Tag Archives: customer experience

All You Need to Know About Content Moderation

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If you are about to, or now managing an online business platform, you might have known already or have been researching about the world of content moderation. Also, you must have heard this popular opinion – the online platform kind of business is not that easy. 

Well, yes sure! It is not, but if you have the right strategy to operate it, alongside ways to overcome possible problems related to it, as well as the knowledge of some other factors that should be avoided and considered in order to get that fast and efficient result, then you are good to go. But if you don’t have any, don’t worry! We got you covered! 

What is content moderation?

There are millions of content online, but not all of them are effective nor meet readers’ expectations. This is where content moderation comes into place. In simple words, content moderation is the process of screening, approving, or removing user-generated content based on some guidelines in order to establish clients’ trust, and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements.

There are lots of reasons why content moderation is important. First, it screens content that is submitted by a certain user to know if the posting guidelines are being violated. Second, it is an effective way for a business to keep a positive reputation which guarantees a decent relationship with clients, thus advances higher accommodation and satisfaction among users and clients.

What is human moderation?

Human moderation or manual moderation is another type of moderating content, however, the one behind it of course – human. Human moderators manually monitor and review clients’ or users’ posts on a particular online platform. 

Moreover, human moderators also ensure the protection of all users or clients from scammers, anomalies, or any type of harassment that occurs in social media. They are also responsible for maintaining the quality and standards of a particular social media platform.

What is automated moderation?

Automated moderation is an automatic process of moderation that automatically determines any-user generated content. In this kind of moderation, contents that are being rejected or published are done based on the pre-defined guidelines by a highly intelligent computer bot that closely monitors the system 24/7.

Automated moderation resolves any physical or psychological stress from human moderators as it can minimize the response time, improve the quality of service, save time, and increase cost quality outcomes.

How important is content moderation in enhancing customer experience?

Utilizing social media platforms is an effective way to connect with customers regarding a particular business you have to offer. With social media, you can create customer service and build strong customer relationships without having to meet them in person. 

In line with this, effective and efficient content moderation can help you know your customers better, engage with them in real-time, establish customer loyalty with your brand, and achieve user retention as it offers good credibility of the event.

Nowadays, every brand is always active on almost every social media platform. In line with this, content moderation is of great help in monitoring social media accounts, comments, images, and videos, as well as categorizing and indexing business offerings.

Content moderation can also help you with online reputation management. Your online reputation is very important for the success of your business. As you might have known, whatever people post or publish online regarding your business, true or not, all have a significant influence on your business reputation. 

And, content moderation can help you fight against harmful content, address clients’ criticisms, and most importantly, feature important and helpful feedback from customers.

Content Moderation in Building Relationships with Customers

As have mentioned above, content moderation can help you build strong connections with your clients or customers. You can use content moderation to make your customers feel satisfied with your services offered by personalizing your responses, as well as keeping them in the loop with any timely news like product updates. With this, the strong relationships you have with them can help you achieve repeat and referral business.

What are the things you should keep in mind when moderating content?

There is a wide range of factors to consider with content moderation. This is very important in order for you to achieve the content that best suits your business. These factors also depend on what platform or site you are using. However, regardless of what site, platform, or business you are having, these are the top 7 things you should keep in mind, or better – do!

  1. Select the best content for your business

There is no one else in the world who knows your business better than you. You know best what your products and services are as well as your users or customers. So, you can use these to help you create the most outstanding content out there that best meets their expectations.

  1. Choose the best content moderation to utilize for your content.

With the best content you have, choose the best content moderation method to utilize. Aim to stand out amongst others. You can do this by using the best content moderation method that is not only suitable for your content and business but also fit your platform’s specific needs.

  1. Always make your content personalized to your customers’ needs.

When your customers feel special, they usually go back to you over and over again. With this, it will drive your repeat and referral business, which often results in more positive business outcomes. That is why, when creating content, make it as personalized as possible, moderate it according to the needs of your customers as this often results in increasing engagement which will lead to more loyalty and conversion rates.

  1. Moderate all your content consistently

Whether you are running your online business via Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms or sites, it is very important for you to make appealing and pleasant content that will surely attract new customers or retain your existing customers. This can be done by moderating your content in a consistent manner. This means that you have to be very meticulous in choosing the right format, images, videos, and other visual factors that will be incorporated into your content.

  1. Establish concise rules and regulations

Establishing concise rules and regulations is one of the most important things to do when moderating content. Therefore, these rules and regulations should be clear for all who are involved in moderating your content, be it from the data analyst to the human or automated moderators.

  1. Utilize all your resources

Every content moderation tool and equipment matters, right? This is why you need to utilize them in the best possible manner. Sometimes, you might see yourself overwhelmed with the available resources in the market, some are paid, some are free.

In this case, it’s very important for you to consider these resources carefully, prioritize the ones that offer innovation and growth as these often boost success to your online platform business.

  1. Quality over quality

Sometimes you have a lot of ideas, and you want all of these to be utilized. This often happens to almost everybody, but always remember that quality is more important than quantity. Quality content builds your customers’ trust, resulting in acquiring more revenue and success for your online business platform.

Customer Interaction

Your interactions with your customers are vital to your business success. Customer experience can make or break your business. That is why you as the business owner have to make these interactions as smooth and flawless and possible. 

There are various ways for you to engage with your customers, you can do this through Live Chats, Live Blogs, posts, tweets, comments, etc. Regardless, when interacting with them, you should be timely when responding to their inquiries, make it personalized, maintain positive emotions when commenting, reposting, and retweeting, and most importantly, always include available links for FAQs in your content.

Conclusion

Nowadays, the online platform business is very competitive. Therefore, you should moderate your content for you to stand out amongst the others. Always think ahead, know the strengths and weaknesses of your business, and engage with your customers frequently in order for you to be able to know them well, alongside their weak points and needs. Try also to utilize the tips mentioned above. 

Additionally, you can also utilize Arena when engaging with your customers through Live Chat, Live Blog, and other Customer Engagement ideas. Arena is easy to integrate, perfect for conversations, community chat, as well as ratings and reviews.

Are you ready to drive more revenue to your business? 

Now, try the Arena for free!

Customer Engagement Strategy Using Live Chat

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Today customer’s expectations from a brand have risen from mere marketing of freebies and discounts to a brand’s ability to relate with the “human element”. To earn loyalty, customers want the brands to interact with them and prove their worth in this cutting-edge consumer market.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement in simple words is the relationship between a customer and a business. To ensure customer engagement, companies work towards creating a relationship with their customers to improve brand awareness and brand loyalty.

