Off late customers usually had to endlessly browse through portals to hunt the customer care number for an organizations helpdesk to place a call. This process was not only tedious and time consuming but also lead to longer customer wait times and hence, more often than not resulted in customer dissatisfaction and disloyalty.
The way an organisation deals with its customer complaints defines its market perception to a large extent. A satisfied customer may or may not tell others about his experience, but a dissatisfied customer will spread the word for sure. Therefore a breakthrough in technology was much awaited, wherein customers could directly place a call from the website interface itself.
Thankfully, WebRTC came to the rescue. WebRTC is a freely available, open project that powers web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities by using uncomplicated Javascript APIs. The bigger question however remains whether your call center software is future-ready to adapt to this nextgen technology and take advantage of it.
The WebRTC initiative is a project supported by Google, Mozilla, and Opera. Wikipedia says that WebRTC is essentially an API definition being drafted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to enable browser-to-browser applications for voice calling, video chat, and P2P file sharing without plugins.
Major components of WebRTC include:
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getUserMedia: Provides web browser access to camera and microphone
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PeerConnection: Sets up audio/video calls
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DataChannels: Enables browsers to share peer-to-peer data
Many applications available on the web today including Skype, Facebook (which uses Skype), and Google Hangouts (which uses the Google Talk plugin) already use RTC, but they need downloads, native apps, or plugins. However, downloading, installing, and updating plugins can be error-prone and annoying. Additionally, plugins can be difficult to deploy, debug, troubleshoot, test, and maintain and may require licensing and integration with complex, expensive technology. WebRTC projects have reformative guidelines which advocate that APIs should be built into web browsers and be more efficient than existing technologies. They should be open source as well as free and standardized.
Future call center softwares will definitely benefit from WebRTC. Though the technology is still evolving, it looks promising for organizations vying for customer loyalty.
