Author Archives: Paola Magni

Tips You Need to Know

Posted on by

Push Notification Segmentation is super-effective for marketing purposes. Notifications become even more efficient when the audience is segmented.

Unless you have a static audience (which is impossible), Push notification segmentation is one of the essential steps you can take to get the right messages to the right audience and achieve your marketing objectives.

The goal of sending push notifications to your subscribers is not just to get them to buy what you are selling. Actually, the purpose is to enable you to get closer to them.

You can only do this when you send highly personalized messages. This is what segmentation will help you achieve.

What is segmentation?

In simple terms, segmentation means dividing a heterogeneous audience into more homogenous and manageable parts. Segmentation is done based on parameters marketers consider very important, such as demographic, geographic, social, and behavioral patterns.

By segmenting your audience, you are creating target groups. This is normally done directly on websites by embedding filters, forms, and questionnaires before or after a visitor has made a purchase. External tools can also be used when trying to attract new customers.

How is segmentation used in marketing?

It has been reported that as much as 75% of internet users are concerned about how their personal data are used by companies. At the same time, up to 62% of users expect brands to send them personalized messages. How do you reconcile this? The answer is segmentation.

Basically, segmentation is used in marketing to get the right message to the right audience. For push notifications, segmentation is used to create a target audience so that it becomes relatively easy to reach the different target audiences with the right message.

Types of segmentation

As hinted earlier, there are parameters used for segmentation. These are the criteria that determine where each member of the audience falls into. They determine the type of segmentation in use:

Geographic

This is segmentation based on the location of the website visitor. You can collect data on the location of website visitors and use it to target your audience. You can target according to country, city, or even district.

Demographic

This pertains to age, gender, nationality, and a few other parameters. Age significantly affects people’s buying behaviors, and you can use your demographic data to target your audience and send relevant push notifications.

Social

Social parameters, like education level, income, marital status, among others, are also used for segmentation.

Behavioral

Based on the behavior and activities of a subscriber or website visitor, you can send push notifications that will get him/her to buy your products or services. It is not rocket science; frequency of purchase, interest in certain products, etc., can be used for targeting.

Segmentation can also be based on device type, whereby the device used by the visitor to subscribe to the push notification is captured.

How does segmentation work for Push Notification?

Fundamentally, segmenting works in push notification almost the same way it works with other marketing methods. Here, you will need different subscriber groups and create push notifications with information that corresponds to their tastes and needs.

It is important to state clearly here that segmentation is not exactly the same as personalization. Rather, segmentation facilitates personalization. In effect, it allows marketers to improve campaign conversion rates and overall efficiency.

Depending on the tools in use, push notification segmentation may operate on metadata, tags, and aliases.

Metadata filters

This is deployed during the subscription process of the push notification system. Within the little time it takes to subscribe, the system can capture information regarding the browser being used (Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.), the Operating System (Windows, iOS, Android), and the location of the device. The information can be used for location-based push notifications.

Tags

Tags are used to target subscribers and website visitors according to their interests and activities on the site. It can be set for categories or product pages to observe and tag visitors that open the pages and those who perform specific actions.

Tags are used to send push notifications about new arrivals, improved offers, and discounts, as many more, according to the interest of the subscribers.

Aliases

Aliases are personal identifiers that can be effectively used to personalize offers and trigger notifications. The push notification system accesses personal identifiers for subscribers as they log in or provide their details.

It can be the username, email address, token, etc.; this allows marketers to send push notifications to subscribers individually.

Benefits of segmenting your audience

Good push notifications are the ones that help marketers to get closer to the subscriber and convince them to buy. It has to be personalized, and it has to convert. These are the things push notification segmentation can bring. Here are specific benefits of push notification segmentation:

It Gets you closer to your audience

Segmentation is regarded as the first important step towards personalization. When you are able to effectively segment your audience for push notifications, you will be able to send everyone messages they will find useful. You can take a step ahead to personalize the messages. When you do, it takes you a huge step closer to your audience.

It Improves your conversion rates

Conversion rates, and not click rates, actually defines success in marketing. As you most likely know already, push notification segmentation will take the right messages to the right people who will click through and make purchases or subscribe to your services because it actually interests them.

It Improves user experience

If you want to run a sustainable business, user experience is another important area you need to work on. Luckily, push notification segmentation helps you so much in that regard.

Personalized messages to your target audience will show them that you actually care about them, even though you want to sell.

It Improves your marketing efficiency

When you get the right messages to the right people and get many of them to take the actions you want them to take, your marketing efficiency improves.

That is what data-driven marketing is all about. That is one of the benefits you get from segmentation of push notification and Arena Personas use. Overall, you will spend less to achieve great results.

Conclusion

Push notification segmentation improves your marketing efforts in many ways. It is based on customer data and helps marketers personalize push notifications.

As you probably know already, data-driven marketing is the future. Push notification segmentation is part of the future.

Arena is always here for you. Your brand’s Customer Engagement Platform can leverage Arena Personas first-party data. Get started for free in minutes.

Live Chat: Shorten Sales Cycle & Improve CX

Posted on by

If you want to close deals faster and improve the customer buying journey, Live Chat can be an excellent tool for your sales team. Find out why!

Sales funnels are at the core of business strategies nowadays, whether your company sells B2C products or sells software, equipment, or services in the B2B market. Having the right sales channels will help you guide leads and prospects through the conversion process.

Companies of all sizes have tried hard to fasten the sales cycle and shorten the path that leads customers to get to know a brand to buy from it.

That’s understandable, considering that just a slight tweak in the sales funnel can positively affect a company’s bottom line.

Think about it: the less time a customer spends in your sales funnel, the more return on investment (ROI) he or she generated for you!

But how can you shorten the sales cycle without rushing your customers? Well, Live Chat can be a great way to engage with qualified prospects at the right time and with the right messages, helping to guide them faster towards the purchase.

#Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

Live Chat combines the convenience and real-time experience expected by empowered audiences while also serving as a gatekeeper for your sales team. After all, not every customer on your website is mature enough to convert or start a conversation with sales reps.

In this blog post, we will explore how Live Chat can shorten the sales cycle and the importance of doing so. Read on to find more about the advantages of Live Chat in the sales funnel.

What is the sales cycle?

The sales cycle is the process that comprehends all the touchpoints between your company and potential customers, from the very first contact until the deal is closed.

The sales funnel describes the steps needed to create awareness around your brand, make your prospects considerate buying from you, and then convert. This process can be described through AIDA’s acronym (awareness, interest, desire, action).

The sales Funnel also includes your entire team’s effort to create and maintain interest in your products, engage; potential customers, answer their doubts, and finally sell to them.

How can Live Chat shorten the sales cycle?

Reducing the Sales Cycle is about helping customers find the information they need at any time and help them understand your product before you sell to them. Live Chat empowers the customer and relies on conversational commerce, which can help warm up your leads until they are ready to buy.

According to CrazyEgg;, 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company if they offer Live Chat. Besides, Forrester; noted a 10% increase in the average order value when reviewing the sales from customers who used Live Chat before making a purchase, compared with those who did not use it.

A few ways Live Chat can help you shorten the Sales Cycle:

Faster feedback to marketing

Let’s say you have a two-month sales cycle time. That means it will take a lot more time for the marketing team to understand which marketing tactics worked or not for a given group of customers that converted in that period.

Live Chat gives you the possibility to get quicker feedback (in real-time) and then reinforce the marketing strategies that led to better results so far.

Efficiency for B2B Sales Teams

Live Chat is particularly great for B2B companies that wish to streamline their prospection activities since it works as a gatekeeper to filter qualified leads.

In the traditional sales model, the sales cycle is a back and forth process: the customer discovers the website and fills out contact forms. A sales representative then reaches out via e-mail or phone call without fully understanding the customer’s needs.

What if sales reps could make a more assertive approach towards prospects? Live Chat can undermine inefficiencies by helping your company start a personalized conversation with the customer.

A real-time chat combines the engagement level and immediacy of a phone call while still allowing your sales reps to manage more than one conversation at once.

That way, you can understand initial questions and objections in real-time before even having a more in-depth conversation with a client. Live Chat can replace some boring contact and assessment forms since initial client diagnosis can be made directly through the Chat, shortening the Sales Cycle.

Better conversion rates in e-commerce

When it comes to; e-commerce, it might sound tempting to assume that your visitors will browse your website on their own, find exactly what they want, be satisfied with the information provided, and then go straight to the checkout process. However, that’s not necessarily how it happens.

More often than not, customers will have doubts about products, payment methods, pricing, and shipping, sometimes leaving your website to search for other options and then eventually come back to make the purchase.

Incorporating proactive Live Chat in e-commerce websites creates a real-time space for customers to ask questions and find complementary information. Altogether, it can help reduce friction in the buying journey and move your customer quicker through the sales funnel.

Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

Once a prospect is engaging via Live Chat, there is no need to put them through the pipelines of your funnel. Live Chat can help you skip them straight to the conversion stage.

Of course, there must be a good strategy behind the conversational flow. It can still be an effective way to reduce costs with social selling and other intrusive marketing channels, allowing you to skip a few steps usually necessary until the purchase.

Live Chat might seem like just a simple resource, but it can be a powerful tool to engage customers and reduce Customer Acquisition costs through the funnel.

Fasten upselling and cross-selling processes

Shortening the sales cycle is not about being pushy or rushing the customer to close a deal. In that sense, Live chat can help you build trust and provide customers with helpful information for their unique needs – resulting in a shorter and more efficient sales cycle.

Beyond optimizing the Sales Cycle for one service or another, Live Chat is useful to perform cross-selling and upselling strategies. With a proactive approach, your sales agents can offer complementary products related to customers’ interests and products they were initially looking for.

As a result, companies that use Live Chat tend to increase average order value and faster ROI in shorter periods.

Let’s say you run a media company, and a customer wants to sign up for a live conference you’re organizing. When he goes to the checkout page to pay for his badge, you could use Live Chat to send a personalized message recommending an essential content subscription with a discount. That logic applies to any industry and niche.

How are brands using Live Chat throughout the sales cycle?

Are you still skeptical about how much Live Chat can help shorten the sales cycle?; A study by AMA found that live chat can be used effectively throughout the entire customer journey.

