How to fake eye contact during video chats (and why it’s important)
On a recent round of customer interviews, we hosted GoToMeeting sessions from the comfort of our team room instead of trekking around the country or renting out a creepy room with two-way mirrors. Video chat software that enables screen sharing and session recording has gotten pretty good and video conferencing is becoming a more and more essential part of a typical day. This was quicker, cheaper, and more inclusive than the typical one-on-one because our clients were able to dial in and observe the interviews first hand.
But remote interviewing has some drawbacks, one of which is that it can be more difficult to build rapport and get people to share their opinions openly.
Here are some tips to make it a little easier:
Tip 1: Use your webcam, even if they don’t.
You’re about to ask a stranger some pretty personal questions. Granted, they’re getting a sweet gift card out of the deal, but still, they’re anxious and, technically, they don’t need to dish much to get their reward. My goal is to get them to open up as much as possible. By putting yourself out there on camera, we found that respondents were much more open and at ease when the camera was on. The camera makes it more like the in-person, face-to-face interaction.
Tip 2: Trick yourself into looking at the camera.
Option 1: Put something with eyes above your webcam (like a googly-eyed sticky note animal, for example).
Option 2: If you’re not totally distracted by seeing yourself talk, keeping yourself up on video can help you make sure that you’re not fidgeting and creating visual distractions. Position the video playback at the top center of your screen, just below the camera. Unfortunately Google Hangouts doesn’t allow for this, but GoToMeeting and others do.
Tip 3: Tape your prompts to your monitor.
Again, we’re trying to do whatever we can to eliminate distractions on the other end of the call and there is almost nothing more distracting than listening to (and watching) someone shuffle paper near a microphone. Ideally, you’ve rehearsed and paired down your discussion guide into something so concise that you don’t even need prompts, but if you still need a little help, take time to position your prompts in a way that you can reference them without missing a beat in conversation.
Try it out. You’ll see that these easy tricks can help to make the conversation seem infinitely more sincere to the person on the other end and get you better results in your next remote interviews!