Customer engagement is crucial to a brand’s interaction with its customers. A highly engaged customer will be more aware of the brand’s vision and mission, and will likely become part of the loyal customer base.

What is a Customer Engagement Strategy?

Customer engagement strategy is defined as the tools businesses use to build strong and engaging relationships with customers. It also involves anticipating customer’s needs, solving their problems and helping them achieve their goals.

An effective customer engagement strategy builds long lasting impressions in the minds of consumers. It also increases awareness of the brand and improves customer engagement. 

The key to a strong customer engagement strategy is to introduce technologies that favor user interaction, user retention on the page, sales, and user participation with the content.

Some of the famous brands like Coca Cola, Starbucks, Rogers Media, Super Bowl, and Apple are renowned around the world for their inspiring and effective customer engagement strategies. Let us take a look at a few of them.

1. Coca Cola

When it comes to marketing, Coca Cola is usually ahead of the game. In 2012, Coca Cola launched a marketing campaign called “ShareACoke” where the company’s logo was replaced by some of the most common names of people in the US. Adding a name to the bottle spoke to the consumers on a personal level and thus became a powerful marketing strategy. 

Within the first year, people shared more than 500,000 photos via the #ShareaCoke hashtag. The campaign became consumer driven where highly active users on social media channels began sharing their pictures with friends and family. 

Thus consumers were acting as creative directors for the brand itself which led to a high engagement on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

2. Starbucks

Starbucks sets a great example of establishing strong customer engagement strategies every year. “My Starbucks Rewards” program was launched in 2009 which allowed Mobile Order & Pay feature where customers would order ahead of time and pick up their orders in the store. This allowed them to cut lines and order through convenience of their phone.

In addition, the rewards program also allowed consumers to check their balance, make use of their star points and earn free coffee refills or food items.

Starbucks doesn’t just limit its marketing projects to social media but also to a wider digital audience. In one of the campaigns called Starbucks’ Love Project, the company collaborated with several artists such as Dave Matthews, John Legend and U2 to create “All You Need Is Love CD.” 

In participating Starbucks locations, customers would get a free CD with a purchase of $15 or more. They were then invited to upload their video to become part of a massive sing-along. Thousands came on board!

3. Superbowl

We are all familiar with Superbowl — the iconic game that generates one of the biggest days for advertising in the US! Companies can learn amazing lessons from the way Superbowl advertisers harness the power of customer engagement in their campaigns. Many organizations even utilize the pre-gaming screen time to start advertising their products and services ahead of the game. 

For example Uber’s pre-gaming marketing featured #UberPuppyBowl; hashtag and promoted the chance for select Uber offices to enjoy a 15 minute cuddle huddle with puppies in select Uber’s offices.

Today with the rise of social media, organizations are leveraging the power of both the mainstream as well as social media platforms to advertise their products. During last year’s Superbowl, Avocados From Mexico’s advertisement featuring Molly Ringwald didn’t receive as much traction as they were expecting.

However, the brand took to Twitter’s live-tweeting responses for the rest of their ads and the halftime show, garnering more attention than their original ad!

Creating a Compelling Customer Engagement Strategy Using Live Chat

User interaction, retention and participation are key elements in creating a compelling customer engagement strategy. This helps improve sales and builds long lasting impressions. 

One of the tools that can help you create a compelling engagement strategy is the live chat feature. Companies are now utilizing live chats during webinars, online conferences, live events and for free ecommerces. 

A live chat feature improves customer experience, builds stronger branding, and helps you gain a competitive edge over your competition. 

Whether you work with small or large businesses, in 2021, you absolutely need a Live Chat tool as part of your marketing strategy. Although live chat feature has been around for a while, companies are now proactively using it on their websites and social media platforms.

Here are some of the strategies you can use to improve your customer engagement through live chat features.

Create Positive Brand Perception

Brands all around the world strive to create a positive perception for their products and services. Live chat can be a useful tool to help you achieve that perception through real-time user engagement. During your brand’s live event broadcasts such as webinars, fashion shows, conferences, concerts, or stand up comedies, you can use the live chat feature for your viewers to engage not just with the content but also with one another in real-time.

Live chat provides you more opportunities to make meaningful connections, which will further promote your brand perception and awareness. There is a power in the ripple effect that a good word of mouth can cause!

Improve KPIs

When working with live chat tools, companies need to understand how to improve their KPIs to ensure positive results. Technologies such as live chat tools can be forefront in creating real-time engagement for your brand. 

When customers interact with an event on your website, they might pose questions about a product launch or may generally be interested in knowing more about your brand. Ensuring the interaction doesn’t stay one-sided, you can take that time to answer the questions for the viewers.  

In addition, you can improve your KPIs in other productive ways too. For example if many customers are asking the same questions over and over again, it is a better idea to include an FAQ page on your website.  

Create an Online Community

Live Chat feature is not only about consumer and business interaction, it is also about consumer to consumer interaction. During live webinars and online events, you can set up a live chat where the viewers can interact with each other. A great example of live chat interaction can be seen on YouTube live videos where viewers communicate with one another by every second.

Other companies like Daily Telegraph, City Gates, CA, Bridgend College, Fox Sports have been using the live chat feature creatively on their social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Provide a Personalized User Experience

When interacting with a brand, customers look for a personalized experience that can address their demands. A personalized real-time experience increases customer satisfaction and improves the perceived value of your brand.

Rather than treating your customer as a transaction or another name on your email list, approach them as human beings who have goals, interests, and preferences. Through a carefully tailored experience, you can help them achieve those goals.

Increase Your Revenue

According to an eMarketer survey on the attitude towards US online buyers who used live chat showed that 63% users were more likely to visit a site again. And 62% of the respondents who engaged through a live chat feature said that they were more likely to purchase from the site again.

Having a live chat feature on your website can have a significant impact on your sales. Using a chat tool during a purchase can influence your customer’s decision to continue with the purchase.

Conclusion

Companies all around the world use multiple tools to improve their online visibility, user experience and sales. Many argue that a positive customer experience is pivotal to success of a business and we couldn’t agree more.

According to a study by AMA Access on how B2B marketers are leveraging live chat to increase their sales, the research found that throughout the customer journey, companies can use live chat to improve: 

  • Marketing awareness by 29%
  • Conversion to create sales suspects by 39%
  • Post-sales customer support and engagement by 39%

Try our freemium Live Chat tool Arena to stay on the top of your marketing game, implement effective customer engagement strategies and produce happy customers!

Customer Engagement Tips to Improve Sales

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Sometimes, all you need to grow your business is more sales conversions. If you are already getting enough traffic, converting them to sales may be enough to give your business the boost it needs to move ahead of the competitor. That is exactly what improved customer engagement can do for you. 

