If you’re looking for a way to help clients improve engagement, increase sales, enhance customer support, and more, consider adding a live chat tool. Live chats tools are easy to set up, and they offer several benefits to both companies and customers. This guide was created to help digital agencies understand how live chat websites can benefit their clients. 

What is Live Chat?

Live chat is a messaging technology that lets users interact with your company and other users via a website chat widget. One study by Software Advice Inc. predicts that more than 85% of businesses will offer live chat by 2022. 

Live chats can be initiated by the company or the user, and company responses can be automated or answered by staff members. Digital agencies can create a live chat website for their clients to engage their audience and improve customer service.

How Digital Agencies can use Live Chat

By creating a chat website, digital agencies can improve engagement, enhance customer service, increase profits, and understand their audience. 

Improve Engagement

Digital agencies can create a live chat website that encourages users to interact with each other and the company. By giving users more ways and incentives to participate in conversations, they are more likely to stay on your clients’ websites. A website chat widget can be added to both a chat website or a live broadcast. 

For example, adding a group live chat during a live sporting broadcast encourages users to share their opinions and interact with each other on your chat. You can also incentivize users to comment by offering prizes, coupons, and product discounts. Fashion brands, like Vans, offer live music streaming DJ sets, aided by Live Chat in their website, to attract and retain users.

Agencies can add a dedicated Q&A that lets users ask relevant questions. Companies can add live chat polls to encourage user feedback and gain valuable insights on their preferences. They can also add call-to-action buttons that include pictures and product descriptions to maximize conversion. 

If improving engagement through group live chat, conversion cards, and Q&As sounds right for you, consider adding a tool like Arena Live Chat. Arena Live Chat is a comprehensive live chat tool that has provided customers with a 28% increase in subscription conversion, 40% reduction in marketing spend, and 64% increase in user engagement. 

For maximum results, pair Arena Live Chat with its Live Blog solution. A live blog can share instant updates on relevant events and can be used to encourage user interaction via live chat. 

Enhance Customer Service

Many website chat widgets specialize in customer service. By building a live chat website for clients, you can ensure their customers are well informed about their products and services. One study shows that live chat has the highest customer satisfaction level at 73%, followed by 61% for email support and 44% for phone support. 

Live chat increases the speed and efficiency of customer support. For example, an AI-powered chatbot can instantly respond to customer questions by sending push links, product information, and website navigation help. You can also let users chat with a staff member and allow agents to take the chatbot’s place. 

Increase Profits

Live chat can increase your client’s profits by boosting sales and reducing expenses. 

Live chat reduces friction in the sales process. One study shows that customers are 2.8 times more likely to make a purchase after engaging with a live chat agent. 

Without live chat, customers typically need to fill out a form to be later contacted via phone or email. With live chat, customers can connect to company sales teams instantly. 

Agents and chatbots can quickly handle objections and streamline the checkout process via live chat. They can provide free resources like tip sheets, PDF guides, and videos to inform customers. They can also address last-minute concerns on checkout pages. 

Live chat also reduces support costs. One study found that live chat customer support is 17% to 30% cheaper than phone support. 

With phone support, agents can only attend to one customer at a time. Live chat agents can multi-task by having three or more chat windows open at once. This allows them to provide more support in less time. 

Understand Your Audience

When paired with a customer data platform (CDP) or customer relationship management (CRM) tool, live chat is an effective way to understand your audience without questioning them directly. 

Companies can look through user chat histories to identify pain points, interests, and engagement levels. From there, they can create a customer profile that shows which chat rooms users engage in, how much revenue they’ve generated, and new products they may be interested in. 

Some advanced tools can analyze user conversations to determine their views and feelings on certain products and brands. This allows company agents to have personalized interactions with customers based on these viewpoints. Consider connecting Arena CDP to your live chat to better understand customer behavior. 

You can also take a direct approach when gathering customer information. By including questions like “How many employees does your company have?” in your live chat script, you can better understand the customer and connect them to the appropriate agent. 

Conclusion

Digital agencies can use this guide to determine how to use live chat to help their clients. Live chat tools like Arena Live Chat can be set up to allow users and companies to quickly interact with each other.

Live chat improves engagement on websites and live events, and support agents can use it to enhance customer service. Live chat also increases profits by boosting sales and reducing support costs. These tools can also be paired with CDPs and CRMs to better understand audiences and create user profiles. 

A corporate live stream is an excellent way to engage your employees, minimize expenses, and create a more unified organization. With the technology available to companies, almost any in-person experience can be transitioned to virtual. This guide is for companies looking for creative ways to engage their employees using a corporate live stream. 

How to Engage Employees with Live Streaming

Consider the following ways to engage employees using a corporate live stream. 

Conferences

Conferences are a great way to learn valuable information about your industry, it’s consumers, and your competitors. However, you can’t send everyone in your organization to attend them. Therefore, most companies send a small handful of employees to attend. 

