While most of the press surrounding video use in real estate is centered on the more ‘visible’ area of residential real estate, video chat and other novel uses of video are shaking up the commercial real estate market is a very similar fashion. The uses for video chat applications within business are only limited by your imagination, and new higher definition video chat applications can be deployed externally to help drive sales and increase customer satisfaction, and also internally to promote a better working environment and improve internal dynamics, a particular concern among organizations with a distributed team. Here are some of the ways that you can use internal chat to directly impact your commercial real estate business and increase revenue.
Create More Immersive, More Personalized Office Tours
Integrating video chat into a preexisting app or launching a new service based around video chat can allow you to offer ‘tours’ to prospective tenants, regardless of their location. This can be particularly useful for clients who aren’t from the area, or where the decision makers in the organization are in another part of the country or a different part of the world. When you use an integrated video chat solution that can display video in high definition, your video tour can be just as useful to your end client as the real thing, and it requires far less of a time investment on your (and your client’s) part. Most importantly, providing a better virtual tour can serve as a great way to get prospects more interested in a property, and it can increase the number of prospects at the same time, since their time investment is so low.
Develop an App That Uses Video Effectively
More and more of your customers are spending their time on mobile devices, and with office spaces being a key barometer of change today, it’s important that you focus on reaching your customers on the platforms that they use the most. Mobile devices are the only device segment that is truly growing according to Pew Research, and having an app puts your firm directly onto the platform that is most used by your customers.
Creating a video heavy app for mobile devices does present some challenges, namely the difficulty of maintaining a data connection adequate for video over a variety of different types of devices and connection speeds. Video chat companies like Agora.io have begun to combat this problem by offering more efficient video communication capabilities to companies looking to properly implement video in their applications. According to the CEO of Agora, Tony Zhao, While video or voice chat is a powerful aid to a brand’s customer service, faulty connections can do more harm than good, frustrating a customer so much they may never try again. Finding a provider with a robust network able to accommodate calls of any length of time, from areas that may not have strong connections, is crucial.” In order to properly compete on a mobile platform, proper implementation of video is essential.
Internal Video Conferencing
One of the most important factors in doing business within distributed companies is proper communication between colleagues, both horizontally and vertically within the organization. Over 90% of communication is nonverbal, and video chat is one of the only mediums that is able to properly replicate most of the verbal and nonverbal communication that you get from speaking with someone in-person. If your employees are spending any time outside the office and they need to get in touch with their team while away, it’s essential that you provide them with a video chat system to do so easily. This will have long term positive effects for both your team and your top line.
Video chat is a key piece of technology that can be accretive to your business when implemented properly. If you are looking to drive revenue growth, then using video chat for virtual office tours can bring more prospective tenants into a space and lower the time and effort needed to fill a vacancy. You can also use video chat as the cornerstone of a branded application to better reach your customers where they spend most of their time, and you can even use video chat to communicate more effectively with colleagues when an in-person meeting would otherwise be impossible.
Are you using video chat today in your firm? Where have you seen the biggest benefits to your team or customers? Let us know in the comments.