/ Cobrowsing

Cobrowsing Benefits? [5 Key Use Cases]

Cobrowsing is a powerful tool for contact centres and sales teams.

First, it is worth spending 2 minutes to familiarise yourself with what cobrowsing is and how it works.

An impressive tool, with broad applications.

But how is it used in the real world?

What are the benefits of cobrowsing?

We've examined our own client base, and included other data from organisations we interact with around the world, to give an overview of the most common cobrowsing use cases and benefits.

At a high level, cobrowsing use cases is mainly used as a sales tool, or as a support tool.

Cobrowsing For Sales

When used in a sales environment, cobrowsing leverages the company's website, turning it from a static web-based brochure, into an interactive sales tool.

Your sales team can wield your website in the same way a shop assistant can give advice and physically show you relevant items.

Increase upselling

If your website is geared towards selling a product or service, it should be filled with all the information your customer needs to make a decision. However, we live in an imperfect world, so your customer may need some guidance to overcome a paradox of choice.

As the old sales saying goes, "Show, don't tell." Cobrowsing lets you escalate a chat or phone based interaction (the 'Telling') into one where the customer can see and interact with what the agent is 'Showing' them.

Sales agents can proactively display alternative products, terms and conditions, and other added extras that the customer may not have seen or considered before.

Travel agencies can directly navigate with the customer to the appropriate holiday for them. Retailers can show and suggest products that are better suited to what the customer is looking for.

Aberdeen Group reports that firms using cobrowsing enjoy 10% year-on-year growth compared to 6.2% for those without cobrowsing.

Shortening the sales cycle

It's easy for customers to switch from your website to a competitor's, in the search for the best deal, price, service, or solution to their needs.

A modern customer journey typically involves multiple touchpoints on multiple different channels. Three of the most popular are websites, web chat, and telephone.

Cobrowsing unites these otherwise-disparate channels into one. Sales teams can answer questions more intelligently, direct customers to the right information, and understand the context of their enquiry.

In essence, cobrowsing heeps the customer within your website until they finish their journey.

A great example of this is comparison websites. If a customer is comparing quotes when they call in to speak to an advisor, they are at an advanced stage of their buying journey. Cobrowsing assists the agent to assist the customer, by providing information parity between both parties. Quotes that have been presented to the customer on the website are instantly accessible by the agent, who can advise and close accordingly.

This is in stark contrast to the alternative, where agents have to follow a drawn out process to even ascertain what the customer is looking at.

Reducing dropoff

Website dropoff is a perennial and ever-evolving problem for websites.

During inbound sales interactions, cobrowsing allows you to directly retain customers on your digital real estate.

In addition to in-the-moment customer wins, an interesting implication of cobrowsing is its ability to provide historical data to marketing teams, via integration with website analytics tools.

With a plethora of popular visitor mapping and customer journey visualisation tools, the understanding of online customer journeys is a real pain point for website owners. Cobrowsing gives you that extra insight into your customer journey, by letting you understand the online journey paths of customers who are directly interacting with your company.

Cobrowsing For Support

When used in a support environment, cobrowsing leverages the organisation's website, allowing agents to see, understand and solve issues in real time.

Reducing Call Times

With 90% of customer's interactions starting on an organisation's website, a large part of their customer journey context is wrapped up on their browsing session.

The issue for support agents is that this context is lost when customers call in.

Webcalling and web chat allows the pass through of some customer journey data. However the situation is still dire for incoming telephone calls.

Cobrowsing allows phone agents to see exactly what the customer is looking at, usually by asking them to read out a 6 digit PIN.

The customer doesn't have to explain over the phone what their issue is, and the agent doesn't have to explain the possible fix. Instead, they can view the customer's issue and simply perform the fix themselves, saving time and money.

For complex and form-heavy websites in particular, cobrowsing increases first call resolution by giving agents the information they need to understand the customer's issue.

Studies show a 10% improvement in agent utilisation costs while remaining compliant and secure.

Customer experience

If you've read this far, we don't need to tell you how important the customer experience is.

The more complicated issue is, of course, how to actually improve your customer experience.

95% of customers say they would prefer slower support if it meant the quality of help was higher.

Cobrowsing is the ultimate tool to provide high quality, relevant customer support in the place they are most likely to need it: your website.

Aberdeen Group shows that cobrowsing is helping companies accomplish far greater annual improvements to customer satisfaction (5.1% compared to 1.4%), achieved by minimising customer effort by having the customer and the support agent able to joinly navigate the website in real time.

Of course, cobrowsing is not the silver bullet to end all customer frustration. But it certainly goes a long way to empowering your agents to minimise customer friction in an age when your website is the most common place for customers to interact with your business.

Being able to view customer journey context helps agents to empathise and build rapport, especially during longer calls.

Voice of the customer programmes are proving popular in helping companies to better understand and serve their customers. With cobrowsing, you can now really see what the customer means.

This article has hopefully given you food for thought. It's worth thinking about how you might incorporate a cobrowsing solution into your own customer journey.