The study shows that:

  • 29% of companies are using Live Chat for marketing awareness
  • 32% of companies are using Live Chat for early-stage sales development
  • 39% of companies are using Live Chat for the post-sales customer support

8 steps to use Live Chat to reduce the sales cycle and close more deals

As great as it is, Live Chat won’t just magically shorten your Sales Cycle from the moment you implement it. Your team should have a well-thought sales strategy that uses Live Chat as a key touchpoint with the customer, considering many variables.

Here are a few steps to make the best out of Live Chat for your sales cycle.

  1. Understand how long is your sales cycle

The basic step is to understand how long your company’s average sales cycle is. That might seem like an obvious recommendation, but many salespeople have never stopped to think about it.

It is important to consider different customer segments and products and then establish parameters of what your team considers a short or long sales cycle. From there, you can set up a strategy for improvements.

  1. Make sure your Live Chat is mobile-friendly

Live Chat is usually built for websites and with desktop navigation in mind. However, you should make sure your Live Chat is also easy to access through mobile devices, to offer your buyers a great; customer experience.

Customers who are ready to buy want to be able to buy quickly from mobile devices, and the same expectation exists when it comes to getting help or information through Live Chat.

  1. Bring different content formats to Live Chat

Many people think of corporate and e-commerce Live Chat as a text-only channel, when in fact, many Live Chat tools offer you the chance to incorporate video chat, voice chat, and formats like maps, forms, and spreadsheets embedded into conversations.

When you have different resources within the chat, it’s easier to target personalized messages and answer doubts from visitors, which ultimately can help them make purchase decisions faster.

  1. Rout customers to the right sales or support agents

There is no use adopting Live Chat to optimize your sales cycle if you’re routing customers to the wrong department or sales representative. Agents should be well-trained and equipped to handle specifics about products and services your offering, payment, and onboarding processes, pricing, etc.

That is something you should be careful about, especially if your company deals with extensive portfolios and many business units.

  1. Plan different steps of the conversation

If you truly want to use Live Chat to close deals faster, it’s important to have a well-mapped conversation flow for each stage of the customer journey (awareness, consideration, conversion😉 and each of your buyer personas. Consider the most frequent doubts and stages for each stage in the journey and customer segments that you would like to reach.

What kinds of materials and information they would want to have access to? What is the best language for each buyer persona? Having those aspects in mind, you can better train sales agents and be prepared to guide customers to the next stage.

  1. Don’t keep Live Chat data in silos

This one is crucial. Live Chat might be an excellent starting point with a potential customer, but you need to make sure data generated from chat sessions are integrated into other sales management platforms.

Live Chat allows you to gather valuable information about the customer profile and his pain points, so it’s thoughtful to have Live Chat software integrated into Customer Relationship Management Platforms (CRM) and Customer Data Platforms (CDP), just so your sales and marketing team can understand the full picture about a customer and set the best strategy to follow up with them.

  1. Use Live Chat triggers to encourage customers to take action

There are many triggers you can use to send proactive messages in Live Chat and help customers move through the sales funnel faster. you can send messages about coupons, events, discounts, free items, and sensitive offers that are related to their profile.

  1. Have clear next steps

At last, it’s not enough just to show you have a great value proposition via Live Chat. To truly shorten the Sales Cycle, your team needs to take advantage of Live Chat to indicate CLEAR next steps for the customer.

Does he need a second round of conversation with sales agents? Does he need to complete an assessment? Does he need to proceed to the checkout page? Make sure you use Call to Actions (CTAs) and the right language to guide him through the next steps.

Conclusion

Are you interested in the potential of Live Chat to optimize your Sales Cycle? Maybe your company already uses Live Chat in Customer Support, or perhaps it’s still figuring out how to incorporate it in its website.

Either way, you can experiment with Live Chat little by little and then adjust it to your Sales operation.

Arena has one of the most complete Live Chat solutions on the market, with many features to help you personalize your sales approach.

Request your free trial today and see how Live Chat can optimize your sales funnel like never before.

14 Ways Live Chat a Customer Service Game-Changer

Posted on by

Live Chat is transforming customer care across many segments. Discover how this tool is leading a “micro revolution” to customer support and sales teams.

What are the main pillars that sustain the relationship between companies and customers? Let’s think for a second about brands that are known for excellent customer experience.

Digital apps, fintech, eCommerce, you name it. No matter the segment, it’s clear that successful brands offer more than great products, advertising, and content. They have a superior approach towards customer service and always try to make sure communication is dynamic and assertive. 

Live Chat is the ultimate tool to offer that. After all, in the age of instant communication, people are not willing to wait much time to have their questions answered. Besides, they increasingly want to count on omnichannel support.

Well, Live Chat is changing Customer Service in many ways. In this post, we’ll explore how this tool is boosting productivity and efficiency in Customer Service and customer satisfaction. 

The context behind Live Chat

For those who are not familiar with Live Chat, here goes a brief description of it.  Live Chat is a tool that allows customers to ask for support via instant messages directly on a company’s website or app while browsing products and viewing content.

Besides, some brands have integrated their Live Chat tools to other messaging platforms to provide a seamless support experience across different brand channels. 

By why exactly is Live Chat disrupting the customer care business? According to Forrester’s study,; 33% of consumers now expect to see Live Chat services offered on every website.

The same report says the number of U.S. online shoppers who use live Chat has increased from 38% to 58% in the last five years. 

Live Chat is mostly used in B2C businesses by support agents and Customer Care teams, but it can also be used by Customer Success and Sales teams in B2B companies.

#Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

Why Live Chat can take Customer Experience to the next level

Live Chat makes communication between brands and their customers much quicker and organic as it emulates conversation platforms. 

Why have the customers reaching for support through email or phone if you can help them in real-time through Live Chat? Here are a few reasons Live Chat is changing customer service in companies. 

1) Enhancing brand experience

It’s no secret customers are more demanding when it comes to customer experience. They have become used to personalized messages and offers in every aspect of their lives, and thus they have high expectations regarding customer service. 

According to Salesforce, 80% of customers believe brand experience is just as important as a brand’s products or services. Another study by Capgemini shows that the same percentage of customers are willing to spend more money to have better customer service. 

Following this logic, customer service can be the central element to differentiate your brand from the competition.

2) Providing fast responses

A few years ago, it might have been OK to make customers wait a couple of days to get responses to their requests via phone or email. That is no longer the truth. 

A study from Hubspot says 90% of customers rate “immediate response” as very important when they have a query. 

Having Live Chat on your website or app gives you the ability to answer queries in real-time. In addition, Live Chat has proven to provide higher customer satisfaction rates than channels such as phone, email, and social media. 

3) Decreasing resolution time 

From a business perspective, Live Chat also has helped companies streamline their customer support processes and optimize customer care strategies. 

With Live Chat, you can route customers to specific departments and agents according to the keywords they use in the chat, for instance, avoiding repeated communication across different support channels. Because it offers instant communication, Live Chat can potentially decrease the average answer and requests resolution time. 

4) Boosting brands Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Agile and effective customer service is the key to drive customer satisfaction. If you want to improve your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), Live Chat is the way to go. Offering real-time, personalized support shows that your company is truly customer-centric;. That is why many companies notice better retention rates after using this type of software.

5) Non-intrusive communication

The best thing about Live Chat is that it happens in an inviting and non-intrusive way. Unlike emails that flood up your mailbox or phone calls from support agents that happen at the worst timing, Live Chat offers an easy way for customers to get done with your requests – in the best timing for them.

It is estimated that 46% of consumers prefer live chat over email and social media, for example. 

Live Chat empowers customers in many ways, allowing multiple interactions on a single web interface. That is vital in today’s digital landscape. According to a study by E-Consultancy, 51% of customers prefer live chat to other channels precisely because it allows them to continue performing other tasks.

6) Using Live Chat Data to improve overall business 

Apart from the; benefits Live Chat brings to daily tasks of customer service, it can serve as a strategic tool to enhance your brand’s marketing, sales, and product strategies.

Because Live Chat provides detailed insights about your website visitors’ journey, it can offer valuable data to help companies grow their bottom lines. 

You can use Live Chat customer insights for:

  • Mapping the customer journey and identifying frequent complaints
  • Personalizing your conversations according to different buyer personas
  • Routing chats to the right department or team
  • Feeding CRM and other data management tools, like Customer Data Platform
  • Improving support agents training according to customers needs and response
  • Improving customer service important KPIs, like first response time and average queue time

7) Understanding where customers come from

One of the challenges for online players is to understand how their Customer Care efforts connect to online conversions. 

Some Live Chat tools allow you to connect the dots between chat sessions and the marketing sources that led the customer to the chat, whether it was a campaign, a disclaimer on the website, or a web search.  Some tools allow you to integrate Live Chat to Google Analytics, for instance, and see a bigger picture of what led customers to chat sessions. 

Such data is important to determine if your marketing channels are actually bringing people to your page and how they are connected to your Live Chat. 

8)  Increasing conversion rates

The study by Forrester shows that consumers who use Live Chat are 2.8x more likely to convert to a sale than those who don’t.  By allowing users to get support without moving to other channels, Live Chat makes buying decisions much quicker and can boost conversion rates.

Placing Live Chat across different touchpoints on a website can also be a good idea. Some companies are using Live Chat in their checkout pages, which helps to solve doubts about payments and shipping, for instance, and thus reduces cart abandonment rates.  

9) Avoiding repetitive tasks for customers and support agents

With a Live Chat customer service tool integrated into your CRM or Data Management Platform (DMP), your team can access customer data or notes from previous interactions to assist customers. That way, you save time that could otherwise be wasted in repetitive conversations. 

Actually, 72% of customers expect customer support agents to know their details like buying history and detailed information — without asking for them.

10) Increasing customers Lifetime Value (LTV) 

Having a sustainable repeat customer base is the dream of every brand, right? Research shows that 63% of consumers who used live chat on a website are likely to return to that site. That is why Live Chat is boosting Customer Life Time Value (LTV) among companies that use it, adding value not just to customer service, but to the whole business. 

11) Cross-selling and upselling products 

Around 33% of the money spent online comes from repeat customers and they generally spend 3 times as much as one time shoppers. Once you build a loyal community of shoppers around your brand, you have the chance to offer proactive communication through Live Chat whenever they access your website. 

Your team can start the conversation, suggesting personalized offers and products through the chat according to the customers buying history and interests, leveraging upselling and cross-selling rates. 

12) Increasing customer engagement

With Live Chat, you are likely to see a significant rise in customer engagement. Because Live Chat emulates messaging apps, it makes interactions with brands more fluid and organic. 

