Last week, we explored texting within the contact center realm.  As texting becomes more prevalent in the contact center, there will be a lot of interesting use cases for expanding text as a customer service avenue.  These use cases will be similar to many years ago when the “call” center transformed into a “contact” center due to customer interactions taking place over the Web.  In other words, it’s the story of the mobile on-ramp to the Internet.

Assuming customers have smartphones, it is easy to make the leap and foresee the advent of video and images within texting. These days, with advanced mobile networks, adding MMS (multi-media messaging) to text is no longer a big deal.  As such, companies can possibly “push” pictures, which could take the form of product information, coupons or ads. I’ve written in the past, for example, of location-based services where a customer would “opt in” to the use of location-based services and then could receive a coupon for a daily special when in the vicinity of a premise.

Short videos could also be pushed to customers to show, for example, where a product code is on a product or how to install the product. These could come in handy, especially since a wired computer might not be close to the product. In the other direction, a customer could push a short video to the company. A use case for this could be an insurance claim; the customer could take a short video of the claim and send it in, streamlining and accelerating the entire claim process.

As video enters the world of text messaging, Dialogic’s PowerMedia XMS software-based media server could help you develop this advanced contact center capability.