You’ve just received a piece of furniture that you’ve ordered online. You’re in the midst of trying to assemble it, but you cannot get the thing to come together. So, you call customer service, and then spend the next 25 minutes trying to describe a very visual problem using words. How very frustrating!

This is where Snapchat enters the scene as an easy, fun and real-time tool to deliver customer service.

What if instead of describing the problem, you could simply send the customer service rep a snap of the piece of furniture, and the parts you are having trouble with? They could quickly identify the problem, or at the very least find someone who is capable of doing so, and respond much more quickly to your problem visually.

This is extremely important, because response time is an important gauge that many customers use when judging the effectiveness of a brand’s customer service efforts. Sound interesting?

Here are four ways that you can incorporate Snapchat into your customer service.

Related: Five Reasons Why Customer Support Software Is A Must For Startups

1. Using images to put customers at ease

One of the reasons that online marketing efforts use so many pictures and images is that these images build trust, and make the customer feel at ease.

The problem with phone-based customer service is that not only is there a lack of ability to see the item that is causing concern, but there is also a detachment between the representative and the customer.

With Snapchat, it is possible to allow the customer to see that their problem is being worked on and that there is a real, concerned person on the other end of the line, not just someone looking bothered while chewing their donut.

2. Creating walkthroughs in real time

Here’s another scenario. You’ve just downloaded some photo editing software, but you cannot get a particular function to work for you. Even worse, the online instructional material just isn’t working for you.

So, you hit up customer service on Snapchat. The representative asks you to send them a snap of your screen. Within a couple of minutes, they have pulled up the same screen on their workstation. Then, one snap at a time, they send you detailed pictures of what you need to do to get things working the way you want them to work. Before you know it, you have things up and running.

Even better, the customer service rep can compile all of the snaps they have taken and send them to you so that you can have the images for future reference.

This could be applied to so many scenarios. For one, the furniture assembly situation would be a great candidate for this. In fact any step-by-step process could be made much easier for struggling customers if they were able to see what needed to be done one step at a time.

Related: Everything You Need To Know About Snapchat Marketing

3. Combining voice and images

Now, imagine using Snapchat in the ways described above, then adding telephone customer service into the mix. By seeing and hearing what is going on, your customer service rep is going to be even better able to understand your problem and help you to find a solution. Fast!

4. Instructional videos and tutorials

While none of us really appreciates the fact that customer service has become so robotic, the truth is there are cases when self-service and automation are quite useful.

For one thing, being able to access information quickly without waiting for a human to respond is very convenient. For businesses, automation and self-service also represents a way of saving money and time. It’s much less expensive to allow a customer to do things for themselves than it is to pay a representative to help them.

To that end, Snapchat can be used to create and post up instructional videos and tutorials.

This means that instead of working through a representative, they can simply find the video or tutorial containing the information that they need. They get what they want as quickly as possible, and they walk away happy.

Related: Choosing Your Medium: Is Snapchat Right For Your Business?