What Is Customer Engagement? 

Customer engagement can best be described as an ongoing interaction between a company and its customers. Practically, it refers to your company’s ability to keep up a conversation with your customer in the most efficient manner throughout the customer lifecycle. 

Customer engagement entails frequent and effective communication with the customers. It is achieved when the communication channels offered by the company is accepted by the customers. Its effectiveness will be measured by the results the continued conversation yields. 

Every business needs a customer engagement strategy to survive. In a competitive market, the ability of a business to connect with customers and keep the conversation going is critical to survival. With the right strategies and tools, customer engagement brings satisfaction to businesses and customers. 

Why Is Customer Engagement So Important? 

Customer engagement is critical to business growth. In the very beginning, it helps to transform traffics into leads. The right customer engagement tools, like Arena Live Chat, will help to convert most of the leads into sales.

Customer engagement also plays a critical role in customer experience, which is an indispensable ingredient in customer retention. If a business is able to convert more leads into sales and make the right first impression, it will certainly lead to repeat sales. With several repeat business, the company can build customer loyalty. 

In summary, customer engagement is considered very important for the following reasons: 

  • It will help drive your sales conversion and help you sell more
  • It will help you reduce churn
  • It will help increase customer satisfaction and retention
  • It can help boost customer loyalty
  • It will help you win back old customers.

How Can Customer Engagement Specifically Help Drive Sales Conversion? 

To convince website visitors to buy a product, pay for a service, o visit a physical office, you need to engage them and convince them and build trust. That is the essence of a customer engagement strategy. Here are specific ways customer engagement can specifically lead to an increase in sales for your business:

  • It Will Keep Customers Informed 

Most customers need more information about products and services before making a purchase. Being able to engage them and get them informed improves the chances of conversion. Well-informed customers are more likely to become return customers, also. 

  • It Creates Brand Awareness 

Brand awareness drives sales, and customer engagement enhances brand awareness. When you engage customers, you will make them recognize your brand. It doesn’t take much, afterward, to establish brand awareness, which is always instrumental in purchases and contract renewals. 

  • It Helps Identify What Customers Truly Want 

Sometimes sales pitches fail because marketers are not really aware of what customers want. True engagement allows you to assess the true needs of the customers and help them figure out the best solution. Through customer engagement, you will be able to create customer value, which drives sustainable sales conversion. 

  • It Opens Up the Possibility of Larger Orders 

It is a known fact that engaged customers tend to spend more – there are actually many marketing studies that have confirmed this. Through customer engagement, you will be able to establish trust. Of course, the more your customers love you, the more they will buy from you. 

  • It Transforms Customers to Brand Advocates 

Never underestimate the power of informed and happy clients. They will most likely become your brand advocates, helping to spread the message and fetch you many more customers. Thanks to social media, it is a lot easier for your engaged and happy customers to refer your business to more people. Word of mouth and other channels still works. 

What Role Can Live Chat Play In Customer Engagement? 

Live Chat is an effective marketing tool that can play a significant role in customer engagement. Arena Live Chat, for instance, is an instant communication channel that you can add to your website to stimulate and generate real-time customer engagement. 

Live Chat is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways to generate meaningful engagement. It is better than chatbots since it adds the much needed human factor to ongoing conversations with customers. 

Can Live Chat Really Help To Drive Sales Conversion? 

Yes, Live Chat can truly help to drive sales conversion. As we’ve established already, it is one of the most effective ways to generate meaningful customer engagement. Live Chat customer service will also boost sales conversion in the following ways: 

  • It delights customers 
  • It shortens the sales cycle 
  • It  facilitates upsells and cross-sells 
  • It brings some level of personalization to marketing 

What Can You Do To Optimize Live Chat For Engagement And Sales Conversion? 

Implementing Live Chat will undoubtedly help you to generate engagement and drives your sales conversion. However, to get the right result, you will have to make the right decision with your Live Chat service. The first important thing is to choose the right Live Chat tool. Over the years, Arena Live Chat has helped several businesses benefit immensely from customer engagement. 

In addition to choosing the right Live Chat tool, you need to customize your Live Chat to have the desired impact and bring the right benefits. There is a need to follow a protocol and create a template that is purpose-oriented. This is the only way to ensure that each Live Chat session with a customer is treated with the utmost regard. 

Success Stories With Arena Live Chat 

As hinted above, the Arena Live Chat has helped several businesses to record meaningful success in their marketing. One outstanding case is the success story of Rogers Communication. The giant Communication and Media Company used Arena to increase customer engagement by more than 64%. Live Chat Roger also helped the company to achieve 28% customer retention and many more benefits. 

Endnote 

Customer engagement is a critical aspect of marketing. Among many things, it can help to drive sales conversion. As we’ve discussed here, Live Chat can play a significant role in boosting customer engagement and driving sales. You just need to choose the right tools and implement them the right way to derive the full benefits. 

Are you ready to implement the best Live Chat service for your business?

Customer Engagement Strategies to Boost Businesses

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You have heard how important customer engagement is for so many times now. But what does having an effective customer engagement strategy really mean? Is it all about giving your prospects and customers a seamless experience with your products and services? Or is it all about keeping up to date with your latest offerings? 

Today, we will talk about taking your business to a whole new level by understanding in depth what customer engagement is and employing effective strategies that will make them advocates of the brand you are building this 2021.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is a facet of Marketing where external customers or companies interact with a brand through various channels – offline and online. Simply put, it is when a prospect or a customer “connects” emotionally with your brand. 

One of the goals of every marketer is to keep the customers engaged even after they have successfully closed the sale.

Besides growing your revenue and boosting your brand awareness, customer engagement is all about treating your customers like a gift that keeps on giving because according to a study, 84% of customers say that being treated like a human being and having their needs met by a business is crucial in their buying decision because 70% of buying decisions come from how customers feel at the time of their purchase.

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There are many factors to consider when we think about the statistics but if we provide a platform that will help our prospects feel that they are prioritized, then all the more that we can expect sales closures of your brand.

Customer Engagement Strategies

1. Give the best Customer Experience (CX) to your prospects

Putting your customers’ needs first will always bring good business. Once you get this part covered, it will deliver benefits to your business, like increased customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and more positive reviews when it comes to word-of-mouth marketing.

Before implementing any automation for your business, try walking into your customers’ shoes and see if it answers their needs and if it leads them to your ultimate goal of making a sale.

2. Implement automation to increase productivity

As part of optimizing the customer experience, it is very important to implement features in your business that will make your customers feel prioritized with less amount of hassle on your part.

