Exploring Amazon s Mayday: Visual Customer Service Options, Network Computing
Exploring Amazon's Mayday: Visual Customer Service Options
Visual sharing is a natural way for people to communicate. Amazon’s launch of the Mayday button on its fresh Kindle has brought a excellent deal of attention to how visual sharing can be applied to customer service interactions and unified communications platforms. Many experts have hailed Mayday as the future of customer service, raising the bar for all other businesses.
For companies looking to replicate features similar to Amazon’s Mayday, it’s significant to understand the different ways a visual customer service practice can be achieved, along with the risks and benefits of each.
Option 1: Movie interaction inbetween customer and agent
Pros: Movie serves as a very private way of communicating, well suited for a smaller company or a business group serving a specific customer segment. Because the agent’s view is of the customer and not of the customer’s computer or mobile screen, the risks of data and information security are low.
Cons: The privacy and security concerns inherent in this treatment are many and are fairly serious. Opening up a movie channel inbetween online customers and contact center agents requires a superb deal of thought concerning procedures and safety, as well as technology, staffing, training, and infrastructure. It is also arguable that, in this screenplay, relying solely on movie without any screen-sharing or co-browsing component (Option Trio) will provide little value in terms of efficiently resolving a question or issue.
Option Two: Movie feed shows the agent to a customer
Pros: The procedure and safety concerns of Option one are limited to only the agent side in this screenplay, making it slightly more attainable. The practice of eyeing the customer service agent speaking and listening may have a positive effect, with customers feeling understood and certain that the company cares about their issues.
Cons: The agent-via-video treatment still requires significant investment in technology infrastructure and procedural switches. In many cases, the act of movie talking may in fact end up distracting the customer and agent from reaching a resolution, slowing down call times instead of making the interaction more efficient.
Some consumers are fairly keen to experiment with the Mayday movie feature, with its instant gratification and potential for amusement. Without building in a screen sharing or co-browsing component similar to Mayday, the video-only interaction will not enable efficient resolution to questions or problems.
Option Three: Customer and agent view the same data/materials
In this screenplay, there is no movie feed or interaction, but rather the customer and agent are co-browsing, placing the purpose of the interaction front-and-center and putting the agent and customer on the same page — literally.
Amazon utilizes this treatment at the same time with its agent-via-video feed to permit the agent to see and control the customer’s Kindle screen while conversing on audio and movie.
Pros: The attention of both the agent and the customer is on the issue at palm. There is nothing distracting from the process of resolving the issue, whether that is by showcasing the customer where to click to find or do something, walking through a form or application together, selecting a product, or troubleshooting an issue. Because co-browsing is a SaaS solution, there is no technology investment and minimal agent required, and it brings up none of the significant staffing and environmental concerns of Options one or Two.
Cons: Security and customer privacy concerns abound when considering the capability to see a customer’s computer or mobile device screen during a customer service interaction. This concern can be addressed with data masking capabilities, enabling companies to block anything from an agent’s view that is not necessary to see in order to reach a call resolution.
For example, some companies may permit agents to see only the corporate website, a handful of third-party playmate or government websites, and the customer’s PDF reader in order to walk through documents together. This can be further drilled down to block specific pages from the websites chosen, and can even include blocking fields on an individual web form, such as credit card numbers.
Amazon’s Mayday feature is fairly innovative, and the customer service technology industry will certainly be watching to see how consumers will receive instant movie and screen sharing practices. As companies consider how this advancement will influence their own customer service strategies, I suspect that we’ll see rapid adoption high-value, low-risk customer service contraptions.
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