If the conference permits it, have the attendees from your company live stream important speakers and topics. This allows all of your employees to benefit from the conference without having to be there physically. If your company runs its own conference, make sure to set up a live stream so employees can watch and rewatch it online.

Check out these virtual conference platforms you and your team can use to stream awesome events.

Announcements

Create a corporate live stream for big company announcements. For example, a startup has scheduled an IPO and needs to announce it to its employees. Instead of sending a wordy email, the CEO can set up a corporate live stream that connects with employees in an exciting and personable way. Allow employees to view the live stream, ask questions, and engage with each other. 

Nubank went further: the bank hired award-winning singer Anita for its IPO live streaming event.

Training

A corporate live stream is one of the best ways to train employees. It eliminates the need to gather employees at one physical location, and it can save your company on training costs. Use live streaming for sales training, onboarding, compliance training, and more. 

During live stream training, let employees engage by asking and answering questions. Live stream training is especially useful for roleplays that require employees and trainers to interact with each other. If you have employees spread throughout the country, a live stream training allows them all to hop on from the convenience of their desktop or mobile device. 

By recording your training, you give employees the ability to rewatch training on-demand at their own pace. Once a training is recorded, there’s no need to spend time recreating it. If a clip needs to be updated, you can always go back and make the necessary changes.

Adding Live Chat is also a great way to enhance the e-learning experience.

Q&A Sessions

Question and answer (Q&A) sessions, also known as “ask me anything” sessions, give employees the chance to speak with someone higher up in the company. For example, you could host a virtual Q&A session with the company’s CEO. This gives employees the opportunity to ask important questions regarding where the company is headed, why he or she started the company, and more. 

To prepare for Q&A sessions in advance, you can create employee polls to collect votes on most important questions. Questions that get the most votes can be prioritized and answered first. Let employees watch the stream live, submit anonymous questions, give feedback, and watch Q&A recordings. 

Product Demos

If your company is constantly releasing innovative products, it can be hard for employees to keep up. By hosting a virtual product demo, you can engage your employees and share all the details of your new product. Allow them to ask questions, rewatch the demo, and see visual representations of the product in action. 

Town Halls

Virtual town halls are organization-wide meetings in which all employees attend and receive important updates, share ideas, and ask pressing questions. By hosting a town hall virtually, you can connect employees in several different branches, and you allow them to connect with colleagues that they don’t see on a regular basis. 

Town halls are typically conducted on a quarterly basis, and virtual ones cut expensive accommodation, travel, and venue costs. They also make employees feel more united and appreciated, and they can have tremendous benefits on company culture. 

Employee Parties

A great way to improve employee engagement and retention is by creating a culture that makes them feel appreciated. One way to do this is by hosting a virtual party. This can take the form of a virtual happy hour, employee recognition meeting, or team party. 

While most would prefer these to be in person, this isn’t always possible. Team members can be scattered around the country and have busy schedules. By hosting an employee party online, you can allow them to connect without needing to travel or take time off work. 

For example, your HR team could host a virtual happy hour in which employees in North America have the chance to meet employees in Europe. You can promote casual conversations, recognize employee achievements, and boost the overall morale of your employees. 

Interviews

The first way to engage employees is by live streaming interviews. You can interview customers, employees, suppliers, industry leaders, and partners. Ask them important questions on how they interact with your company and its products and services. This engages employees by allowing them to learn more about your company and its challenges from someone else’s point of view. 

When you live stream your interview, make sure to record it so people can rewatch it if they missed out. It also helps to generate a transcript so employees can highlight important points. By sharing video interviews, you’ll be able to help onboarding employees gain a better understanding of your company’s mission and strategies. 

Conclusion

Many people think of live streams as a way for companies to connect with their customers. However, this guide reveals that live streams are a great way to connect and engage with employees too. A corporate live stream can be used for interviews, conferences, announcements, training, Q&A sessions, product demos, town halls, and casual employee parties. 

How Arena Can Help

If you need a tool that lets you create group live chats, send instant messages, ask questions, and create polls, consider downloading Arena Live Chat. You can also share important written updates during your announcement with Arena Live Blog. If you enjoy using these tools, check out Arena Customer Data Platform (CDP) to help you understand your customers’ preferences and interests. 

Arena has been used by thousands of companies in over one hundred countries to improve their live events. Arena customer TV1;, a company focused on live experiences, began creating virtual business conferences as a way to keep attendees and employees engaged online. Arena has also been trusted by companies like Facebook and VTEX; to run live events. 

For help planning a virtual event, download our free eBook for creating highly engaging live event scripts. For more information on enhancing your live stream, click the link below to download our free eBook. 

Building a business that’s predictable, sustainable, and scalable without negatively impacting output is a primary goal of most agencies. A scalable agency is one that adds revenue at a much faster rate than costs. If you’re looking to scale your agency, this guide is for you. It covers different strategies, ideas, and tools you need to create a scalable agency. 

How to Scale Your Agency

The inability to scale is one of the biggest challenges facing agencies. To overcome these hurdles, use the following tips on how to scale your agency. 