Using Arena’s features and technology like Live Chat and Live Blog where you can customize your brand’s responses to customer’s possible queries, publishing content real-time in a blog format are some automation examples that not only will it improve customer engagement but will give your customers a better walkthrough of your brand but will save you a lot of time and manpower requirements.

3. Collate data on points of interaction and customer behavior across your platform

The implementation of this strategy starts by asking the question, “At what point do my customers start inquiring and at what point do my prospects abandon the usage of my platform?”

There are tons of ways to gather these types of data and with the help of analytics, you will be able to pinpoint the instances on where you are going to focus interaction and where you are lagging for you to act. 

4. Offer personalized service

There is nothing better when customers feel that the products or services they use are meant for them.

As we have discussed earlier, customer engagement is enabling an “emotional connection” between the customer and the business with the intent of them not just continually purchasing but for them to become advocates of your product or service.

In observation of this strategy, companies like Arena help businesses ease out their operations by providing customers with Live Chat features that are easily customizable and will fit the needs of your target audience.

5. Take feedback seriously

In this day and age, we are able to deliver products and services to our customers even without seeing their faces. But that does not mean that we can slack off on resolving customer feedback, whether it is positive or otherwise. Because of this phenomenon, you must consider feedback as your friend.

There must be a reason behind customers not pushing through with the purchase. And it is our duty as marketers to identify what went wrong, in which part did we lack support, and how to further meet customer expectations. Just sending out short surveys will do.

Remember, feedback is a gift. Customers are not required to respond to our surveys but once they do, it is their message to us that there may be areas for improvement and they need to see changes. That is one characteristic of customer-centric service.

The Five Stages of Customer Engagement

Marketing practices today have changed a lot of decades before. And with similarity to a business entity, Customer Engagement also has a life cycle.

The intent of identifying the five stages of customer engagement will help businesses simplify which action plan to take and make it more manageable because not all business models are alike and customer engagement data can come from an infinite number of sources.

1. Discover

Before you get sales closures and make a lot of money, your product or service must first be heard by your potential customers. The initiatives of this stage include sending weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly newsletter of your latest offering, publishing current updates from the company, and so on.

This is basically the point where you cast your net to see which fishes will take interest in your offering.

Conceptualizing and formulating content for this stage proves to be both time-consuming and demanding of manpower, it is noteworthy though that companies like Arena offer services like Live Blog, among others, to further improve your level of customer engagement.

This stage also, is where you use analytics to track customer behavior and how they respond to every point of interaction you employ.

2. Shop

This stage will be realized once marketing efforts from the Discovery stage are effective. It indicates that your prospects are interested in your product or service and they find value in what you provide.

It is nice to know that customers visit your shop online and offline, but for us, marketers, identifying the source of that traffic is crucial to proceed to the next stage.

Once sources of traffic are identified, it is a must to push further the strategy to keep prospects coming. Afterward, evaluate both online and offline data together to further illuminate your actions as to how the customers are attracted to your platforms.

3. Buy

In this stage, marketers must be able to answer the question as to which part of the sale happens and as to which part of the sale is abandoned. Are there features to the sales process that are lacking in the platform? Are there common payment gateways that are unavailable when customers try to check out which leads to the fallout of sales?

With Arena’s Live Blog solutions, there are several ways to follow through with customers and improve customer engagement.

Using the Live Blog structure, Arena provides businesses with added tools that serve as points of interaction, retain customer attention on your page, and further allow user participation with real-time content.

Marketers must as well be ready with follow-through solutions to customers that abandon their basket and robust outbound support to address customer concerns that will eventually lead to conversion.

4. Own

In other words, retain. Perhaps this stage is one of the most misunderstood and misinformed stages on the part of the marketer. Even sophisticated marketers do not really understand the depth of importance this stage gives.

At this stage, the marketer has to identify the level of attrition – usually from first-time or first-year buyers. In this way, we will be able to fully understand the triggers that discourage first-time buyers from becoming repeat customers.

Remember, a customer’s successful purchase is also an investment on their part. If there are concerns or issues that these customers encounter in the first-year purchase, surely, they will expect the same issues to arise on their second-year purchase unless these issues are resolved immediately by the business.

5. Advocate

Proficient marketers understand that customer engagement does not end when the prospect successfully checks out their purchase. Rather, it is an ongoing cycle of continuous information to the point where customers become loyal to your brand based on the metrics of loyalty that you will set.

In time, these loyal customers shall serve as your advocates and shall be the ones to help you out in your marketing efforts because who knows the customer experience better than those actually bought?

After all the exhaustive discussion on customer engagement and the effective strategies that need to be implemented in order to level up your business this 2021, it is undoubtedly a vital aspect of your marketing practices.

But knowing that there are platforms like Arena which offers technologies like Live Chat and Live Blog, among others, is assuring how the ease of implementation from this platform presents a huge and positive impact on the growth of your business this 2021.; Try Arena for FREE now!

Marketing: why you absolutely need a Live Chat tool

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Live Chat is a tool for instant communication between a brand and its customers. Moreover, it’s a business feature that will make your company convert more visitors and offer better service.

Whether you’re involved with big retailers or small brands, a Live Chat will help you connect to your consumers in the best possible way. Real-time answers are one of the reasons customers love to make deals with companies that offer this tool.

But there’s so much more you need to know about Live Chat, especially since one of the following year’s marketing trends focuses on providing a greater customer experience.

Since we’re on the subject, both things are highly related to each other — but I’ll get into more details later on. Here, I’m also going to tell you everything to understand how to use this feature and create a positive brand perception for your business, plus how to choose the best live chat software.

Just one more thing before you learn all about acquiring a Live Chat as a marketing tool for 2021: it will only take you as far as you’re willing to put your efforts. What does this mean? It’s worth nothing to work with this type of chat if you don’t create a strategy and work to see the most beneficial results it can offer.

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The growth of Live Chat

First, let’s start with some background on this tool. As I said, it is a communication tool, and its purpose is to connect brands with their customers. The concept has been around for many years, but only recently, companies started developing modern software that actually focuses on the customer experience.

Most customers prefer to make deals with companies that offer Live Chat. It’s more practical and convenient for them to talk, ask for help or support from the brand’s attendants.

Because of its many benefits, both for the brand and the customers, this feature has grown exponentially over the last few years. Even though companies still aren’t living the tool to its full potential, the process of adaptation has started.

In fact, many companies know this feature is important, they have a solution for their brand, but they also know they aren’t using it as they should to see the impact Live Chat can have.

