Cobrowsing For Customer Engagement: 7 Ways To Leverage It

If you're a customer support agent, you've probably had versions of this conversation throughout your career: 

Customer: Hi, I'm having issues with such-and-such, but I can't figure out how to fix it.

Agent: Sure, happy to help! Could you give me a few more details? What error message are you getting when you try?

Customer: I'm not sure.

Agent: Could you send a screenshot? 

Customer: Like this? 

Agent: Not quite, could you right click and choose inspect and send me a screenshot of what you're seeing on screen?

Customer: I'm not sure I understand. What is 'inspect'?

Or maybe something like this instead:

Agent: If you just go to the settings icon on your dashboard and navigate to your account settings, you can turn off this setting and it should fix the issue.

Customer: I can't find the gear icon.

Agent: It should be on the top-left of your dashboard.

Customer: Okay, I found it. But now I can't find which setting to turn off.

Agent: Navigate to the account menu under settings.

Customer (growing frustrated): I can't find it.

And so on.

By a certain point in the conversation, both the agent and customer are talking past each other and both are growing increasingly frustrated. The agent can almost feel the user itching to churn and defect to a competitor.

Now imagine there was a better way to have these conversations: one where the agent could call the user, request access to control their screen and show them how to solve the problem collaboratively and in real-time.

Turns out, with cobrowsing, you can do just that!

Why customer engagement is so crucial in SaaS

Nothing is as important as customer engagement when it comes to tech — especially SaaS.

It can mean the difference between high retention rates and a thriving business – or haemorrhaging users and shuttering operations. 

Some of the biggest SaaS companies in the world report extraordinarily high rates of customer engagement and retention — Snowflake, Chili Piper (recent layoffs notwithstanding) and Seon all report NRR (net revenue retention) rates well in excess of 120%. 

But why’s that a big deal? 

Because it means that they could add exactly zero new customers to their roster and still manage to grow their revenues. 

There are a number of reasons why customer engagement is so critical, especially for SaaS companies. If you were to strip it down to the basics, it comes down to this: 

The two things every company wants is to keep their customers and for those customers to eventually buy more. 

And high rates of customer engagement make both those outcomes a far likelier possibility, which is why it pays (literally) to invest in customer experience and engagement. 

Here are just a few reasons why customer engagement is so crucial: 

• It helps you build better and stronger relationships with your customers. 
• It increases the longevity of those relationships. 
• It helps build your brand. 
• And more importantly, it can help drive revenue through upsells, cross-sells and renewals. 

A refresher on cobrowsing

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Before we dive into all the ways you can leverage cobrowsing to increase customer engagement, a brief refresher: cobrowsing is a technology where two or more people can browse the same website or web content together in real-time with multi-cursor screen control. 

Everyone in the cobrowsing session can navigate within the website and interact with elements. 

Typically (as in the case of Fullview Live) this happens on a call, so they can also interact with each other while they cobrowse. 

The main purpose of cobrowsing is to give agents a better way to quickly, easily and collaboratively solve support requests — especially for level 2 and 3 IT support. 

And cobrowsing is now used widely in a number of businesses — from e-commerce to banking to SaaS. 

7 ways you can leverage cobrowsing to increase customer engagement

One of the biggest benefits of cobrowsing is how easy it makes solving a customer's problem. Because agents can request control of a user's screen and solve complicated issues themselves, you save customers the effort and frustration inherent to solving problems themselves — especially when it comes to complex technical issues they may not fully understand.

That's why cobrowsing is one of the best ways to increase customer engagement and reduce churn.

Here are all the best ways you can use cobrowsing for better customer support and engagement: 

• You can use it for technical support
• You can use it to support users proactively
• You can use it to personalize your support interactions
• You can use it to create better onboarding experiences
• You can use cobrowsing to speed up time-to-resolution
• You can use it for upselling and cross-selling
• And you can use it as one part of an end-to-end customer support experience

Use cobrowsing for technical support

IT support is often complicated to give — and to understand. Especially these days, with professionals of all ages and ilks likely using your website or web app. 

With technical support, as an agent or SME, you’re often going to be dealing with complex problems that can’t be solved over chat. 

Cobrowsing can prove enormously handy in these situations. You can get on a cobrowsing call with your users, take control of their screen and solve their problem at your end without having to rely on them to do the complicated troubleshooting. 

