All the ads for Apple’s FaceTime focus on personal relationships — a father talking to his son from a hotel room; a young woman showing off her new haircut to her boyfriend; grandparents looking at their grandchild’s latest drawing. Is the future of mobile video chat — whether it’s on your iPhone, Android, old Nokia, or (maybe someday) your BlackBerry — strictly a consumer story? Or can businesses find a way to leverage mobile video calls to help them better engage their customers and clients?
Many businesses rely on video chat everyday, but for the most part they either use expensive video conferencing systems focused more on internal or business-to-business communication, or consumer-friendly tools like Skype or Google Talk.
For businesses focused on client and customer relationships, the latter can become invaluable tools that allow the business to balance client face time with the realities of modern work — remote offices, consistent travel, and the need to be in two places at once.
There has been a lot of talk since Apple released FaceTime for the iPhone 4 — about whether it threatens Skype and other consumer level desktop video chat clients. Skype has grown considerably in the past year, according to a recent report on GigaOM, and one of its growth strategies is to sign up small to medium sized businesses that rely more and more on video chat for collaboration and customer relationships.
Will FaceTime cut into this business market? I mean, if it’s “face time” that businesses want, maybe Apple’s product — or one of the other mobile video chat applications out there like Fring and Qik — is the way to go. Because these applications are so consumer-focused, it seems possible they could affect how businesses and consumers relate as much as the phone itself originally did. I looked at how a few businesses are using video chat to see what benefits this technology might have for companies and their customers.
How Businesses Might Leverage a Consumer Technology
To be fair, none of the mobile video chat services I looked at currently advertises itself to a business audience. On Apple’s FaceTime page, for instance, it says that “With the tap of a button, you can wave hello to your kids, share a smile from across the globe, or watch your best friend laugh at your stories.”
Similarly, the website for Fring — one of Android’s big video chat clients — looks like it might be a social network for toddlers. Qik touts its services with images of grandparents cooing at the grandkids over a mobile phone. It’s clear that all these services are going after the consumer’s heart more than the business person’s bottom line.
Putting their marketing campaigns aside, however, we can objectively point to at least two things that businesses might fight interesting when considering how to handle their video calls. As opposed to desktop video chat clients, mobile solutions offer:
- Mobility (obviously): Just like using a headset frees up your hands while talking to a customer or client, the mobile video chat doesn’t require that you sit in front of a computer.
- Two Cameras: (at least potentially): The ability to show a person what you are looking at is much better than lifting up your laptop to share the view.
In what ways could a business benefit from a mobile, two camera video chat?
FaceTime is “Not Business Oriented”
Search for “mobile video chat business” and you don’t get many useful results. This is reflected in the experience Pablo Carrega, CEO of RelevanSí, a business solutions firm for green businesses. Video chat is the main way Carrega communicates with clients. “We are located in two countries,” he told me. “In the States and in Argentina … It would be impossible to have face contact with [our clients] without Skype. It’s a trust tool for us.” Video chat is crucial for Carrega’s business because, as he said, “We can see the face of our client — his opinions. Facial expressions for us [are] very important because we can really see if he likes what we are doing.” Additionally, both sides can use the camera to better illustrate complex ideas.
But, when asked whether he uses any mobile video chat services with his clients, Carrega responded that even though he owns an iPhone 4 (along with an iPad) the technology is just not developed enough for him. FaceTime requires Wi-Fi and another iPhone 4, for instance; and while the quality of the video call itself might be quite good, it is awkward to use alongside his other business tools. The iPad allows him to communicate and share presentations away from his desk, for instance, but try to add video chat in to the mix and “[i]t’s a little complicated,” Carrega explained. “You have your iPhone in one hand and your iPad in the other trying to open your Keynote presentation… It’s not business oriented.”
For Carrega and others like him, the business transacted with the customer more often than not requires more than just face-to-face chatting. FaceTime, Fring and other mobile chat clients don’t integrate closely enough with the other tools he uses to engage his customers.
Show the People, Show the Room
For Eric Rice, CEO of LWI, a business management company for celebrities and professional athletes, mobile voice chat offers completely new and valuable ways to engage with his clientele. Video chat was already a big part of Rice’s business. Dealing with his clients requires trying to get a lot of people together who, for all intents and purposes, live on the road. Having face-to-face conversations is important, but having them in the same room is very difficult. He calculated that video chat saves his company anywhere from 13 to 25 hours a month in e-mail writing and about $13,000 every 60 days in flights.
With mobile video chat, he can connect with even more flexibility — people almost always have their phone, he said — and the dual camera on the iPhone allows him and his clients to basically share their respective spaces, which is helpful when looking at endorsement products, for instance. In those cases, the video chat client doesn’t need to integrate with other business tools. It just needs to show the people and show the room.
Rice described one situation where a client needed LWI’s help throwing a charity event in San Diego, where LWI is based. The client lived in West Virginia, so they discussed how they should pick out the spot. “He said, ‘Just send me pictures.’ ” Rice explained. “And instead of pictures, we were actually on the phone with him [using FaceTime] scoping around the entire venue, showing him ‘This is about 15 feet from this, this is here.’ ” The client judged they had enough space and went with the spot.
So for Rice, the mobility and dual camera actually approximate some of the most important parts of his client interaction. He can share the space he is in much more easily than one can do over a desktop client. And while the Wi-Fi-only aspect of FaceTime definitely creates obstacles for him, the ease of calling someone into a face-to-face conversation is vastly greater than when they relied on a laptop.
Is FaceTime Right for your Business?
So looking at these two cases, it’s clear that FaceTime and other mobile video chat services can be used for more than just, as Apple says, watching “your best friend laugh at your stories.” But, it also will clearly have to grow quite a bit to become more ubiquitous in a business context.
For now, with FaceTime, Fring and Qik all limited in some ways, it seems that the businesses best suited for mobile video chat are those with:
- Highly personal customer relationships. Those FaceTime ads where the friend shows off her dress for another friend are actually a good example here. Video chat is intimate, and businesses built on a more anonymous customer relationship may not find much value from putting a face on every interaction.
- A customer interaction that is already very talk-heavy as opposed to visuals-heavy. While I can use the dual camera to show you what I’m’ looking at, it’s not the best tool for presentations or other digital images.
- A highly mobile workforce. If you are already in front of a laptop or desktop, why not just use that? For those who live by their mobile phones, however, being able to cut the laptop cord can be very valuable.
That being said, it is possible to imagine some customer-focused businesses innovating with mobile video chat and really taking advantage of the mobility and dual cameras. For instance, a wedding dress maker who offers the client video call updates to show progress, or to talk over details they can both look at. Or on the flip side, where a customer needs help setting up a grill and is able to show the customer service rep exactly what he or she is looking at. And as described above, Eric Rice from LWI highlights a great potential use for event planners who want to show customers the space they are thinking of booking.
Have you seen any novel business uses of mobile video chat? Do you have thoughts on how a business might leverage mobile video chat to better engage with its customers and clients? Share your ideas in the comments below.
Apple iPod touch 32 GB (4th Generation) NEWEST MODEL
Technical Details
Capacity: 32 GB
- 32 GB capacity for about 8,000 songs, 40,000 photos, or 40 hours of video
- Up to 40 hours of audio playback or 7 hours of video playback on a single charge
- 3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen Multi-Touch display with 960-by-640-pixel resolution (326 pixels per inch)
- Support for AAC, Protected AAC (iTunes Store), MP3, MP3 VBR, Audible, Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV audio formats; H.264, MPEG-4, and Motion JPEG video codecs in M4V, MP4, MOV, and AVI formats
- One-year limited warranty
0 comments:
Post a Comment