Customer interaction is getting personal. As a consumer, I want the best possible service I can get. In just the last few years, I have seen service move from being a phone call with a representative to interactive voice response (IVR) systems to email or live online chat. These are great alternatives, but still not very personal.

Video in Contact Centers

The new era points to a concierge customer-service experience via video, allowing much more intimate and rich conversations. Today we see phone calls from mobile devices leading to agent interactions that encompass video, document sharing, and co-browsing.

I'll be honest: I am a late believer in the power of video. But when my parents from India declared their preferred mode of communication to be FaceTime video, I was converted.

Video experiences are simpler, easier, and far richer than ever before. Different video communications options are now widely available. With the advent of secure video via solutions like Cisco Spark, I expect that the use of video will continue to increase.

Doing Contact Center Video Right

Contact centers have an enduring business requirement to capture and analyze customer interactions for quality, training, satisfaction rates, and such. Businesses need a way to capture video interactions and derive value from deeper analytics.

Some industries have even stronger requirements, such as financial services and healthcare. For example:

• In the United States, Dodd-Frank legislation mandates recording of certain financial transactions across all forms of communication, both traditional and modern.
• In Europe, call-recording requirements under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) will become mandatory for all areas of financial advice.

Especially in these cases, successful implementation of a video recording, storage, and retrieval solution to meet compliance requirements (legal, business, trade group) is critical. But you also need easy and effective ways to analyze the data. Storage will be a challenge for video recordings, because it requires more data and doesn't allow for easy encryption. But new solution architectures with elastic storage are ideal for these growing storage needs.

Solving the Problem

It is exciting to see software solutions solving the problem. Session border controllers now enable video recording. The Session Recording Protocol (SIPREC) IETF specifications define a SIP-based protocol for these solutions. Unified Communications solutions from various companies have solutions now.

Cisco Customer Care solutions enable businesses to easily enable video collaboration and the ability to record and replay these conversations.

The Cisco Remote Expert Mobile solution enables companies to provide mobile video communications between a customer and business,

I look forward to have rich video interactions with businesses in the coming year. (And I know that my interaction could possibly be recorded for training or compliance reasons!)