Video Conferencing To Replace In-Store Workers

The future is here, and the future is…video conferencing. Anyone who has had to call someone for customer service has undoubtedly gone through countless minutes of automated menus, trying to reach a person to help with your situation. A lot of times these menus are simply used as a means to make you so frustrated that you give up trying to contact someone at all. This same type of customer service technology could be moving to in-store service at retail chains.

It’s a very real possibility that within years you could be talking to a television screen to help you find what aisle batteries are on. Video conferencing has already been implemented at various Staples stores in Canada. The defense behind the video conferencing push is that the agents on the video conference have a greater amount of knowledge about products than in-store help. There’s two sides to every argument, and the case against video conferencing is individual store knowledge. So the question you might raise against this new customer service technology is, “How would someone 1500 miles away know which aisle rechargeable batteries are on?”

Chris Woods, CTO of ClairVista that creates one of the brands of kiosks explains the practical use of the technology, “We found that consumers are lining up to talk to the person on the screen because they know the dopey kid behind the counter can’t answer their question”

It’s not hard to see why companies would want to go to video conferencing over in-store help. With conferencing kiosks you end up saving a large sum of money in the long run. Why would you pay 2-3 people to do a job that could be handled by a person over a video stream. Of course when the large shopping days hit around the holidays, 1-2 video kiosks aren’t going to cut it for the amount of traffic a store generates. Also, as techno-savvy as a lot of people claim to be most still prefer person-to-person interaction, especially if there’s a great deal of customer service involved.