Throughout the digital revolution, consumers have shown a marked fondness for technologies that make their online engagements more participatory. As this trend continues to dominate through the current decade, businesses large or small have to respond with web-based business models where technology enablement not just connects but actually allows businesses to engage with customers in person.

Today several businesses realize that traditional digital call center technologies like live chat and IVR menus are not enough to differentiate their operations from their competitors; they need other add-on to help them compete. One of such tools is known as co-browsing. Customers do not like to just be led or guided in their buying experiences, they also like to contribute and participate in the process. Such participatory behavior can happen when live chat sessions are enriched with co-browsing tools. The article titled Navigating the Tricky Co-Browsing Landscape states that enterprises which focus on enhencing customer experience have been relatively swift to embrace technologies such as co-browsing technology to satisfy customer needs of active participation.

Personalize Customer Service to meet new customers demands

Customers are not willing to spend significant amount of time surfing several generic-type product or service descriptions to locate one particular product or service they need. Rather, customers want instant, customized help when they are ready to shop. Thus personalization—a strategy that caters to the individual customer with distinct tastes and preferences is becoming popular among the online business community.

An example of personalization, provided in Personalization Strategies to Attract and Retain Customers, cites the case of a cosmetics manufacturer – where a particular line of makeup and skin care products follows a system of generating on-the-spot shade matching for every skin tone. This type of one-on-one solution provider, when selling online, can very well use the co-browsing technology to view and display different result along with customer.

A personalized help using tools such as Co-browsing, takes Customer Service strategies up a notch. It helps making customers feel like a “VIP” as the service seem to have been tailored to meet the exact need of the individual. That also opens up a whole opportunity for the vendor as their sales representatives can navigate customers into viewing a set of preferred or custom products the vendor would like to offer.

The challenge of choosing the right co-browser

Co-browsing technology is complex. The need to be able to synchronize between two parties browsing websites of different nature, on different platforms (e.g. PC, mobile) is challenging. When you add security aspects and a common requirement to browse pages behind login, the challenge is even greater. There are different technologies for co-browsing (mainly ‘Proxy’ and ‘Direct’ co-browsing), which should be considered with the specific needs of the business. Before committing to a specific solution, read more about