Statistics that prove you need a Live Chat

Since it has gained much attention, companies wanted to learn some statistics and understand how important Live Chat really is. After all, numbers and facts are big helpers to make more intelligent and assertive decisions.

After gathering data from several business and customers, these are some examples of statistics that show how Live Chat is growing and making itself a must-have solution:

  • It’s expected to grow as much as 87% in the next months
  • 46% of consumers prefer Live Chat over other communication channels
  • B2B companies saw a 20% increase in conversions after they started using Live Chat
  • This tool is 50% cheaper than phone customer support
  • 79% prefer this channel because they get faster responses

Once again, I’ll repeat that: these numbers are only true if you work to make them that way. For example, customers prefer this chat because conversations are instant and faster than other means, right? So, if your customers are to think that way, you need to make sure attendants will be available to make real-time answers happen.

Do you see what I’m saying? It’s quite simple, really. Use it right, get the results. Leave it to chance, and you’ll be losing money.

How Live Chat and Customer Experience go together

If you haven’t made the connection so far, I will make it clearer for you: Live Chat IS customer experience.

What encompasses customer experience? Mostly, it is about the entire exposure and participation a person will have with your brand. From the first contact to closing a deal, every single moment is considered inside this experience.

And how important is CX? Well, I’ll recur to the statistics here one more time and there are two thing I want to show you:

  1. 96% of consumers say they consider this to be a deciding factor to encourage them into being loyal to a brand
  2. Businesses that focus on customer experience see a revenue up to 8% higher than their competition

CX is about increasing the customer lifetime value as well. The better the experience, the more long-lasting the relationship will be. This means that customers will either buy more frequently or make bigger purchases at once. Whichever happens, each customer will be worth a lot.

You probably know this already, but maintaining a customer is less expensive than acquiring new ones. So make sure to have a proposition to create loyal consumers.

Create a positive brand perception with Live Chat

As you may have noticed, offering good service is also related to how your company is seen through the eyes of the consumers. Are they giving you compliments or complaints? Are they recommending you? Are they coming back or making unique purchases?

Additionally, tracking consumer behavior is vital to understand their connection with the brand. If you know who looked at a product page, who added to the cart and gave up, and so on, you will know what kind of strategy to use as a follow up.

As you gather data, your whole team can analyze the information and have some insights on how to improve marketing, sales, and the customer experience itself.

Why do you need a positive brand perception?

I know this is probably a somewhat foolish question, but it needs to be answered. That’s because you must understand the benefits of having a good word of mouth.

Most decisions nowadays are made based on how your company is known in the market. If people give you good reviews, you’ll have higher chances of getting new customers. However, if your reviews are bad and full of complaints, people won’t think twice before turning to your competitors.

It’s all about increasing customer retention, attraction, and loyalty.

How is this related to Live Chat?

You’ve seen above how Live Chat and CX are part of the same thing. Which means, when you give customers a good service through this feature, it will pay off in customer satisfaction.

Once you get clients to be happy with what you give them throughout interactions, they will be more likely to talk you up. In reality, 89% of consumers say they would recommend a brand after a positive experience.

Hence, your brand will start getting recognition and be more attractive to make deals with.

What to do with your Live Chat to enhance CX and brand perception?

Simply put: you need to humanize your service. Create a real connection, asking and answering questions without sound like a pre programmed machine — one of the reasons why Live Chat is surpassing chatbots too.

Of course, you can use chatbots when your agents are so busy the response time will be longer. In these cases, your can program the bot to say “hi, an agent will be available in 3 minutes, would you like to wait or can I help you in the meantime?”.

Besides, you should always ask for feedback from your conversations. When problems are resolved, ask the customer if they can help you by answering a few quick questions about the service they just got.

This is good to see what worked, what needs to improve, and to get to know your consumer better as well.

Summing up: why you need a Live Chat for 2021

Now, I just wanted to make a short list that will give you all the reasons to acquire a Live Chat for your marketing plans for 2021. That is:

  • increase customer retention
  • enhance customer engagement
  • improve your marketing strategies with proactive service
  • increase your revenue by using Live Chat for sales strategies
  • give the best customer experience
  • improve your brand image
  • increase lead conversions

How to choose the best Live Chat software

“What do I need to consider to choose a Live Chat?” is a question that may have crossed your mind. And I will tell you what you need to know.

Features

What are the features the software has? Does it offer proactive chat? Does it have visitor monitoring options? Will your customers be able to use it through mobile? This is all important to ponder when you’re choosing a Live Chat solution for your business.

You shouldn’t go with the software that has more features. It’s necessary to check their quality and make your decision based on real facts.

Security

Will your information be safe inside this software? What about data from your customers? The last thing you want is a data leakage incident.

Make sure to be hiring a trustable Live Chat system.

Support

Since this tool is likely to suffer updates and renewals along time, you might encounter some difficulties to use it. Will there be a support team to answer your questions when that happens?

It’s very important to receive support. If they keep you waiting, it means you’ll be keeping your own customers waiting. And we don’t want that, do we?

Pricing

I wouldn’t say the price itself is the most important factor, but the cost benefit your chosen system has. Is it worth its price? How long will it take for the tool to “pay itself”? What’s the ROI for the software?

Have these questions answered, even if through projection, and put it to weight on your decision.

Customization

Not everyone takes this into consideration, but I find it crucial. Will you be able to put your own twist on the looks of the chat? Personalize colors? Use logo and create agent profiles?

Remember to learn more about this element before making your final decision. Keeping your brand’s image and visual identity on the chat is a matter of consistency.

Reports

Is the software you have your eye on checking all of these items? Here’s one more you need to rock off: team productivity reports.

To understand how your service is going, what needs to be done and who needs more training can be read in monthly reports the Live Chat system can offer you.

That is, considering the software you chose actually offers this feature.

How about you give a chance to Arena Live Chat?

At Arena, we can offer you everything that has been talked about and even more. To learn more about our solutions, simply go to our products page.

However, if you are already interested and ready to start reaping our Live Chat’s benefits, go ahead and start your free trial period. You’ll have up to 14 days to learn all about our tool, how to use it, and see how fundamental it is to your business.

14 Ways Live Chat a Customer Service Game-Changer

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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.

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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!

The Future of Customer Experience

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The first Arena Customer Experience and Data Live Event is happening soon! Arena GO will introduce you to the tools that connect all user data dots to create world-class customer experiences.

The Future of Customer Experience

In the digital era, capturing and owning the right data is the recipe for success. Business solutions must be integrated and condensed in a single touchpoint, instead of being pulverized and lacking coherence. A-list services platforms, such as Arena, understand the importance of guiding strategies throughout the entire customer journey.

