Published On: Fri, Sep 26th, 2014

What You Should Know Before Video-Chatting With a Client

Whether you are in a small scale or multinational business today, you must appreciate the fact that technology has incredibly transformed the way of doing business all over the world. Businesses need to constantly keep in touch with their customers in order to maximize profits and optimize management.

Video-Chatting

The emergence of e-commerce sites and online shops has made purchasing much easier and more comfortable. However, technological advancement has also driven customer demands up. Due to the uncontrollable swelling of commercial sites on the web, customers are left to grapple with the challenge of fraud and credibility issues.

There is always the urge to talk to the seller of a product and even see the product before gaining confidence in online purchases. Video chatting allows businessmen and women to establish communication with their clients, and help ease concerns in real time.

How Convenient is Video-Chatting?

Video chatting provides the human touch to online businesses. Traditionally, customers want to do a bit of window shopping, talk to the seller, ask questions and where possible before finally deciding to make a purchase. Most companies have already purchased a business internet service and computers capable of online interaction, so you likely already have the tools necessary to implement video chat as part of your business plan. This makes transitioning into video communications a fairly simple and convenient decision to make.

Clients like to keep in touch with you before and after purchasing your product or service so that they may seek advice or have their questions answered. Video chatting makes answering these questions easier as it allows you to communicate easily and openly with your clients. You can immediately clarify issues, clear doubts, and avoid confusion and thus improve sales.

Video chat can be used to set up virtual conferences where confidential files and documents can be shared securely among selected members of the conference. Alternatively, you can use video chat to provide tours of your facilities when speaking to potential investors. Real Estate agents have even sold homes by providing video tours of their available houses in real time.

Challenges of Video-Chatting

Online business technology comes with its own fair share of challenges as far as video chatting is concerned. Video conferencing for instance, is susceptible to cyber bullying. Some unscrupulous people out there could pose as clients and gain access to a video conference only to turn around and abuse the facility. As a modest businessman you will obviously be courteous with your client and may innocently set up a conference with possible rogue clients. The same could apply to innocent unsuspecting clients coming from possible rogue businessmen.

Differences in time zones could pose another challenge to you as a business person. Once your online business is set, or you have given out your video chat details, you should expect chat pop ups anytime. This may call for staying up late or waking up at odd hours of the night to respond to customer needs or loss of sales. This is likely to happen quite open since customers will demand communication at whatever time that is convenient for them. If you don’t rise to the occasion, they have the option of moving to the next available seller.

With video chatting, you will face the challenge of increased concurrency which will ultimately decrease your efficiency. If multi-point communication does exceed a given point in video conferencing, then efficiency automatically dwindles. Therefore, in order to attain optimal efficiency levels from your end as a business person, the video chatting software should allow only eight, face-to-face communication points at most.

Your Verdict?
Customers will keep getting more and more demanding. They no longer just stop at buying, customers and clients want to feel special and needed by businesses. They would like to be informed about offers and discounts without necessarily asking for them! This much sought after service is precisely what video chatting brings to business, despite a few challenges.