Besides, you can add layers of engagement to Live Chat by adopting a few features in it, such as:

  • Co-browsing: Co-browsing, in the context of Live Chat, is when a customer and a support agent browse a page together during a chat session. It delivers a guided experience and it’s a great way to guide customers through form fill-ups and complex applications, for instance. 
  • Vídeo and Voice Chat: Customers sometimes have requests that are complex or take too long to explain by text. With that in mind, some companies are adding Vídeo and Voice Chat to their Live Chat experience. Not only can it help solve queries quicker, but it also makes interactions more dynamic and personal. 

13) Increasing productivity in Customer Care

At last, another triumph of Live Chat is to leverage Customer Care productivity. It reduces the queue time and enables faster resolution of issues, but beyond that, it allows agents to handle multiple chats at the same time. 

As a result, Live Chat can boost important productivity KPIs such as first response time (FRT), average queue time, number of chats answered, and so on. 

14) Human touch

In the era of hyper-automation and chatbots;, a human approach to customer experience might give you extra points in the relationship with customers. Even though automated emails and chatbots; can benefit customer support, users have shown that they want to interact with humans whenever possible.

The 2019 CGS Customer Service Chatbots & Channels Survey found out that 86% of American customers prefer to talk to humans over chatbots. With Live Chat, you can give customers personalized, warm assistance in an easy, user-friendly way. Besides, much like at physical stores, consumers are more likely to buy when they are treated well.

Conclusion

As we have seen, Live Chat has the potential to change Customer Care across many different industries, and your company shouldn’t be left behind. 

Live Chat can optimize many aspects of a digital business, and executives are increasingly aware of its importance. A 2018 survey from Bold 360 found out that 71% of respondents believe Live Chat will surpass traditional customer service communication channels by 2021.

If your organization has not yet incorporated Live Chat into customer service, it’s time to change that.

Arena; has one of the most complete Live Chat solutions on the market, and the best thing is that you can try it for free. 
Click here to access the free trial of our Live Chat and start answering your customers quickly right now!

Live Chat Marketing: Improve Customer Experience

Posted on by

Live Chat has been around for some time now. But why is it everyone talking about it all of a sudden? For starters, more than customer support, it can also be used for marketing and sales.

Despite not being a new tool, it is being used in different and more efficient ways now. Even when it was already used for customer support, it was not really the best of channels since it promised real-time answers, and that didn’t really happen.

However, with the digital presence’s growth, many customer-related services and marketing strategies needed to evolve. Before, companies were more centered on presenting and selling their products.

What’s different today? Strategies are customer-centric! That means that most content is focused on the customer’s journey. Instead of just showing them the product, marketing needs to work around the pain points and how to deal with them.

And what does Live Chat have to do with this? Since it’s a communication channel, it’s a path that will give the customers what they are looking for: a quick and efficient service. Plus, it’s a benefit for the company.

Through Live Chat, you can get to know who your consumer is, what they are looking for, and store important information that will lead to the brand’s following marketing plans.

Why is now the best time to invest in a Live Chat solution? Let’s learn a bit more about it!

#Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

Why does marketing need Live Chat?

One characteristic of the Live Chat is the capability of personalizing the initial message. Every system gives you the possibility to do that. Even more than one message can be included to be sent according to the customer and navigation made.

So, if someone visited a product page, you can send them a message offering a discount. But if it’s the person’s first time on your page, you can simply say, “welcome! What can I do for you?”.

This feature is excellent because it allows you to work according to the current strategy and moment the brand lives. Additionally, you don’t need to use the same messages for the rest of the company’s existence. The decision is not that dramatic. It can and should be updated as your brand grows.

Many companies have difficulties using Live Chat, they have and use the tool, but they know they could be doing more and better with it. If that’s the case for you, I’m glad you are here to find some ideas to improve your tactic. 

What are Live Chat features?

You can talk to customers, sell products, and work your marketing plans through the chat. Overall, all of these features will follow your chat’s first message. That’s the link we make here that explains why I’ve talked about it in more detail earlier.

That happens because that’s where you catch the client’s attention to start a conversation. From then on, it’s on the attendant’s hands. The conversations need to be helpful and flow naturally, always thinking about the customer’s needs first.

Does Live Chat have anything to do with Customer Experience?

To sum up: it has EVERYTHING to do with it.

Every bit of interaction someone has with your company is already a part of their experience, so it wouldn’t be different with Live Chat. Though it does have something more: it’s a tool that allows you to communicate directly with the consumer.

It’s a means to help them and make their entire experience easier and better. If you’re having trouble with customer services, Live Chat can help you transform your image for the better as long as you follow some best practices, of course.

More than installing this tool, you need actually to have a strategy to work with it. To help you understand what kind of approach is the best for your brand, here is some more information on the benefits of this tool: 

What are some Live Chat benefits for your company?

A happy customer

When you put the client at the center of your strategy, things tend to get better magically. And Live Chat is one of the tools that help that magic happen. It gives the consumer convenience of having their questions answered without the need to make a call, send an email, or even leave the page.

More than that, customers can:

  • be attended while multitasking;
  • have real-time and efficient answers;
  • get their questions answered before, during, and after the purchase;
  • have a closer relationship with the brand.

Higher satisfaction levels

Because of the reasons mentioned above, you could only get this consequence: a higher customer satisfaction level. It’s considerably better than other support channels, like through email or phone.

Besides, with the real-time factor in action, customers get a more positive and complete experience. Thus, increasing the chances, they will recommend your brand to friends and family.

Sales strategies

By using Live Chat, it’s possible to create automatic messages and practice complementary sales strategies. So, through this, you can rescue abandoned carts, offer discounts on products that were visited but not added to the cart, and use the cross-selling strategy.

All of these alternatives are made with the first message coming from the brand itself.

How does that work? For instance, if you have an abandoned cart, there’s a reason for it, right? So, what was it? Maybe shipping costs were too high. Perhaps they tried using a coupon that expired, or something like that. 

To know exactly what message will affect the customer, you need to track what actions were taken by the consumer on your page. On this note, you should also know that working with Customer Data is essential.

If the expired coupon was the reason for an abandoned cart, what can you do? One option would be sending a personalized message offering a new coupon.

Customer’s journey

Because it provides service for any customer, it works the entire life cycle, being a complete tool. In other words, it works the customer journey. If they’re in the discovery phase, the chat can work to lead them to purchase faster. But if they are already considering a solution, the chat can be used to convince them your product is better — or at least to give them an extra push with a discount.

Even if a decision isn’t made right away, you can still generate qualified leads through the use of Live Chat. For example, if someone comes asking details about a product, you can say you’ll send all the information through email.

There are many ways to work the customer journey here and it’s better that you talk with the marketing team so you can line up the best strategy for your brand.

Faster decision making

Because Live Chat can influence the customer journey, it can also be used to help consumers make faster decisions. That is one reason why your conversion rate increases by up to 42% by using this chat system.

Everything should be done in a way that doesn’t pressure the client, of course. However, this method to lead them to purchases in a quicker way is quite efficient.

Basically, when someone asks for shipping costs of a certain product, you can offer some special advantage — for example, free shipping to buy that product + some complimentary item like, let’s say, a smartphone and a personalized case.

Instead of spending weeks thinking and analyzing if they actually do want to buy that item, the client will take advantage and purchase at that very moment, hence making a shorter customer journey than it’d be without the help of a Live Chat.

Offline configuration

Despite many companies already knowing the impotence of using Live Chat, they recognize they are not using it at its full potential. More than that, they end up disabling the chat during some periods when there are no attendants available.

Why shouldn’t you do this? I mean, yes, you can make a form available where clients will share their email and share what is their question, but when will they be answered? The real-time chat is what really gets them satisfied, so this might not be the best choice.

So, how will you deal with this problem? One alternative is the use of chatbots when there are no human agents to chat. They are not as efficient as humans, but they keep the instant messages going and, if you choose an AI bot, most problems will be solved.

A lot of Live Chat tools have the chatbot available within their system. Make sure to check that information when choosing the tool for your eCommerce.

Longer relationships with customers

Have you ever had issues when purchasing online? Who did you go to? Was there someone you could talk to? If there’s no one available, the chances you lose purchase and a customer are high.

That means, when offering a Live Chat solution, you’re giving yourself a treat: a better relationship with your consumers that will have a great purchasing experience. Therefore, maintaining a relationship with the brand.

Cost reduction

First of all, acquiring a Live Chat system is not as expensive as other software might be. Moreover, it pays itself really fast. What does that mean? It has an excellent ROI.

Besides, when you used to invest in 6 telemarketing agents, now you can invest in just one attendant for the Live Chat. According to research, an attendant can talk up to 6 people at once while keeping a quality service.

Do you see now how Live Chat is perfect for helping your business’ marketing? 

Do you want to use Live Chat for your brand’s marketing?

Then you’re in the right place!

The job of a marketing team is, essentially, listening to the customer. The more you know your audience, the better you will work with Live Chat. Here, I should also add that having a trustable database is crucial to understanding consumers’ needs.

Also, real-time tracking of the customer’s actions on your page will help act at the right time and guarantee a higher conversion rate.

Best practices for a more efficient Live Chat

An important action to succeed with the use of Live Chat is to make your CTA the most attractive. Thus, the initial message needs to be a trigger to the consumer.

Moreover, you can and should program different initial messages according to each consumer and the phase of the journey they’re in. After all, people visiting the website for the first time need a different incentive than the ones who have already purchased previously and are coming back.

One of the most critical factors is: train your attendant team!

But first, who will have access to the chat? Will it be the support team? Or the marketing team? Whoever is responsible for talking directly with the customers needs to have both the capacity to support and sell. When this information is defined, you’ll know exactly what type of training will be necessary.

What else needs to be done? You should definitely create a protocol and some answer models. However, make it clear for the attendants to personalize the messages, not only copy and paste. They should never sound like a robot!

Does your company have a tone of voice defined? If so, the chat should stick to it. If not, you should immediately work on it. Keep it professional and helpful, adapting to your public’s language. For example, if it’s a younger audience, use slangs and emojis or keep it a bit more formal if it’s an older public.

Instruction to not pressure the client should be clear as well. Nobody likes to do anything under pressure, and, if that does happen, chances are you will never see that person again. Knowing who the best leads are is an ability to be trained too.

Usually, when consumers ask about payment means or ask for more information on a product is an indication of a qualified lead. 