This unique 360º view of the user allows the brand to follow the customer along the entire buyer’s journey, from lead acquisition to purchase, until post-sales services. That’s because Arena provides the right tools to create a data driven and highly personalized customer experience.

At Arena GO you will explore our real-time customer experience data platform, discover our tools, and link them to serve relevant, meaningful, and engaging content.

You will be able to create an environment with powerful triggers to achieve your purposes, whether it is a purchase, a new subscription, or whatever else you need.

Learn how to explore real-time possibilities better, and exceed your customers’ expectations. 

At Arena Go, We will walk you through product demos and use cases to give you a glimpse of the future of customer engagement.

Customer Experience

What does your audience want? Why do they want it? How? When? If key-questions like those aren’t guiding you through your CX strategy, the odds of failure are higher.

That is because you are not building a connected experience for your customer. Although, when you count on tools, such as Customer Data Platform (CDP), that provide you high-quality data analysis, you can tailor each stage of the strategy based on real demands and information.

Customer Data Platform (CDP)

A strategy that is not data-oriented can’t really be called “strategy”. 

Having Arena’s Customer Data Platform (CDP), a unified data source that gathers all your touchpoints in a single place, will offer you the most reliable insights to build up a killer strategy for your audience.

Besides gathering the data, Arena’s CDP analyses it and creates organized clusters of customers with matching information. As a result, you will have much more depth of knowledge about your customer. It will feel like you are looking at a picture of them to truly understand their needs.

Live Chat

As we have said before, using real-time solutions is the way to exceed customers’ expectations. So, having Arena’s Live Chat allows you to engage in real-time with the audience while they are browsing on your website. That will enable you to create meaningful approaches, increasing the value of your customer’s experience.

Whether it is a reactive contact (which is when the customer looks up to you when they need something; to get a question answered, to get more information, etc.); or a proactive one (when your team approaches the audience to offer something able to raise the value of that browsing moment) Live Chat can be the most strategic and successful way to do it.

Live Blog

Still following the steps of creating meaningful real-time engagement, Live Blog is the answer companies needed to increase browsing time.

Through Arena’s Live Blog, you can create live coverage of an event, display updated news, use text, audio, video, and extra-sources. All on a single screen!

Your audience won’t need to look up for updates on other pages or keep refreshing the website to check if there is anything new. Also, using Arena’s Live Blog, the audience will be able to simultaneously engage that content on their social media pages without shifting tabs and bouncing off of you.

Rogers Media increased engagement by 64% using Arena

One of the world’s largest communications and media companies, the Canadian Rogers, was looking for a smarter and more efficient way to make their audience engage with their content and, thereafter, increase retention. They needed straightforward ways to integrate other tools used by more than 50 teams. 

Combining the power of the Live Chat, Live Blog, and the Content Wall to cover real-time events, Rogers was able to promote users’ interactions in their multiple domain channels. At Sportsnet, for example, Arena’s Live Blog covered all the matches with exclusive content, and Live Chat enabled fans to engage with passionate discussions during the games.

As a result, Arena helped Rogers to increase their engagement by 64%, and retention by 28%. Besides, their ROI skyrocketed, increasing the numbers of new subscriptions, app downloads, and advertisement revenue.

Globo brings real-time coverage to the next level with the NBA 

The second-largest commercial TV network in the world, Globo TV was a pioneer by adopting two of Arena’s Customer Experience solutions to broadcast the NBA Live finals. Globo was looking for fresh and real-time alternatives to provide relevant and valuable content to their audience.

By using Arena’s Live Blog to cover NBA Live matches play-by-play, with Arena’s Live Chat to create an environment of enriched engagements, Globo had audience peaks of tens of thousands of users simultaneously. 

Arena helped Globo understand the importance of delivering dynamic and interactive content for such an amazing event, during all the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, which was the key to a successful strategy.

Providing multimedia content and an innovative experience paid off well for Globo. Their user engagement had amazing growth, as well as the time the audience spent on their domains and the higher ROI.

Tecmundo covered Amazon Prime Day and boosted engagement

One of Brazil’s most popular technology websites, Tecmundo, combined Arena’s solution to bring massive traffic to their page and increase revenue during Amazon Prime Day. 

Creating a unique environment, what Tecmundo did was pretty much comparable to a real store during Black Friday season: it had customer interactions, conversations, and lots of sales. 

Prime Day is the most profitable day of the year for eCommerce. On that day, Tecmundo created a hot site to cover Amazon’s best deals in real-time using Arena’s Live Blog. To stimulate users’ engagement, they also had Arena’s Live Chat. 

The audience could get the offers while they had ongoing discussions about them, the products, and providing honest customer reviews. 

The complete solution made by Arena to Tecmundo also used the Customer Data Platform (CDP). As a result, they gathered data from different touchpoints, enabling companies to find out where their potential customers were. By doing that, a more assertive approach was made and better deals were closed.

Arena GO

To dive into the possibilities of Arena’s real-time customer experience and data platform, Arena GO is an open event to walk you through the construction of consistent and effective customer engagement strategies.

31 Live Chat Black Friday statistics you must see

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Live Chat is becoming one of the most powerful tools for online customer service. If your eCommerce is still not using it, you might want to take a closer look at your strategy.

With Black Friday right around the corner, businesses are looking for new methods to make them a crowd favorite. In other words, they want to get all the attention, increase their conversions, and make peers “eat dust.”

To make this happen, they are betting big on live chat tools. With them, communication becomes easier and more accessible to consumers. They can use it while also performing other tasks and the conversation with an actual person makes live chats a customer preference.

Of course, these are only two among many other aspects that make this type of chat so popular. However, even though it has grown over the years, most companies still use it mainly for customer support. However, it goes way beyond that. Live Chat can also be used for marketing and sales.

How Live Chat can impact your business

That being said, you can already imagine how it will impact your entire company. If you use it the right way, you’ll see results coming quickly.

Nonetheless, it’s more than increasing sales and revenue, a Live Chat is a tool to assist in building your brand in the market. For instance, you can add value to your product and brand by having a personalized conversation.

People don’t want scripted messages that make you sound like a robot. That’s the whole point of acquiring this tool: bring a human agent to the formula.

Moreover, a Live Chat will show you a wide variety of benefits and it can indeed improve your business outcomes. 

We can prove it:

Live Chat statistics you need to know

Is there something that makes us more convinced than numbers and facts? 

For this reason, we brought here some of the main Live Chat statistics that will show you just how important it is.

Customer support and satisfaction

Since customer support is one of the main reasons companies acquire this tool, let’s start by evaluating some data on it. In addition, we’ll be looking into customer satisfaction levels as well.

