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“A picture is worth a thousand words,” goes the old saying. When it comes to customer support, this is quite literally true. Video communications, once reserved for conference rooms and on private wireless devices, is today finding its way into the customer support industry. What began with Amazon and its revolutionary “Mayday” button which summons a video support session with an Amazon employee, is now beginning to find value in a number of other customer support applications.  

Video is particularly compelling for highly complex or expensive products that require significant tech support, or in cases where the agent and the customer may not be speaking their native languages. In B2B customer support, video support tickets are a great way to provide valuable customers with the kind of personalized, intensive support sessions that maintaining important accounts requires. Video also helps eliminate misunderstandings that can take time to fix, cost money and damage customer goodwill.

“Either a screen recording or a video recording is much simpler,” according to B2B customer support solutions provider TeamSupport in a recent video demonstrating the ease with which video can be used in support sessions. “Customers can show you what’s wrong rather than trying to explain it.”

TeamSupport offers a suite of products called SupportView to share images and make service more efficient, including VideoView, ScreenView and ImageView. The features, which include full motion video and audio, eliminates the need for customers to write a long, involved narrative that describes the problem. Instead, customers can record a video using their webcam and simply insert it into the ticket so the agent can use it for background about the customer’s issue. The agent, in turn, can use the same function to reply with a video that shows the customer how to solve the issue step by step. Customers and agents can also use the features to embed a screenshot into a ticket.

Video can help build rapport between customers and agents in addition to eliminating the frustration of having to write out a complex narrative of a problem that can be more easily shown than described verbally. It puts a face with a name to deepen customer relationships and send a message that a dedicated professional — a real, live person — is ready to provide support whenever the customer encounters a problem. While names and voices can seem impersonal, video collaboration is a great way to build a relationship with a customer.

Going forward, video will become another element in a more collaborative relationship between B2B customers and customer support agents. We live in video-enabled times when many people’s written skills are not as sharp as they might have been 50 years ago. Misspellings, grammar mistakes or translation problems can harm a customer relationship. Video, on the other hand, can help customers and agents express themselves more easily, and use tones of voice and even body language to help get the message across.