WebRTC Blends the Customer Support Phone Call Seamlessly with the Web Experience

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

Contact centers are on the front lines of a technology revolution nowadays. Not only are customer support channels changing – customer favorites such as the telephone are being joined by Web chat, social media and even video chat – but contact centers are having to evolve to meet customer expectations with Web-based service. One of the technologies worth a spotlight is WebRTC, or Real-time Communications.

WebRTC is an open standard that allows developers to embed real-time multimedia communications into different Web browsers, allowing for a variety of new and more trouble-free Web-based service methods. Before WebRTC, no standards existed and developers had to rely on more cumbersome methods of enabling interactive communications in a browser environment. Customers were obliged to download plug-ins such as Adobe (News - Alert) Flash or other solutions, making it more difficult for customers. And since customers today are searching for ease and simplicity over nearly all other considerations, WebRTC has been a boon for companies seeking to improve their Web-based customer support. Even smaller companies can deploy multimedia communications-enabled applications using simpler HTML and JavaScript APIs.

In the contact center, this means that companies can readily deploy a mix of voice, video and screen sharing to their Web sites and technical support sites, and even mobile apps. It allows organizations to convey contextual information to contact center applications to streamline workflows and improve customer interactions. Agents can gain greater visibility to Web page data and mix telephony-based and Web-based customer support into the same session, which means customers get more real-time service and don’t need to repeat themselves across different channels.

Many customers today begin their customer support journey on a company’s Web site. Before WebRTC, if a customer wanted to continue the quest for an answer or a solution, he or she was obliged to pick up the phone and essentially start the transaction all over again. Thanks to WebRTC, a customer can click to call and essentially continue the same support session, with no need to reinvent the wheel and no need to download anything onto their computer or mobile device. The WebRTC signal is essentially converted to a SIP trunk that is natively compatible with legacy contact center technologies, making a smooth transition from Web to telephone call.

The end result is that the customer is served faster and in a blended Web/telephone way, reducing wait times (and possibly the need to interact with an IVR), eliminating the need to repeat his or her information, reducing human error and enhancing the customer support experience with multimedia tools.

For contact centers looking to reduce customer effort and costs while boosting the quality of the customer experience, WebRTC is a vital component of the twenty-first customer support interaction. 

During WebRTC IV Conference & Expo this week, Oracle (News - Alert)'s Director Product Management, Jim Donovan, will take part in a panel discussion titled "Customer Service: The Killer App for WebRTC?"  that examines actual WebRTC based deployments in Customer Interaction and how they are proceeding. 

Edited by Stefania Viscusi