Build Scalable Lead-Generation Systems

To scale your agency, it’s important to have a continuous inflow of new leads. Avoid relying only on one-time campaigns or word-of-mouth referrals. You need to create lead-generation systems that can grow with your agency. An all-in-one system is the best way to do this. 

Whether you use organic search, email marketing, social media advertising, or referrals, you can combine them to achieve optimal results. Instead of looking at your marketing strategies as individual channels, understand how each of them work together to get results. It’s also important to have a marketing strategy that integrates with your sales strategy.

Dominate Your Niche

Some agencies have trouble scaling because their niche is too broad. They try to serve too many different audiences, and they never become the leader in their niche. That’s why it’s so important to pick a specific niche and focus only on serving clients in that pool. 

Let’s look at a simple business example. Someone who needs a software tool to help them build a high-rise skyscraper has two options. The first option is to use a software that serves the construction industry. The second option is to use a software tool that specializes in helping people build high-rise skyscrapers. Construction managers are far more likely to choose the software that specializes in their specific skyscraper project. 

By niching down, you can become the “go-to” leader in that area. This makes it easier to scale because you’ll understand more about your specific customers’ needs, and prospects are more likely to hire you due to your specialized expertise. 

Try Result-Based Pricing

Another way to scale your agency is by switching up your pricing structure. Many agencies either bid on projects or offer fixed-priced packages. To attract more customers, offer them results-based pricing. By doing this, you take the risk burden off your customer because they only pay for the results you generate. 

Before trying this, make sure you’re confident that your agency can deliver results for the customer. This pricing plan puts the risk on your agency, but customers appreciate it and are more likely to sign up. It’s smart to have enough overhead to cover any losses if you fail to succeed. 

Understand Your Client Journey

The client journey refers to every touchpoint between your agency and your client. The journey starts when a client enters the pipeline, and it lasts through final post-delivery communication. By standardizing this process, you can more easily scale your agency. 

To create a standardized process, you must first map out the customer journey. A simple example is by categorizing new clients into referrals and outbound sales. If these two types of clients are onboarded differently, include boxes and arrows on your customer journey map that correspond to the proper onboarding strategy. Referrals may be onboarded using process one, and outbound sales leads may be onboarded using process two. 

By creating a visual chart of this process, you’ll be able to streamline onboarding operations, connect sales and project management processes, and more easily scale your agency. 

Enhance Your Analytics

Improving your data analytics allows you to gain better insights into your customers, scale your agency, and show off ROI to prospects and clients. To enhance your analytics, invest in a software tool or hire an analytics specialist who specializes in areas relevant to your agency. These can help you improve the common types of analytics listed below. 

Descriptive Analytics

Descriptive analytics is done by taking content or data and determining what happened. It uses both historical and current data to reveal relationships and trends. You can use descriptive analytics to see how many customers downloaded an eBook, how many likes your social media post got, or how many people viewed your video. 

Diagnostic Analytics

Diagnostic analytics uses data to determine what causes certain correlations and trends between variables. Diagnostic analytics can be done manually, with statistical software, or by using an algorithm. An example of diagnostic analytics is testing the color scheme of a landing page and seeing which generates the best results. 

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics uses historical data, machine learning, and statistical algorithms to make future predictions. Predictive analytics can be used to optimize your marketing strategy by revealing what type of campaigns are most likely to work best, which customers are most likely to generate the largest revenue, and the best time to reach out to customers. 

Prescriptive Analytics

Prescriptive analytics takes the data collected from predictive, diagnostic, and descriptive analytics to make a recommendation on how to optimize your agency going forward. It uses algorithms, artificial intelligence, business rules, and machine learning to make a recommendation. Prescriptive analytics can reduce human error, create a long-term business plan, and save time for agencies. 

Tools for Collecting Data and Improving Engagement

One tool you can use to collect data from your users is through a customer data platform (CDP). Arena CDP can help by collecting and analyzing data from multiple touchpoints to form unique customer profiles. 

By integrating the CDP with Arena Live Chat, you can analyze what the user says online and use it to understand their interests and preferences. A live chat tool is also great for enhancing user engagement.

They can be paired with live virtual events to add instant messaging, group live chat, Q&As, polls, and other engagement features. Another tool for improving engagement, creating a superior live stream event, and collecting user data is through Arena Live Blog. 

This tool’s analytics dashboard lets agencies analyze audience behavior and monitor performance. It can also be used to provide quick, interactive updates during live stream events. 

For information on enhancing your live stream through engaging virtual event scripts, check out our free eBook.

Conclusion

If you’re looking to scale your agency, try some of the five strategies covered in this guide. Create lead-generation systems that are comprehensive and scalable. Pick a specific niche and dominate it. Try results-based pricing instead of a fixed pricing structure. Map out and understand each type of client’s journey. 

It’s also helpful to ramp up your descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. You can also use Arena’s CDP, Live Chat, and Live Blog tools to collect customer data, enhance engagement, and improve a live event experience.