Lastly, it’s not only about answering right away. Just as important is actually resolving the customer’s problems. Most people won’t mind if you take one minute longer to answer them if they get the information they want.

So, if you create this combo of velocity and efficiency, there are no brands that will beat your customer experience! 

Why should you choose Arena?

We have over 6,000 clients worldwide that will tell you just how much Arena has helped them improve their customer experience and grow in the market with Live Blog, Live Chat and more.

Besides, you can try our platform for free! It’s all about advantages right from the start.

Start testing our tool today and try all of these Live Chat marketing strategies we’ve talked about!

11 great reasons to add Live Chat to your website

Posted on by

Live Chat is a powerful tool to make your brand more competitive in the era of convenience. Find out why!

Live chat once used to be something optional for companies’ websites. It was just an additional channel to email and phone support. But things have changed in the last few years and Live Chat has become the standard channel for Customer Care and Sales strategies.

Customer-centric; brands know that customers are increasingly demanding due to the mobile culture, which compels them to adapt their customer service channels to meet customers’ expectations.

Adding Live Chat to your website can dramatically improve the; customer experience, no matter the industry your company is in.;

A 2018 survey from Bold 360 found out that 71% of respondents believe that Live Chat will surpass traditional customer service communication channels by 2021.

But what makes Live Chat so powerful? Well, it essentially makes interactions much better for the final customer and customer support teams.

After all, these days, people are hesitant to pick up the phone or send emails asking for support while knowing they’ll face lengthy holds and long response times. On the other hand, traditional channels can make support teams feel pressured and overwhelmed with demands that pile up and take too long to resolve. 

The result? Both your customers and your support team might end up frustrated, ultimately damaging your business operations and reputation. And you don’t want to lose conversions and customer loyalty because of a bad support experience. 

With a website’s Live Chat feature, there is no waiting queue, no holds, and you can offer immediate answers. Seems like the best way to go, huh? 

Let’s explore the advantages of adding Live Chat to your website.

#Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

What is Live Chat?

Live Chat is a window that allows customers to chat instantly with a company’s sales, support agent, or chatbot directly on their website. The Live Chat can be shown in the support section or as a pop-up window that appears while the customer is browsing.

Live Chat can be reactive, serving as a tool to answer questions only when requested by customers, or it can be proactive, allowing brands to start the conversation and guide the customer’s experience. 

Live Chat makes communication between brands and their customers much more natural as it simulates messaging platforms. Some Live Chat tools might even be integrated into messaging apps that customers use daily, like Facebook Messenger, What’ sApp, etc.  

One of the best things about Live Chat is that it allows customers and support agents to multitask. Customers can keep browsing products and the website while talking to the agent, while agents can handle multiple customers at a time without getting stuck in phone calls, for instance. 

According to a study from; E-Consultancy, 51% of customers prefer Live Chat to other channels exactly because it allows them to multitask. 

Live Chat can be used by companies in different sectors, from marketplaces, online retailers, entertainment, and media companies.

There will be a real agent behind the Chat most of the time, while some companies are already testing fully automated bots or hybrid systems, which mix both formats.

The advantages of Live Chat for Business

There are many benefits of adding Live Chat to your website, from a customer’s perspective and a business efficiency point of view. 

Here is a list of advantages of Live Chat:

1 – Convenient Customer Support

When it comes to high-quality customer service, accessibility and timing are key factors to offer a great customer experience. Combine these two elements and you’ll have convenience, which is one of the main drivers of the digital economy.

Users have become used to having access to content, products, and services with only a few clicks. That logic also applies to how customers solve problems and ask for help, so why would customer support be any different?

Adding a Live Chat to your website makes support requests very intuitive and convenient for customers. They don’t have to send and follow up on lengthy emails or stay on hold in phone calls, instead can easily get all their requests solved in a single chat session. 

2 – Better Customer Experience

Maybe a decade ago your brand could get along well without Live Chat, but that is no longer the case. According to research from Forrester, 41% of customers expect Live Chat on companies’ websites. For customers that visit websites on a mobile device, this number is; as high as 50%.

Live chat has become the leading digital contact channel, as 46% of customers prefer Live Chat compared to just 29% for email, and 16% for social media.

3 – Reduce customers’ waiting time

According to a; study by Zendesk, 66% of customers expect immediate responses or resolution in Customer Support, and more traditional support channels obviously cannot live up to those expectations.

To get an idea, the average response time for emails is 12 hours, according to a study from Super Office, while it’s 10 hours for social media. Imagine making anxious customers wait that long! With Live Chat, users can get answers to their questions in two minutes, says the same study.

Remember time is the most valuable asset for people nowadays, so if your brand wants to be helpful, it shouldn’t make customers wait for too long. 

Actually, another research from Zendesk shows that the most popular pain point experienced with support teams is to be placed on hold for too long: about 42% of the respondents described it as frustrating.

4 – Increase Customer Service Efficiency

If your goal is to increase work efficiency in Customer Service, Live Chat is a great option for your company. While presenting a convenient communication channel on your own website, it allows support agents to handle multiple cases at a time and solve them right away, increasing productivity. 

Live Chat also brings easier transitions between cases. As one chat ends, another pops up, and the agent doesn’t have to pick up a phone or dial a number, for example. In addition, Live Chat allows you to rout customers to the right agents and departments according to the requests they tell at the beginning of the chat session. 

You could have standard automatic answers to find out customers’ doubts, and then redirect them to the right agent that will handle the request. 

As a result, Live Chat can boost important Customer Service KPIs such as first response time (FRT), average queue time, number of chats answered, Average Resolution Time (ART), etc.

5 – More Cost-Effective

By increasing the support team’s potential to take on more support cases, your business can optimize costs with Customer Care, hiring fewer agents, and spending much less time and money with phone calls and emails.

Imagine the difference it can make during busier times, like Black Friday or special dates, when usually companies have to hire many more agents.

Live chat also gives you the possibility of implementing chatbots to automate part of the job and resolve less-complicated requests.

No matter your company’s approach towards customer service, if it’s totally human, hybrid, or automatized, you’ll certainly have a more cost-effective operation with Live Chat. 

6 – Drive more revenue from qualified customers

Companies are realizing that Live Chat has the potential to really help them grow their businesses by increasing lead conversion rates. While many use Live Chat only for Customer Support, an interesting option is to use it proactively to drive engagement on your website.

You can use Live Chat to suggest personalized content and products to customers while they browse, increasing the time spent on your website and even your revenue. After all, proactive Live Chat is all about offering targeted relevant messages to trigger qualified customers who are ready to buy or; engage with your brand.

A study shows that customers who spend between $250 and $500 a month online; are the most likely to be influenced by the availability of a website with Live Chat. Around 63% of those big-spend consumers are more likely to buy from companies that offer Live Chat support. 

7 – Increase customer loyalty 

Try to think like the customer: if a company has a personalized approach towards your problems and treats you as a unique individual, even at a general channel such as a website, you’re likely to come back to see what they’ve got for you, right? 

This is not just an impression and Live Chat has actually proven to drive more customer loyalty. A study; by Emarketer discovered that 63% of customers were more likely to return to a website that offers Live Chat.

8 – Improve Customer Satisfaction Rates

An immediatist culture requires quick and efficient answers, and that’s what makes customers satisfied. By incorporating Live Chat into your website, you will likely increase overall customer satisfaction rates.

According to LiveChat’s 2019 Customer Service Report, the percentage of satisfied Live Chat users is currently at 82% based on the data from over 25,000 websites with Live Chat support. 

Comm100 discovered that the same percentage of customers were satisfied with their Live Chat experience, compared to just 61% of email users and a worrying 44% of phone users.

9 – Increase average order value

Live Chat can help you increase sales with proactive communication, but it can also help you increase the value of a sale, too!

Many companies have used Live Chat to talk to their customers while they browse for content and products. In that process, you can recommend similar products and services and end up cross-selling and upselling customers, increasing the average order value. Imagine increasing order value with just a simple chat window! 

Let’s say you’re a publisher and a reader is looking to sign up for a basic subscription. A chat agent can send a message through the Live Chat recommending a more sophisticated subscription and maybe offering exclusive content and discounts. 

That’s just an example, but it shows how you can take advantage of Live Chat in upselling and cross-selling strategies. 

10 – Be more competitive in your industry

If you want your company to stand out in its segment, especially if you are in a competitive business, then Live Chat can also help you with that.

Despite being already popular, Live Chat is expected to continue to grow by as much as 87% in the next 12-18 months. In some industries, chat growth has increased by as much as 150% in the last couple of years, according to The Live Chat Benchmark Report.

When we match customers’ expectations to the Live Chat growth perspective, it gets clear it’s no longer an option not to have Live Chat on a website. 

But relax, it’s not like Live Chat is a saturated tool yet. In fact, a Live Chat study made by Super Office with 1,000 websites found that only 9% of them use Live Chat to provide real-time support to their customers.

That means there’s a lot of room to grow with Live Chat. You have the unique opportunity to bring it to your company and become a benchmark in your industry. 

11- Better understanding your customers

Last but not least, Live Chat is a powerful tool to get to know your customers better. What kind of approach works best for them? What are their main pain points with your company and your products? What types of customers need more help or are more prone to become loyal? 

With Live Chat, you can get valuable insights on customers both in quantitative and behavioral terms. A; Zoho study found that 43% of businesses offering Live Chat were able to better understand their customers after just one year of using it.

Start using Live Chat now

Live Chat adoption rates continue to grow across many industries. If you want to be ahead of your competitors, consider implementing Live Chat on your website as soon as possible.

By having Live Chat embedded in your website, you could be:

  • Boosting sales and revenue
  • Offering faster customer support
  • Leveraging customer experience

If your company is not using Live Chat already, now is an excellent time to start!

Arena; has one of the most complete Live Chat solutions on the market, and you can try it for free. 
Click here to access the free trial of our Live Chat and change your business for good!

20 Reasons to Use an eCommerce Live Blog

Posted on by

Everything you need to know about Live Blog for e-commerce is here. This practical solution for real-time engagement provides better customer experience and brings many benefits to the company — from audience growth to an increase in revenue.

In this connected era, people have become accustomed to a certain speed of consuming content on the internet. They want to know about things as they are happening at the moment. For this reason, Live Blog has been gaining more attention.

This tool is an alternative to provide interactive, real-time content to a brand’s audience. Rather than publishing static content, a Live Blog platform facilitates several sources in a single post. In other words, it pieces together information like images and inputs on social media.

