Veedesk brings you face-to-face with customer service

The massive growth in online shopping over the past decade has changed the way we think about retail forever and has become to many shoppers a cheaper alternative. It is not, however without it’s detractors. Retail is an art and there is real value in face-to-face interaction with trained staff. I like to think of myself as a fairly competent shopper but when faced with a baffling array of similarly named XLR leads, HDMI cables or power adaptors it can be hard to know which is best. For all its myriad conveniences, occasionally it would help to have a shop assistant on hand to clear up queries. I spent 15 minutes on Amazon this morning trying to buy a Blu-Ray player and was stumped by a number of questions. The player in question had You Tube – but could it play You Tube HD? It has *.mkv file playback – which sounds incredible, but can it playback files in 1080p resolution? And off what? An HFS formatted USB key? Or merely a FAT32 formatted one? I could go on.  Sometimes 5 minutes with a well trained shop assistant could save hours Googling.

Here’s where Andy Henshaw and his Vee24 platform come in. Billed as an “online customer service interface,” I envisaged popup windows with sales reps asking “How could I help you?” and as a result, approached the platform with a large degree of scepticism. After all pop-ups are annoying,  sales reps asking how they can help all the time can be annoying and a mixture of the two just might break the Internet/irrevocably damage the online shopping experience.

Fortunately Vee24 does none of these things and uses a number of intelligent design features to make the service unobtrusive and genuinely helpful. CEO Andy Henshaw took me through an extensive live demo of the product and answered a few of my key questions. The service is powered via “the VeeDesk” (pictured) and a human operator. New visitors to the website are noted and flagged if their behaviour shows signs of confusion  – the digital equivalent of holding two seemingly similar models of toaster in either hand and a quizzical gaze. A small panel slides across offering assistance and can be slid back with the click of a button. The platform also allows for Reactive assistance allowing you to press a Help/Assistance button.

Asking for help pulls up another window with a video of a sales rep and an Instant Messaging window, plus the option for sound using VoIP. I was impressed how this worked seamlessly, even in Google Chrome, without me having to download any special programs or codecs or waiting for dialogue boxes. Surfing from a fast broadband connection, Vee24 pumped high quality well lit video onto my desktop – although there is a dynamic resource allocation system in the background that varies video quality depending on your connection and system settings. The high quality video really helps and the attention to detail in this area really impressed me. Instead of a washed out office glow, each VeeDesk is fitted with a proper key and fill light set up and Autocue style secondary monitor that makes the on screen image seem eye to eye and is very useful for transmitting non-verbal cues.

On my trial run with Andy he showed me a co-browsing feature where the operative and I shared the cursor and were we able to browse an electronics site, look at a few models of TVs an even fill in a form. Andy pointed out that this functionality is not only useful for standard retail queries but also for more in-depth work such as filling out a mortgage application form or applying for a credit card.

When I question Andy about any possibly security implications he reassured me that no personal data was stored and the platform accessed web-browsing data in a similar fashion to Google Analytics – which is found on literally millions of websites. The platform has also cleared a number of security related hurdles required to launch in Germany – where they have very strict privacy laws.

At the end of our talk Andy ran me through some a retail statistics. 82% of online shoppers abandon carts, 42% value interaction and for every 100 browsers on a site on 2/3 actually make a purchase. Based on the demonstration I saw I expect this platform to be extremely popular with the larger online retailers and a welcome addition to the online shopping experience in the not too distant future.