Every support agent knows that the best way to decrease customer engagement is to cause unnecessary stress and frustration, and cobrowsing can help you avoid just that. 

Use cobrowsing for proactive support

Proactive support is the practice of constantly monitoring your user base to detect issues and getting in touch with them when you notice something crop up — without waiting for them to request support first. 

There’s real value in proactive support and it demonstrably increases customer engagement and NRR (net revenue retention) while decreasing customer churn.

Why?

Because out of every 26 people experiencing trouble with your product, only 1 will reach out to support. The rest will just churn. By putting proactive support workflows in place, you can ensure that everyone receives the support they need even before they know they need it. 

Session replays and cobrowsing are a one-two punch: use session replays technology to record and monitor user sessions and then escalate to a cobrowsing call when you notice a user experienced a bug or issue in your product. 

Use cobrowsing to provide personalized support 

While one-size-fits-all solutions like FAQs, chatbots and help centers can be very helpful for both agents and users, they are more suited to some kinds of support requests than others. 

As we’ve already discussed, level 2 and 3 technical support is often much more complicated and requires solutions and fixes to be tailored to each individual user experiencing a problem. Use cobrowsing to provide that personalized assistance to users in real time. 

Because it is typically a one-on-one session, cobrowsing is personalized and focused on one user’s needs by default. And because it involves some face-to-face (or screen-to-screen) time between an agent and a user, it can also go a long way towards developing and strengthening those relationships. 

As a consequence, your company is no longer some nameless, faceless entity; it's now something users can start to associate with feelings of trust and human connection. 

Use cobrowsing for better onboarding experiences 

Good onboarding can make or break a SaaS platform, but creating an experience that gives users their first ‘aha’ moment in your product is not easy. 

We’ve already covered various ways to improve customer onboarding before and we included cobrowsing on that list.

Offering to set up one-on-one cobrowsing sessions at key points in the user journey — or initiating a cobrowsing call anytime you notice a user displaying concerning behavior such as rage clicks — can make it much easier to show your users exactly how your product can solve their pain points — without causing them the frustration of having to figure everything out themselves. 

Use cobrowsing to speed up time-to-resolution

Average time-to-resolution is a metric that most support teams keep a very watchful eye on and work to speed up as much as possible. 

But think about it: what are some of the biggest reasons support tickets take ages to solve? 

It boils down to two things: the agent having difficulty understanding what issue a user is having because they’re struggling to explain it — or a user having difficulty implementing the fix because it’s complicated to do. 

By giving agents the ability to take over their user’s screen and solve the problem themselves, cobrowsing speeds up time-to-resolution significantly. 

No more messing about with endless back-and-forth chats or emails — now you can get straight to the point. 

Use cobrowsing for upselling and cross-selling

Companies that aren’t specifically training their support and success staff in the art of upselling and cross-selling are really missing out on what could become a very significant revenue stream. 

The biggest SaaS companies in the world consistently report NRR (net revenue retention) rates of over 130%. A huge reason why is because their customer-facing teams are excellent at recommending more products and solutions for existing users to buy. 

A cobrowsing call can be a great time to make these recommendations because an agent can demonstrate the value of an add-on based on that user’s unique use case. 

Use cobrowsing as one part of an end-to-end customer support experience

Customer experience isn’t just something that happens at one particular point of a user’s journey. And it doesn’t look the same across the board. 

A good customer support philosophy takes the entire customer journey — and all its touch points — into account. It also recognizes that support requests are as individual as the users who make them. 

That’s why it’s essential for your support infrastructure to span across many different channels and to offer support in many different ways. 

Cobrowsing should just be one cog in the wheel and that wheel should probably also include things like: 

• Session replays
• Troubleshooting and console log software
• In-app messaging
• Chatbots
• Comprehensive self-service options
• Multichannel support including social media

That way, you cover all your bases.

Wrapping things up

Customer engagement plays a vital role in the success of SaaS companies, and cobrowsing is a powerful tool that can significantly increase customer engagement and reduce churn. Traditional support conversations often lead to frustration and miscommunication, hindering the customer-agent relationship. Cobrowsing enables agents to provide real-time, collaborative support by requesting access to the customer's screen. This technology can be leveraged in various ways to enhance customer support and engagement. By utilizing cobrowsing and combining it with other support channels, SaaS companies can create a comprehensive support infrastructure that enhances the overall customer experience and drives revenue growth.