A Live Blog solution is perfect for a strategy that aims regular updates posting, live events coverage, and breaking news coverage. Furthermore, Live Blog in the year 2020 has been used as an audience engagement tool for guaranteed success.

Curious, right? Keep reading to learn more about what Live Blog is, how it impacts e-commerce, and why you should use Live Blog for your e-commerce.

What is Live Blog?

The answer to this question can be summed up like this:

Live Blog is a type of platform where content can be published in real-time.

Even though the format remains a blog post, it works as an interactive piece, putting together information from several places online — images, videos, tweets, etc.

It’s an excellent tool for brands and companies that work with a high number of live events. Instead of writing insights about it for the Blog only after it’s finished, it’s possible to do it while it’s taking place. Moreover, it’s great for breaking news coverage as well.

Seeing it can create high-quality content from different sources, it becomes an advantage for both parts: company and visitor. That’s because the person would have to go all over the internet and do a thorough search to find all the information they now have in a unique blog post.

Reaction buttons, comments thread, sound notifications, and interactive pools are just a few possibilities with a Live Blog structure. All of these features make your content more interactive, thereby increasing audience engagement.

But how does Live Blog make a difference when we talk about an e-commerce company?

It helps in many ways, either increasing sales and revenue or improving customer retention and relationships. But, before we dive into the reasons why you should use Live Blog in your e-commerce, here’s a bit more about this new live commerce notion.

The concept of live commerce

With the advent of this publishing technology, many other things have started to change and modernize too. Online shopping is one of those things. Since it’s possible to work with live content now, e-commerce has begun to find ways to apply some Live Blog strategies to their benefit.

Thus, the concept of live commerce gained life. China is already a leader in this method of sales. If you look it up, you’ll see that most of their e-commerce is done through live content, primarily live streaming.

However, in the US and Europe, people still tend to turn to social media to learn more about products and services.

People love when things are done in the simplest way possible, and live streaming of products brings the benefit of the one-click purchase. Suppose the company already has a register of the customer with the required information (like name, email, card number, and address). In that case, they can easily buy anything they want from live content.

Overall, there are many benefits a Live Blog can bring to your e-commerce company. These are 20 (yes, TWENTY) reasons to acquire a Live Blog solution to your brand.

1. Be up-to-date

We live in an era of technology and immediacy. People don’t want to wait until the end of the day to hear about the news. They want information as it is occurring. Having that in mind, acquiring a Live Blog platform will showcase your business as modern and trendy.

It’ll always be on top of the news, sharing brand-new content and displaying products as soon as they come out.

2. Real-time engagement

Since publishing happens in real-time, it means everyone online at the moment will be able to see your content and talk about it while things are happening. The system of a Live Blog has features for real-time comments, shares, and reaction buttons. As content is being updated, people are talking about it.

3. Use Live Chat

When we talk about real-time engagement, there’s no way to leave out the use of Live Chat. Customers can interact with the brand and with each other to talk about the content, products, or events occurring right there and then.

More than that, a Live Chat can also be used for immediate customer support, marketing, and sales strategies. This research shows that companies that use Live Chat have a 48% increase in revenue and 40% in overall conversion rates.

4. User-generated content

Because a Live Blog can collect content from several sources, it can also use content that the users themselves are sharing. This approach connects the audience and makes them eager to share more and mention your brand online.

This is another reason to create hashtags in your online community. That way, people will share using your hashtag, and every content will have a category you can put under to make posts more organized inside the Blog.

5. Create a human connection

These factors, such as real-time engagement, sharing user-generated content, and communicating over Live Chat, make it easier to create a brand that’s closer to the audience. It builds a more human connection.

After all, the editorial team is a bit more vulnerable when they work with live content—going live means more significant chances of making mistakes and having unforeseen situations. Thus, the audience will see how the brand behaves in true-to-life scenarios — making the brand more sympathetic.

6. Improve customer relationship

When you build a human connection with the public, you get as a bonus, the improvement of customer relationships. Live Blog is highly associated with bringing a better customer experience.

You are sharing great content and creating a place where customers can feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and opinions with you and all other visitors of the page.

7. Watch live streaming

Like any other blog, a Live Blog can also share video content. Only in this case are we talking mainly about live streamings.

They are a big plus to increase sales. Remember when we mentioned China earlier on? While in the US, customers mostly use social media for product information, they go straight to live streaming in China.

If people can see the product being used in a real situation, with no cuts or edits, they are more likely to complete purchase since they know it’s “the real deal.” That’s why, among all these other reasons, e-commerce can benefit from a Live Blog acquisition.

8. Increase sales revenue

Simultaneously, the more people are connected and interested in your content, search engines like Google notice and value this. SEO tactics make a difference to rank your posts, but so does audience engagement. Because of that, your e-commerce will gain a boost in revenue.

Also, it’s possible to work with embedded links and promotional codes inside a Live Blog. It is increasing, even more, your revenue.

9. Launch new products

The release of new products will be exciting with a live stream and real-time interaction from the audience. Can you picture showing that brand-new item and capturing real-time reactions? This is doable with a Live Blog.

People love discovering new products, and they look forward to trying it as soon as possible. So providing them a live stream, with a real person showing what it is about and how it works will be a motive to keep them on your page — and interacting — for a long time.

11. Perform interviews

In the same way, you can use live content to show new products. You can use it to perform interviews. Whether it’s with the brand’s CEO or someone famous, that can be somewhat related to the product.

While the interview is happening on your blog, people can comment and even ask questions for the person being interviewed during the event.

10. Q&A panel

Likewise, question-and-answer panels are an excellent way to catch people’s attention. The audience loves it when they are heard and have their doubts answered. Nowadays, this mostly happens on social media since personal profiles seem more reachable than any other digital media.

However, with Live Blog, you will no longer need to depend on Facebook, Instagram, and so on. You just need to make sure to have a strategy that will lead traffic to your Blog, and then all your content, live streams, and event coverage will take place in a unique platform.

12. Branding

When a brand starts being seen as an expert in the field, things tend to only get better for the business. Sharing live content makes you look updated and concerned about bringing the top news for your public.

A branding strategy includes demonstrating the brand’s position in the market, purpose, and value proposition. All of which will be presented along with the content approach.

13. Dynamic communication

Because it’s simple to interact and share the content on a Live Blog page, the communication between customer and brand becomes more dynamic.

Liveblogging allows the delivery of interactive content at all times. Instead of having a static page, the public can feel like they are a part of what’s happening.

14. Make users spend more time on your page

With real-time engagement and having their actions show up on the streaming feed, the website visitors get so involved in the experience they end up spending more time on your page than they usually would if you were presenting static content.

Additionally, a Live Blog can be used as an area where people can go to talk about overall subjects. It’s up to the company to decide what topic makes the most sense for the business. For example, if you’re in the sports field, your blog can become a place where fans come to share their ideas on games and teams.

15. SEO Optimization

Even if the content is being shared in real-time, you can still work with optimizing it to have greater reach in research tools. First of all, the time people spend on your website already counts as an SEO indicator. That’s because it makes Google recognize your page as important, giving it a better ranking on keyword searches.

With Arena, all the hard work is done for you. This means even if you’re not an SEO expert, you’ll be able to; work on the optimization for your pages.

16. Boost conversion rates

The interaction and real-time conversations happen not only between content and readers or readers among themselves but also between brand and customer. In particular, by using Live Chat, customers can easily talk to an attendant to better understand the product, discounts, and shipping information.

17. Create an online community

By using this dynamic communication tool, people will start to give your blog more attention. Just like you can create a community on social media through hashtag use, you can do the same thing (or even better) in a Live Blog structure.

For instance, in collaboration with FoxSports, Arena’s live blog solution gave them a place where basketball fans could like and share updating posts about the NBA.

18. Make the audience more loyal

When you provide high-quality content, readers notice it. Even more so when they can easily interact and talk about it. Moreover, have a consistent and coherent content strategy to offer personalized themes for your audience.

More than that, listen to their feedback—customers like being heard and having their suggestions implemented. Keep an eye out for their comments, and make sure to answer them.

19. Customer retention

Providing a great customer experience is what makes a customer stick to a brand. Building a customer loyal is side-by-side with increasing customer retention. For both cases, your strategy will be to give them updated content, answer questions, solve problems, and give them a voice to be part of the overall experience.

Of course, personalized notes and emails are essential for this approach. However, Live Blogs are so connected with the customer experience that it plays a big part in making retention happen.

20. Promote user interaction

It’s more than the company creating a connection with the audience. It’s about creating an online community and making customers interact with each other. Liveblogging enables users to pose questions and have other users answer them.

Readers can also reply to pools, leave comments on your page, and retweet your content to their Twitter profile directly from the blog post page. All of this is done without the need to promote interaction, but it’s still worth applying some CTAs in association with the content.

How to acquire a live blog solution?

Arena has everything you need. Our Live Blog solution will help you stand out from competitors in the market and grow your audience with minimum effort.

In order to get the best Live Blog tool for your business, some factors must be taken into account. They include:

  • usability for the audience and editorial team
  • integration and features
  • flexibility to run on multiple devices
  • data privacy and safety

Of course, Arena offers all of that and even more. You can find out more about our platform by accessing the Live Blog tool’s FREE TRIAL. This is an opportunity you can’t refuse!

How AI and Live Chat enhance Black Friday experience

Posted on by

How will your business compete with the biggest brands in the market now that the busiest time of the year for retailers is here? You need a little help from Live Chat and AI!

To understand why these two are necessary, I think it’s important that we give you some context:

Today, consumers expect their favorite brands to know them almost personally. However, at the same time, they don’t want to feel overwhelmed by random ads popping up while they’re navigating online.

How does one establish that fine line between personalization and data privacy?

That is a big challenge. One that also revolves around the GDPR, a regulation for Customer Data protection. But there is already a solution for brands to keep working with their clients’ information while still following the law.

So, to make your marketing and sales strategies create a real connection with the consumer, you need the help of artificial intelligence (AI).

Especially when dates like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are getting closer, companies need to focus more on targeted shopping experiences to enhance their results. Because of that, every marketing effort needs to be assertive.

Through AI technology, you’ll understand what makes a purchasing decision happen and what leads to an abandoned cart. 

Long story short: it’s all about Customer Experience.

Keep reading to learn all about how to enrich your eCommerce this year by:

  • knowing what is and how to use AI on a Live Chat
  • understanding how AI will improve your customer experience
  • using a Live Chat for Black Friday
  • learning what the role of Customer Data in modernizing your brand’s Black Friday experience

What is AI?

