By Scott Hoffpauir, Managing Partner

Coincidentally, I had lunch with a friend, Chris Koehncke, Co-Founder of Kranky Geek and a WebRTC enthusiast. We discussed how the pandemic accelerated the adoption of video conferencing and calling. More and more people are now comfortable using video for everyday communications. Pre-pandemic, it was normally used within a niche community of technologists. It’s considered a must-have tool for folks conducting business as well as for students to access their teachers and institution for learning. Even the word “Zoom” is used as a replacement for “meeting”. 

So, how does this translate to enhancing customer experience? Well, people frequently contact businesses using their mobile device. They will search for contact details, then call, chat or email. WebRTC allows peer-to-peer communication to be established directly from a website, on the person’s device, without them having to change app or device. By providing a “click-to-call” link within a webpage or app the customer can be quickly connected to a specialist over the web thus speeding up a resolution to the customer’s enquiry or problem.

Businesses are always looking for new ways to improve their customers’ experience, and technology like WebRTC plays a part in this.

WebRTC itself has been around for a number of years now, with the first production release back in 2018. For those unfamiliar with WebRTC, in short, it provides a framework for delivering real-time communications on the web, implemented within a browser or mobile application. So how does it help users? It enables audio and video communication to work inside web pages by allowing direct peer-to-peer communication from the user’s device. Nowadays, users such as remote office workers or educational institutions have created a sort of “Renaissance” era for video conferencing. Let’s use an example from the Amazon Chime SDK to illustrate this.

For retailers, providing timely support to customers with faulty goods is important both to minimise customer inconvenience and to ensure maximum efficiency during resolution. A WebRTC click-to-call action, embedded in a webpage, allows either the customer, or a generalist technician to easily place a video call to a specialist. This then allows the specialist to use the device’s camera to remotely view the faulty equipment, pinpoint the fault, and diagnose the appropriate corrective action. This approach helps to ensure that an on-site technician is better equipped to deal with the issue the first time, avoiding costly second visits.

The Amazon Chime SDK allows builders to add real-time voice, video, and messaging solutions, powered by machine learning, into their web applications. The click-to-call action, for example, is available to businesses via a pre-built widget to make website implementation straight forward. 

In the ongoing quest to improve customer experience, this approach provides a good return on investment for businesses because it is a low-cost solution to implement and maintain. It has the potential to improve the customer’s experience whilst also reducing business cost, for example through higher first-call resolution.

Have you had experience implementing WebRTC solutions using platforms such as Amazon Chime SDK? If not, are you considering WebRTC solutions in the future? Comment below and share your experience.