebRTC is likely to be far less beneficial for the enterprise than for consumers. Smart companies will approach WebRTC as a way to make the customer experience better, and this flag may in the end be carried by more innovative vendors such as Salesforce.
In the next post in this series, we’ll examine the problems WebRTC can help solve, what strategies companies should adopt and how the convergence and multimodality the standard can drive will benefit customers.