From the popular Siri and Alexa to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence has become quite common these days. It is a computer science branch that develops machines capable of performing tasks that would typically require human intelligence.

For example, talking to a customer through chat support.

Nowadays, companies are using this technology more and more, putting it to different uses. Whether it’s to perform a support service or to automatize personalized recommendations.

Why is this happening?

Simply put: because AI can create valuable knowledge for a business strategy. I mean, not only can it collect and analyze Customer Data, but it can also select what is relevant and what is not. Even more than that, it can actually understand what needs to be done to reach the customer the right way (and at the right time).

Arena AI Concierge for Publishers, Content & Affiliate Commerce is here. Request early access.

How will AI improve customer experience?

One of the biggest issues retailers face today is personalized content and offers to their customers. Usually, the major retail brands out there can do pretty well on this matter. They use systems that allow data collection and content personalization.

However, some of these data come from third-parties. Now, you might be asking, “why is that a problem?” Well, this type of data typically comes from external sources, that is, not directly from the relationship between the brand and the customer.

The most reliable way to work with Customer Data today is to focus on first-party data, the type shared with the brand from the consumers themselves. That is where the opportunity to enhance business results is.

You can easily do this by using a Customer Data Platform. That’s the best guarantee you’ll be working with clear, assertive data. Any guess on how this platform works? Yeah, that’s right, with AI.

Some more examples of how AI can be used to enrich your customer experience:

Online chatbots

There are two types of chatbots, the simple ones and the ones that work through AI. This first type is pre-programmed with questions and answers, so the client can’t really ask a question. They can only click the options available on the chat.

The second type, the one we are indeed interested in, is the AI chatbot. It has some pre-programmed information, but it works mainly through machine learning. That means that each customer attended will make it learn a little bit more.

At first, it may not be so efficient, but it will become a robust customer support tool as it keeps being used. That’s actually why it’s recommended to test it out and use it before making it available to your consumers.

Machine learning

As mentioned right above here, AI is directly associated with the machine learning concept. 

Where do I want to get with this information?

Well, machines don’t just learn information about the customer. They can also learn how to detect the tone of voice and sentiment in their communication. This allows retailers to see how their products impact their audience, what makes them desirable, and what doesn’t.

Besides, they can use this information to create offers and ads that trigger the consumer’s emotional aspect.

Analytics and personalized recommendations

Every bit of information is beneficial for a company, even more so when a system performing through AI does the main job of selecting the most important for you. When AI learns what customers are saying about the brand (both online and in-store), you can analyze that and create new ways to improve the facets that are getting complaints.

In the same way, you can work with marketing and sales teams to refine the method you’re currently using to attract and retain customers.

A CDP, for example, gathers similar customer profiles into a singular place. Then, you can use it to send personalized offers and promotions.

Targeted deals and promotions

So, here it is. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!

Targeting is the key to success this year. You need to nail your segmentation groups to achieve the best results you possibly can. Additionally, using connected strategies will make your goals easier to accomplish.

Live Chat is an example of a tool you can use to reach those groups I’ve just mentioned. By being proactive and sending the first message like, “Hey there, do you want to learn how to get 50% off on this product?” results will come quickly.

Of course, it’s necessary to know what the customers like and dislike. What drives them away from hitting the “finish order” button? 

Once you have that answer, your work with targeted deals and promotions will be at its prime.

Better understanding and tracking of consumers

For that reason, artificial intelligence also assists in knowing your consumer. While it gathers customer data, all the information is read, analyzed, and selected to present only what actually has some value to the company.

When AI solutions were being created, aiming to help retailers do better in the sales department, no efforts were saved.

What do I mean with this statement? Well, have you noticed that each topic I’ve included here has completed each other? That is an indication of how AI technology works and how it’s thorough doing its job.

After the technology you’re using to help your brand collect and analyze information from your consumer base, you’ll just need to take that, transform it into a strategy, and define what the next steps and goals to be achieved are.

The live chat experience

I’ve talked about live chat above, and I think it’s interesting to focus our energies on this subject a little longer.

First of all, what is live chat? If you’re still wondering about this, let’s make it clear: it’s a tool similar to chatbots, but the conversation happens with a human agent, not a robot. Although, it can also be programmed with some automatic bot messages — such as, “an attendant will be available in about 2 minutes, hold tight.”

It works for many purposes, but the main reason is sales, followed closely by customer support. It can also be used for marketing, cross-selling, and retargeting; strategies. For most of these, you can be a proactive chatter; that is, you can send the first message instead of waiting for the customer to start a conversation.

When you have this software installed in your eCommerce, you will notice the positive outcomes like increased conversions, qualified lead generation, and more productivity for your customer service team.

How will Live Chat help you during the Black Friday season?

This time of the year is the busiest time for retailers. Not only is it the period for Christmas shopping, but it’s also an opportunity to make big purchases (new notebook, phones, etc.). Many people wait for this season to get the best deals on the products they want.

Because it’s such a hectic period, especially on Black Friday itself, website pages might be congested, or people might need extra help to find what they want or to apply for discounts. Thus, Live Chat is a must-have gadget.

It provides your brand with a combo of better supporting customers and selling more. Overall, it generates the best Customer Experience you could ask for. 

Working with Customer Data

While using a Live Chat, you will need to perform your strategies through Customer Data. Even though the amount of data generated yearly is immense, you may have noticed it’s not so easy to work with it.

That’s because you need to stick to the GDPR rules of data privacy. So, instead of randomly collecting data and using it to reach more people over the internet, you should center your approach to using a trustable data system.

As previously mentioned, the Customer Data Platform is of immense help in this matter. It collects, selects, and stores clear and valuable information from your customer base. Moreover, it breaks data silos, automates marketing workflow, tracks shopping events, and so much more.

The Arena solution

Here at Arena, our AI is built to enhance the results of your business. Do you want to improve your campaign results? Arena is here for you. Do you want to have more engagement? Arena is here for you. Do you want to have a better branding experience? Arena is here for you.

Basically, we can solve any issues you have related to your Customer Experience and make the best of it.

Are you interested? Start by trying our Live Chat platform for free!

GDPR: How using a CDP solves cookies problems

Posted on by

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was created to give internet users more control over their personal information. Is your company working according to the law?

While you’re probably aware of the existence of this regulation, you may still not know all you need to about it. For example, did you know this law has existed since 1995? Yeah, and only in 2012 has it started being reviewed.

That happened because of the huge amount of data being generated nowadays. As a matter of fact, the foresight for the year 2020 was that 35 trillion gigabytes were going to be created. It makes sense that a project for data protection would start.

Approved in 2016, the GDPR is a project made in the European Union. However, it affects each and every country that has a connection with EU countries. That means anyone who buys or sells products or services with a country that is a part of the region needs to follow the data protection rules.

In order to make that job easier, many brands are appealing to the Customer Data Platform. This is a solution that works with Customer Data without breaking the law. To thoroughly understand how the CDP can help here, how the GDPR works, and more, keep reading this post.

#Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

What is the GDPR?

With the growth of data usage came the need for some kind of regulation for brands to use information without becoming invasive to users online. Because of that, GDPR came into force.

As you can probably imagine, the main reason behind it is to protect the user and their privacy. Mainly because, with the amount of technologies nowadays, it’s so easy to gather data and use them to personalize ads and content. 

However, that only works if the user allows you to do it. If you send personalized offers for someone who has never even been to your website, it will feel like a privacy invasion.

With GDPR, the user or client has a guarantee of control over data collected. This means that the company needs to ask for permission to gather and store information about them. But, even more than that, the brand needs to make clear what kind of information is being collected, what it will be used for, how long it will be kept in storage, and who it will be shared with.

What about customers’ rights? To sum up what GDPR says about the subject, the client must have:

  • access to collected data
  • control to correct wrong data
  • possibility of data exclusion
  • access to review and deny automated processes using their data
  • visibility of data transfer to thirds

It does sound like a lot to keep track of, but it comes with a bigger reward: a trustful relationship between brand and customer.

What does that mean? Instead of looking like a privacy-invasor brand, it only communicated with the client according to what they alone decided to share with the company. Therefore, building their success through a highly tailored and excellent customer experience.

How do GDPR and CDP work together?

In order for the company to work according to GDPR rules, it needs strict control over the data they collect. They need to know where the data came from, where it is stored, how it is being used, who it is being shared with, and so on. Every single detail needs to be known.

So, this is where CDP comes into the picture:

The Customer Data Platform, CDP, is a system that does this thorough job with customer data. It collects, processes, and stores data that is relevant, useful, and clean.

Overall, the CDP is built to provide the company flexibility. In other words, even though it’s mainly used for marketing purposes, it can allow other software to have access to its information. 

Thus, the Customer Data platform does exactly what companies need, now that GDPR is out there. Since they need to know everything about the data, CDP is there for it.

What are some specific requirements of GDPR that the CDP is helping brands with? Here’s a few of them:

  • identify where data comes from
  • connect with other data sources
  • gather all customer data into a singular profile
  • correct data
  • document customer authorizations
  • manage and store data usage
  • privacy by design

Moreover, the Customer Data Platform is pivotal for first-party data collection. Something essential seeing that third-party data is becoming less popular by the day — which happens due to the lack of reliability in this type of information, that also breaks (most of the time) GDPR laws of data protection.

The use of first-party data is the goal from now on. With this, you can ask for permission of the user in the direct relationship of the brand website visitor.

In short, to work according to GDPR, companies have the option of not collecting data (kind of unfeasible in this day and age), collect less data than they used to, or use systems that work through those rules, like the CDP.

#Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

What is there to know about the CDP?

As previously mentioned, the Customer Data Platform is the best alternative for brands that want to work with Customer Data while sticking to the GDPR.

It is a system developed to assist marketing teams, but it has grown into much more than that. That is, helping several sectors inside a company, like sales, customer support, and customer attendance.

For that reason, it has also become an essential tool to stand out from the competition while offering the best customer experience.

Through clear and reliable data collection, processing, and storage, a brand can custom content, offers, and ads according to both individual profiles and segmentation groups. Which, by the way, the CDP itself creates.

Additionally, all types of data are read by the software. Though it collects and gives preference for first-party data, it can also work with second and third-party data. What it does is select and separate what data is actually valuable for the company, putting it in storage, and what’s not. 