  • While emails get 61% of customer satisfied, and phone support 44%, the Live Chat gets up to 73% of customers satisfied.
  • 63% of customers said they are more likely to return to a website if Live Chat is available.
  • 83.1% is the average customer satisfaction rate globally with Live Chat.

Even more than that, when asked what about Live Chat that made them so pleased with the service

  • 79% of customers said they like this type of chat because of the instant messages
  • 51% said it was because they can multitask
  • 46% affirmed it’s the most efficient method for support and overall online services

Lead generation & Conversion rates

Brands can use live chats with the purpose of increasing their conversions. As a matter of fact, with Black Friday getting closer, it has been brought up as a strategy eCommerce should use to improve their businesses.

So, what do researchers say about the topic? First of all:

  • The dominant number here is 40%, which is the increase in conversions a brand can have by using Live Chat

Then, we have some info on lead generation that is super valuable:

  • Even if a customer doesn’t use the live chat feature right away, 63% of them are more likely to return to the website because of it
  • Proactive chats, initiated by the company, had an optimistic result of 94% of customers satisfied with the experience
  • From all consumers that had a live chat session, 38% of them purchased because of the conversation they had
  • In general, 85% is the average possibility of chatters becoming customers. This means that from each visitor that uses your Live Chat solution, they are 85% more likely to buy something than the ones who don’t have a session

Customer experience and engagement

When it comes to customer experience, we can imagine that it will be good once we’ve seen how satisfied most people are with the Live Chat feature. Still, there are numbers related to this matter that are quite impressive too:

  • In order to have a better CX, 80% of consumers said they would pay more for a product
  • On the same note, 49% of customers already experience bad CX and decided to change companies because of it

What about customer engagement? What does that even mean when we’re talking about live chat? Well, it’s mostly an expression to elucidate the expectation of the consumer regarding the relationship (and experience) they will have. 

For example:

  • You should always offer a service with sales reps since 40% of customers want the help of someone to attend their needs faster than they would do it alone

Moreover, some facts that you should know on the subject are that:

  • The main reason for customers to change brands while making a purchase is because of service-related problems
  • On average, when customers are pleased with your service, they share a positive experience with about 11 people 

Revenue stats

Obviously, while live chat increases conversions, it also has an impact on your business’s revenue. This is what we’re talking about:

  • A 48% increase in revenue can happen per chat hour
  • Companies that offer live chats are more likely to have returning customers, in fact, 51% of consumers said they would come back to repurchase when an eCommerce offers this feature

In addition, you should also have an idea of how many businesses are using live chat for sales purposes, and that is:

  • Most B2B businesses, a total of 85%, use this tool for sales
  • In a similar statistic, but regarding B2C businesses, 74% of these use live chat for sales

Furthermore, Live Chat is mainly used for customer support: 

  • 66% of B2B businesses use it for this reason
  • 67% of B2C companies have Live Chat for supporting customers

Response time

It’s common to see response time as a benefit and/or differential of the Live Chat, so we had to bring some statistics about this issue too. Curiously, response time is not the preference of most customers. Check this out:

  • While you might think that fast answers are a must, 95% of customers said they prefer high-quality service over speed
  • At the same time, 59% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when they get answered in under 1 minute

This information is really useful so you can come up with a Live Chat strategy for your company. And here are two more to complement your data:

  • Long waits make 24% of customers frustrated
  • There is a number of chats that end up unanswered when customer-initiated, a total of 16%, and the reasons for abandonment can vary from a long wait to a bad customer service

Live Chat vs. Chatbot

With the rise of live chats operated by human agents, a “war” seems to have started between this eCommerce feature and the already popular chatbots. Both tools are used for the same purposes. The main difference is the one we’re mentioning here: you talk directly to a real person in a live chat.

To help you make a decision between live chat and chatbot, here are some facts:

  • 67% of customers have already used a chatbot to get customer support in an eCommerce
  • Up to 80% of routine questions (that is, questions that are frequently asked by customers) can be answered by a chatbot

Additionally, some chatbots are built with AI technology. This means the more they attend clients, the more they will learn and perform better. They are also easily scalable, can answer multiple customers instantly and at once. Overall, they deliver a great customer experience.

On the other hand:

  • Many consumers prefer to be attended by live agents than by a chatbot, even if they are AI bots. The magic number: 70% of customers said they like a Live Chat better

That says a lot, right? Even though businesses can reduce their costs by around 30% with a chatbot, Live Chat is a tool that will give you a competitive advantage. Moreover, Live Chat is a low-cost solution and the ROI is excellent.

The future of Live Chat

According to these facts and statistics, it’s possible to notice some trends and understand how Live Chat will grow and be used from now on. In 2020, we can already see that:

  • 85% of customer support activity happens without a human agent, in other words, through chatbots
  • However, 71% of businesses believe that Live Chat will become the main channel of communication by 2021

Further on, an interesting fact is that:

  • 62% of customers expect live chat for mobile, which means that this feature will most likely be optimized for that

In addition, nowadays the results are great, proof of that is:

  • After one year of using Live Chat, 43% of businesses said they had a better understanding of their consumer
  • Meanwhile, 79% of businesses reported they had positive influences on sales, revenue, and customer loyalty because of the Live Chat tool

We can conclude that this tool is more than a simple feature, it’s a powerful weapon to make your eCommerce thrive by increasing conversions and revenue through live conversations.

Biggest trends for 2020 Black Friday

The year 2020 came with a huge impact on the business model of many retail stores. Because of the pandemic, eCommerce became even more popular, and not only people but several brands had to adapt to this “new normal” situation.

Now that Black Friday is near, everyone’s started to wonder how things would work this year.

All in all, there are some trends this year that might not have gained attention previously, but the truth is, eCommerce has been a huge hit on Black Friday for a few years. The difference now is that there are more people going online for their purchases, so there’s the need to offer better customer service and experience.

That’s why the first trend we’re talking about here is the attention to the customer journey. On average, people start to search for products and offers about 6 weeks before Black Friday day itself.

So, that’s also about the time you should start presenting campaigns and special offers to make the customer start their journey early and work their decision to purchase throughout this time.

Because of that, it’s also expected that sales will start earlier this year as well as they will last longer. Some brands are thinking about starting right after Halloween, but there are some planning to launch campaigns even prior to that. 

It’s really up to each strategy and how your company will work to achieve goals for the Black Friday event.

Still in that matter, stores are thinking about longer sales. But what does that mean?

Since retailers will have an early start, there’s no reason to end offers before the day of Black Friday, unless products go out of stock. Thus, we will see products on sale for a longer period of time.

