A picture is worth a thousand words. Just ask any customer or agent who has struggled to describe an issue or explain a solution for something they can’t see themselves.

Adding a visual dimension to phone or chat conversations in real-time can clear things up in an instant. When an agent can see what the customer sees, they can understand the issue quickly and seamlessly guide the customer to a resolution.

That’s important now more than ever. As businesses accelerate digital transformation to bring more customer experiences online, leaders are turning to visual engagement technology – like interactive video and co-browsing – to augment agent-assisted customer conversations on popular engagement channels.

But not just any visual engagement tool will work.

Many existing visual engagement tools lack important features that are crucial for reducing customer effort and building customer trust. Here are some of the top pain points:

The Dreaded Download

Starting a visual engagement session with a download eats into the time you could be using to actively solve the customer’s issue. Customers aren’t always very tech-savvy, and agents will need to coach these customers through how to download and install the app. This is especially painful for one-time fixes. Who wants to download an app to use just once?

But all hope is not lost. An entirely browser-based solution lets you skip the download and get straight to it.

No In-session Annotations

Most video-sharing and co-browsing solutions are missing on-screen annotations. Without the ability to draw and place annotations on a webpage or paused video, agents may struggle to direct the customer’s attention and point out specifics.

Modern visual engagement solutions should enable agent annotations to enhance teaching opportunities and provide a concierge-level customer experience (CX).

Security Slips

A big problem with current co-browsing tools is that they don’t mask private data. Some solutions may offer this on their own website, but what if the customer needs to log into a bank account before completing a transaction on your site? With existing co-browsing tools, there’s nothing to prevent agents from seeing sensitive data.

Be sure to safeguard your customers and your business with data masking on all web properties, not just your own, and the ability to block agents from taking certain actions, like clicking Buy Now, on behalf of your customers (again, on all web properties).

Beyond co-browsing, any visual engagement solution, including camera-sharing, should enable session recording for training and compliance, an admin center offering granular control, and the assurance of a security architecture used and trusted by major banking institutions.