Here’s a detail to remember: it does this selection considering the regulation (GDPR).

Is there anything else you need to know about the CDP?

Of course there is. The CDP is a huge program that does a lot more than help you with GDPR. Inside its system, there is a client history. Thus, more than an individual profile per customer, it’s also possible to understand how each of them behave online — what kind of purchase they make, which products they’re interested in, etc.

What we really want to say here is that the Customer Data Platform meets your GDPR needs. Plus, it keeps you worry-free in relation to unreliable or illegal data usage.

So, even though we still would have a lot more to talk about with the CDP, let’s just highlight this: with this software, you only use information to personalize content provided by the client, him or herself!

And what does that lead to? A double benefit for the company: improve CX and brand credibility.

How to get a CDP?

You probably have no more questions left regarding the need of a CDP for accomplishing GDPR regulation. But you might still be wondering how to acquire a CDP solution.

The first step is simple: do your research.

Once you know what is in the market, you can easily pick a platform that will meet all your needs. 

You don’t need much more than that. Once you acquire the CDP, set it up and start using it. Simple as that!

Here at Arena, our platform is a guaranteed solution for working with Customer Data. With over a thousand clients, we know how to deliver what you’re looking for. Besides, we also have some other solutions to make your customer experience strategy go up the charts such as Live Chat, Live Blog, and Content Wall.

Now, back to our main topic, let’s see what’s next:

What are the CDP benefits for data usage in the GDPR era?

Along with some benefits already mentioned, like the complete work with Customer Data, there are other advantages that make the CDP complete software that any company should get.

For example, the possibility of all company employees to have access to the data — with due permission. Whether it’s a sales rep, customer support, or product developers.

Especially in the Customer-centric period we’re currently in, allowing every sector to have access to this customer data just makes the job easier and the strategy maintained with efficiency.

Now, there are three other reasons to have a CDP that are directly related to the GDPR project:

Low cost

In spite of not being the cheapest data control tool in the market, it does stand out as the most complete and provides the best price-performance ratio. One of the reasons that makes this possible is that the platform is already built and programmed without the need of an IT support team.

That is to say, you simply acquire the Customer Data Platform, make some basic configurations, and start benefiting from it. No need to hire a platform support team or anything like that.

Another thing: this tool is faster than others that work with data, such as the CRM. In addition, your goals will be reached easier and, likewise, faster with it.

Individual and unified profile

What happened before CDP came to the market was data duplication.

Let’s explain this better:

A system like CRM, for example, doesn’t have the capability of recognizing different actions made by the same client. So, if someone interacts with the brand through the website and then by email, the software thinks it’s two different people.

With the CDP, that problem doesn’t exist. It is built to identify and unify these actions into a singular customer profile. Thus, avoiding data duplication.

No matter how many interactions or where they take place, the platform will be able to understand it is the same person and gather the information in the same place.

Easy external access

Okay, so, we’re talking about how CDP is superior to other data collection systems. This doesn’t mean you need to get this platform and get rid of everything you currently use. Not at all. 

The Customer Data Platform has the ability to connect with other systems, so you can take advantage of all the data you already have by connecting your platforms and centralizing all data into one place.

Even more, if there is incorrect, duplicated, or data going against GDPR, the CDP can correct and/or delete this information.

This way, before you waste your current database, make sure if it’s worth it or not to practice this integration between platforms.

Moreover, other software that is not directly related to data collection could perform better with the help of a CDP database. Don’t hold back doing your research.

So far, you’ve learned some of the main tasks of a Customer Data Platform, but there is still a lot more to know about it. How about reading our ebook on the subject? The download is free and the knowledge is uncanny!

How to increase lead conversion with Live Chat

Posted on by

Live Chat is the easiest and fastest way to increase your brand’s conversions. Through real-time conversations, you can generate more leads and convert more clients! Doesn’t it sound great?

At the same time, a Live Chat tool can allow a person to be attended, it also allows him or her to keep navigating the website. Same way, you can even keep working on your daily tasks and talk with the attendant. As a matter of fact, the attendants themselves can perform more than one service simultaneously.

Most companies use the software for customer support services, but it can be so much more than that. It helps a brand to provide customer service and increase conversions. Whether that happens by generating qualified leads or by making a sale.

Overall, Live Chat is a communication tool, so it can cover support, sales, and customer service as a whole. In addition, it can also work for group chats. Besides, the benefits list is quite long.

Let’s talk more about: 

  • the benefits of Live Chat
  • how to increase leads conversions
  • what makes Live Chat so efficient to increase conversions
  • how to use Live Chat to achieve better results

#Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

The benefits of Live Chat

More than increasing conversions, there are many advantages you get by acquiring a Live Chat solution. Here, let’s highlight how you can use all of them to improve your business’s customer experience.

So, what are the Live Chat benefits?

Improve brand value

Much like entering a physical store and wanting to ask many questions to a salesperson, when a client enters your eCommerce, they might need someone to talk to and help them make a decision. And how can you make sure that person doesn’t go away without guaranteeing a purchase?

Use a Live Chat!

If there’s a Live Chat available, the website visitor can simply start a conversation and have all their questions answered right away. Just like it would be in-store. This is quite an effective way to cause a good impression and create a loyal customer basis. Thus, increasing your brand value.

The right place at the right time

Maybe you’ve heard this before if you work with Customer Data and a CDP. Let me explain: this happens because when you use a CDP, you know everything about your consumers, who they are, what they like, how they behave, and so on.

Because of that, you can understand exactly how to approach them and when to do it.

Now, how does that logic work with a Live Chat? By using Customer Data, you can take the first step and start a conversation with clients who abandoned their carts or who are trying to cancel an order. Of course, the chat is also available if the clients themselves want to initiate a conversation.

Either way, problem-solving becomes a lot quicker and easier.

Low costs

When you use a Live Chat, you can save some money with telemarketing, for example. That’s because operators and phone call charges can be high for not-so-good results. More than reducing expenses, you’ll be optimizing your service and team productivity.

After all, 1 Live Chat attendant can perform up to 6 conversations at the same time, while a phone operator can only do one customer at a time.

Improve customer service

Because we’re talking about an online, real-time communication channel that happens between two actual people (not a bot), the brand creates a closer relationship to the customer. Both improving the services and the customer experience.

Even more than that, the personalization a Live Chat brings to each client’s assistance is something that helps guarantee the excellence of an eCommerce service.

Brand humanization

Making a brand more human nowadays is essential. But what does that mean? Basically, it’s about giving your brand more personality. It doesn’t necessarily need to have a face, but it is important to work with a tone of voice and brand values throughout your communication.

For whatever strategy you chose for your business, Live Chat is a way to make the “human-factor” happen. And the explanation is simple: there is a human behind the screen.

The only thing to say about using this software is: make sure your attendants are well-trained and follow the same tone of voice in their chats. Of course, they can add a bit of their own personality to make the chat more dynamic, but they need to stick to the company’s brand persona character.

#Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

Find out customer pain points

There is no better way to learn about your consumers than by talking to them. For that reason, real-time chat is the path to go.

In addition to learning about the customers’ main questions, you can even create opinion polls and set them to happen once a chat is finished (or even before it starts). This is both a way to know them better and to generate some leads, since they will need to leave their email information.

Increase ROI

It seems needless to say that an increase in conversions also increases the return on investment of a company, but, then again, that is not always the case. So, it’s necessary to complete the information here by saying that:

Yes, Live Chat does help increase your business’ ROI.

This tool pays itself easily, which means the investment you make to acquire, install, and use the Live Chat is repaid fast. Hence, increasing the company’s ROI.

Perform cross-selling strategies

Still thinking about the ROI of your brand, Live Chat helps you perform cross-selling strategies. That is, a way to make sales by offering complementary products to the one originally bought by the consumer.

To clarify with an example, let’s say you have a sports store and someone came wanting to buy a tennis racket. When the person adds the racket to their cart, you can initiate a chat with a message such as, “How about getting these tennis balls 30% OFF?” 

You’d be surprised with the effectiveness of this method. Simple like that, you’ll for sure see the results of your sales and revenue increase.

Problem-solving promptness

You know how we said clients and attendants can multitask while using the Live Chat? That means when providing a service to the consumer, attendants can leave the page of the chat to look for information that will answer every question asked.

Sometimes it’s necessary to enter the store system, look for a register, find something in a contract, or something like that. This makes it vital for the attendant to have the freedom to navigate while talking to a client.

Competitive edge

Even though many companies make this chat available on their internet pages, it’s usually directed for customer support. But, as we’ve been talking about here, when you use the tool for other purposes, you give a few steps ahead of your peers.

Even more so when using a Live Group Chat, that allows users to talk among themselves about several subjects.

Cost-benefit

This is not the cheapest software out there, but it’s far from being expensive. Plus, it’s one of the safest purchases you can make for your company since it brings the results you aim for.

While Live Chat increases the productivity of a variety of contributors (customer support, customer service, and sales), customers themselves are more pleased with the service offered. This way, your business will have more loyal customers, the type of consumer that keeps coming back to buy from your brand.

How to increase leads conversions

In order to actually see an increase in leads conversions and how it should happen, you need to do some strategic moves.

We can’t really say a positive outcome will not happen if you simply install the chat and wait for something to happen. However, things will be a lot better-looking if you follow these basic steps:

  • set a welcome message
  • optimize chat for mobile experience
  • perform in-chat polls
  • start conversation with leads that abandoned their carts
  • collect customer data

Besides, you can trigger customers with coupons, discounts, and free items, so the lead wants to know how they can take advantage of those benefits.

What makes Live Chat so efficient to increase conversion?

Now, the main thing we have to say and stands-out about Live Chat is: real-time conversations! The name of the tool itself already gives you the answer to that question, doesn’t it?

Still, what makes the real-time factor so appealing to the audience? Well, times are busy and agitated, so people want to get things out of their way as fast and easily as they possibly can. And that’s what a Live Chat makes possible.

Moreover, the answer in a Live Chat can be as fast as 7 seconds. Because of that, many companies use an automatic message with a warning like, “Our attendant is a bit busy right now, your chat will start in about 2 minutes.” This way, the person gets an instant message and also knows it won’t take long to start the conversation.

If there’s one thing you can be certain of is that Live Chat is far ahead in the customers’ favorite communication channel. Your only job is to make sure answers are fast and problems are indeed resolved.

How to use Live Chat to achieve better results

Since we’ve made it clear that Live Chat does work, what do you need to do next?

First of all, it’s essential to have a service protocol and answer models ready. Through customer data collection, you can find the necessary information and understand what the main pain points are of your customer basis. So, with that in hand, you can formulate a few answers to be used when those questions happen.

Then, your business must have a brand persona. With it, you’ll determine the tone of voice to be used and what kind of language to use. A hint: your persona is defined by your brand’s values.

In order for the communication to be effective, productive, and compatible with the brand persona, your team needs to be trained and qualified. It’s important that everyone knows what to do, how to deal with certain situations, and where to look for the answers they need. 

Nonetheless, they should also be encouraged to use their own personalities. It’s not supposed to be a copy and paste conversation, people need to feel like there’s a real person behind the screen, and not a robot. The whole point of using a Live Chat is to make communication more human, right?

Whether by using emojis, slangs, or even laughter, if the moment is appropriate, the human characteristic must appear.

Last but not least, Live Chat should also be used with proactiveness. You don’t need to wait for the customer to take the first step, you can start the conversation yourself. Whether that is to welcome a visitor or to use the cross-selling strategy we’ve talked about earlier. Just don’t let the chat sit there unused.

Here at Arena we’ve already helped innumerous brands to achieve better results in their eCommerces. How about you join them?
You can start with a FREE TRIAL of our Live Chat solution and all it takes is creating a free account.

Which one is best for your business?

Posted on by

Knowing the difference between Live Chats and chatbots can help you figure out how to benefit from the several utilities of using both tools.

Many professionals work day after day to provide customers with the best digital channels for support and general communication.

Gartner predicts that 85% of customer relations will be managed without human interaction by the end of this year. This is a snappy consequence of customers’ expectations regarding how brands communicate with them in online environments.

Customers expect a response from companies they get in touch with, within an hour. However, it isn’t uncommon to find companies that still struggle to respond to consumers. Most terribly, some companies don’t reply to their customers at all.

In this context, solutions like Live Chats and chatbots have erupted to boost response times and optimize interactions. They grant companies ways to immediately reply to customers and get involved earlier in their buying lifecycle.

Have you ever wondered what the main differences between a Live Chat and a chatbot are? Many people have. That’s why we have written this article.

Here, you’ll understand the dynamics of Live Chat vs. chatbot, and figure out which is the best solution according to your goals.

Let’s get started!

What is Live Chat?

As the name suggests, a Live Chat is a tool that allows live interactions to happen between users alone or between users and brand representatives. Live Chats enable instant messaging and have a fantastic potential to become an exclusive place for customers to get real-time support. 

Rather than using their phones to call—and eventually hang on the line—, customers that use Live Chats have a more convenient way to talk to brands on their digital properties, whether they’re seeking help or simple information.

According to Zendesk, Live Chats have the second-highest customer satisfaction rate (85%), while talking on the phone remains the most top-performing live interaction (91%). See how small is the gap between them?

Live Chats are responding quite nicely to the need to optimize response times and increase customer satisfaction. Still, Live Chats don’t work solely for customer support. They are ideal to complement sales approaches as engines to increase purchases and conversion rates.

In case you’re curious to know more about this software, we have also listed 40 Live Chat benefits you need to know.

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a software application that simulates a conversation as if humans handle it. Also known as digital assistants, chatbots are often seen as a very promising tool for interaction between humans and machines.

These days, companies from distinctive sectors use chatbots for a huge purpose variety. Whether it is to enhance customer support, help users navigate on their websites, or collect leads’ information, these tools are excellent for transforming how companies communicate with their current and future customers.

Different chatbot usage is based on the fact these tools rely on artificial intelligence and can be programmed to reply to spoken or written messages. A sophisticated chatbot also uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to better address human language.

Because they are simple to use and are available 24/7, chatbots revolutionize customer interactions and fasten their pace. Sixty-nine percent of consumers prefer chatbots over other channels because they provide quicker responses to simple questions. By reaching out to a chatbot, customers save time—and, as you know, time matters.

For those reasons, the market can’t see itself in the future without chatbots. According to Grand View Research, the chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025 globally. That’s a lot.

Prime factors of Live Chat vs. chatbot

Based on customers’ expectations, Live Chats and chatbots, three core-tasks must be:

  • Answering a question
  • Giving detailed explanations
  • Resolving a complaint

These are things both tools can do effectively. Still, as much as both Live Chats and chatbots serve the same purpose of optimizing response times and elevating customer interactions, there are a few differences that separate them.

Ahead in this post, you’ll find further details to understand how they differentiate.

1 – Scalability

Perhaps the most evident difference in the Live Chat vs. chatbot debate is that chatbots are much easier to scale.

When you implement a Live Chat, you must have people working behind the screen to reply instantly to customers. 

Depending on the conversation’s complexity level, sales reps might take longer to reply to more users activating a Live Chat. Recall that a Live Chat agent can answer to a limited number of interactions at a time as well.

Meanwhile, chatbots are programmed to handle multiple conversations simultaneously and reply faster, scaling conversations to employees when needed.

2 – Humanization

Statistics tell us 86% of customers believe there should be an escalate agent option when talking to a chatbot. 

That’s reasonable. You probably have gone through a more complex and specific customer issue that demanded human support, and chatbots aren’t able to solve any and everything—yet.

Your team might have to interfere and offer quality responses that are accurate to their needs for specific customers. This is something only Live Chat agents can utterly deliver. 

If you’re worried about Live Chat response times, here is an interesting statistic: 95% of customers agree to wait a little more to get a better quality service that matches their expectations.

Think about this for a minute: are your customers more likely to wait for human service or would they appreciate faster chatbot approaches?

3 – Acceptance

While people in the past seemed to dislike interacting with a robot, users these days appreciate having their issues resolved regardless of who is doing it.

Notice that 40% of customers don’t care whether they’re helped by a human agent on a Live Chat or by a chatbot. 

Plus, technology has advanced so much that some people don’t even know whether they’re talking to a real person or a very sophisticated chatbot.

4 – Availability

While chatbots work uninterruptedly, Live Chat agents are only available to respond during their working hours. 

This is a problem if you intend to make your brand available to users 24/7, especially if you consider the number of conversations that will occur if your customer engagement increases. 

You may have thousands of chats per month to reply to. How much human effort should it demand from you and your team?

On the other hand, Live Chats are most likely to make agents multitask more efficiently. Once they’re ready, Live Chat agents will identify more urgent conversations and route them to the right team, sharpening support time.

5 – Customer support

When customers get stuck in a product or checkout page, chatbots can quickly—and automatically—initiate a proactive interaction to help them out.

This is extremely important, as 73% of customers say what makes them love a brand is their ability to provide friendly and excellent customer service, especially when they need help before, while, or after the buying process.

Keep the information above in mind whatever the decision is you make. It doesn’t matter if you’re using a Live Chat or a chatbot to help consumers out. What truly matters is the support quality you’re providing them with, according to their preferences.

6 – Cost impacts

As much as implementing Live Chats and chatbots can make you take some money out of your pockets, the impact on costs is undeniable. 

You might spend to hire Live Chat agents, and training them should require some time. Just the same, implementing a chatbot isn’t free.

However, as response time-speeding tools, both Live Chats and chatbots retain customers’ attention and interest, going as far as converting website visitors into paying clients. This empowers your marketing and sales strategies and increases ROI. 

Live Chat increases conversion rates by 45%. For example, chatbots will save businesses more than $8 billion per year by 2022. They’re the best of both worlds.

Do you need to pick a side in the Live Chat vs. chatbot argument?

I’ll save you time and reply to this question right away: no, you don’t. 

The best thing about Live Chats and chatbots is that they don’t erase each other’s purpose and utility. Blending them might be a good option for many reasons.

Chatbots can work seamlessly along with Live Chat agents and notify your team when it’s time to step into the conversation with a lead or customer. Remember, chatbots are intelligent, automated mechanisms that scale and a good one should transfer a question it can’t answer to the right human agent.

While specific conversations require human support, many others can be handled by chatbots, and save your team time and effort so they can focus on more complex problems.

Let’s imagine a top-level customer has just entered your website. Your chatbot will tell your Live Chat agents right away, so they can reach out in a more personalized approach to answer their questions as conveniently and accordingly as possible. 

Live Chat vs. chatbot audience ownership

If you’re looking for solutions to keep your community on your page and take back your audience’s ownership, then interactive Live Chats should strongly be considered.

Beyond customer support and sales confines, Live Chats can be programmed to be a unique place where your customers can interact with other people in real-time conversations. Those are called Live Chat Groups.

By allowing instant conversations to take place in your Live Chat Group, you create a new sense of community that users can’t usually find anywhere else. 

This maximizes customer relationships and drives traffic to your website, making your brand less dependent on social media accounts and other external marketing channels.

Live Chat Groups are highly customizable and work on any website, making them an excellent tool to boost your customer engagement.

And there’s more: unlike standard Live Chat tools, Live Chat Groups are scalable and handle chatrooms with thousands of concurrent users simultaneously.

#Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

Key takeaways in the Live Chat vs. chatbot matter

  • Chatbots reply faster as Live Chats depend on agents’ potential to reply
  • Live Chats are a better solution to deal with customers that prefer human interactions
  • Live Chats assure better quality responses to complex queries, while chatbots nail simple conversations
  • Chatbots scale, especially on peak hours; Live Chats don’t
  • Live Chat Groups are fresh, unique interactive tools that increase engagement and create a community sense, which neither chatbots nor typical Live Chats can

Many companies worldwide use both Live Chats and chatbots at the same time to handle different contexts and conversations and have amazing results from combining such powerful tools. Some of those results are better customer experience, and more authority is being perceived from their website pages.

Let users talk about your content

We have no doubt chatbots, and Live Chats are both needed in our context. Instant communication is an essential requirement, and the customers that don’t find the channels they expect to communicate with brands will get frustrated.

We have seen many (rational) hype around the Live Chat vs. chatbot matter, but think there is a problem: people aren’t talking about Live Chat Groups enough.

If you want a forward-thinking and customer-centric tool to increase your engagement and help your website be seen as the to-go place, it is time you have a Live Chat Group.

The cherry on top is that, besides being easy to implement, Live Chat Groups are also becoming crucial to make users spend more time on your website and give your brand more credibility.

To see how a Live Chat Group fits your website best, all you need to do is use Arena’s real-time engagement platform and have full control over your chat rooms.

You’ll start finding new engagement opportunities even before your competitors think about them. Get started for free!