However, something that is likely to happen a lot this year are flash sales. In other words, it’s a type of sale where companies offer a limited special offer for their consumers. A notification is sent a few days ahead and people can only buy during a shorter period of time.

Remember when we said 62% of customers expect Live Chat to be optimized for mobile?

Well, on the same note, customers mainly do their online shopping through mobile. For that reason, many brands are adopting mobile-only offers. That is, communicate offers and deals through SMS or notifications, for example, allowing consumers to buy straight from the link you sent.

An incentive some brands are working on this year is free shipping. Since many people suffered a negative economic impact due to the pandemic, it might be a necessary provocation to make them buy during the Black Friday period. Therefore, free shipping costs are being highly adopted this year.

Get ready for Black Friday with a Live Chat

All of Black Friday trends can do even better if you use a live chat tool on your website. You can use it to proactively answer customers’ questions, initiating the chat with an offer they can’t miss.

If you want to help your eCommerce achieve its goals, this is the way to go. Increase your conversions by acquiring the Arena Live Chat – you can try it for free NOW!

Ecommerce Customer Experience: how to optimize it

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A good eCommerce customer experience offers much more than just speed and ease: it fits customers’ preferences to increase their lifetime value and keep your churn rate low.

It’s no secret that people are shopping online more and more. With social distancing, the average customer profile has evolved and adapted to navigate and make eCommerce purchases.

Ecommerce has been a key channel in retail, marketing, and sales operations, to the point it globally represents three-quarters of the overall retail growth. According to Statista, eCommerce sales are supposed to reach almost $604 billion in 2021.

Whether eCommerce sales are made overseas or regionally, one thing is true: The customer is at its center, and offering an at-least-good customer experience is a basic requirement.

Still, that is not what we usually see these days. Regrettably, it is very common to find bad eCommerce customer experiences, such as buggy checkout processes.

Well, that’s no laughing matter. Losing a customer in the checkout process means you’re saying goodbye to the most concrete revenue you might be able to get.

Why is eCommerce customer experience so important?

Owning an inventory and simply selling it isn’t enough, especially in the competitive market we witness today. Products and services aren’t differentiators anymore—but good eCommerce customer experience is.

An eCommerce experience refers to the quality of the interactions customers have in digital stores.

To achieve acceptable levels of quality, the user interaction should match customers’ expectations and provide them with fantastic eCommerce customer experience—there is where its importance lies.

Customer experience decides if you’re selling or not—literally—when it comes to eCommerce. 

The following statistics, provided by CX Central, make it clear:

  • After going through a poor experience, 89% of customers say they have stopped buying from a brand
  • Customer experience is overtaking price and products as a key brand differentiator
  • Eighty-six percent (86%) of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience
  • In general, 61% of people have a better opinion of brands when they offer an excellent mobile experience
  • Around 25% of online shoppers leave the website without paying if they find the website navigation too complicated

As you can see, offering a bad eCommerce customer experience is the way to chaos. Simultaneously, a good eCommerce customer experience is the way to customer engagement.

But how can you avoid being in the bad eCommerce statistics?

Keep in mind that every and each eCommerce operation should be built considering how the customer feels throughout the buying journey. 

If customers feel bad about your brand while on your eCommerce, they won’t hesitate to open a new tab and search for your competitor quickly. Competition is a few clicks away.

This means you have to offer a seamless, intuitive, eCommerce customer experience.

What makes a good eCommerce customer experience?

A good eCommerce customer experience should allow your customers to move through your online shop with speed and ease while matching their personal preferences.

This might differ from customer to customer – that’s why it is important to know them deeply.

In case you’re in doubt whether you’re offering a great eCommerce customer experience or not, there are a few KPIs that can help you get your answers.

We know a large portion of customers abandon the cart because that’s how they browse eCommerce. 

Still, according to Baymard, the main reasons for cart abandonment during checkouts are too high extra costs (50%), eCommerce demanding customers to create an account (28%), and too long checkout processes (21%). 

Another interesting statistic is that customer retention in eCommerce is 5X cheaper than acquisition. 

This suggests that keeping your customers and increasing their Lifetime Value (LTV) is a great way to keep ROI coming back to you. If your customer LTV is good, you might want to keep it high to benefit from consumers’ engagement.

With this in mind, we’ll move forward to some eCommerce customer experience trends that are extremely promising for the upcoming months.

1 – Personalization

You wants your customers to feel like you care about them, right? 

The best way to ensure them you do is to offer them interactions that match their context.

By basing its campaigns on factual data, eCommerce can deliver highly personalized and relevant offers to customers throughout their lifecycle and buying journey.

This means more accurate product suggestions, tailored loyalty points, smart follow-up emails, and more, to guide your customers more easily in the journey.

Please pay attention to the fact 71% of consumers express some level of frustration when their shopping experience is impersonal. On the other hand, 80% of them are more likely to buy from brands that offer customized experiences.

Tailoring a specific eCommerce customer experience based on customer data is no longer a futuristic idea. It is here, and people are demanding it.

2 – Flexibility

Customers expect to buy from anywhere at any time. This means providing them with:

  • A wide variety of paying methods on the checkout page
  • Search bars so customers can quickly find products they’re looking for
  • A small number of input fields in the checkout process
  • Fair price policies that don’t scare buyers away

Are these all? In fair honesty, they aren’t. Granting your customers with flexibility goes much further, and it starts with understanding what their preferences and hopes are.

The omnichannel market, for example, is growing at an impressive speed due to customers’ need to create deeper connections with brands as fast as they need to.

Whether customers want to shop online or to go in-store and have their package sent to their houses, omnichannel embraces countless opportunities across digital platforms and physical operations to deliver customized customer experiences.

This creates a competitive advantage and levels your eCommerce customer experience up.

3 – Human connection

The average Americans see from 4,000 to 10,000 ads daily. This massive advertising has contributed to making customers feel overwhelmed and make them harder to reach effectively.

When getting involved with brands, customers need to understand root-causes to allow an emotional connection. 

This isn’t something that paid ads can tell them, so eCommerce needs to take a step back and focus on organic storytelling techniques.

By focusing their attention on unique, personal brand experiences, businesses can upgrade their marketing campaigns and shopping journeys to build an outstanding eCommerce customer experience.

How does that affect your eCommerce directly? Well, this is a fantastic opportunity to use videos and live content to tell your story in an appealing way to attract and retain customers.

This is also a sign you should focus on more effective human support. 

For example, as much as people don’t mind being served by chatbots, 73% of customers still love being supported by friendly representatives who provide excellent service.

4 – Convenience

Convenience is the key to a good eCommerce customer experience, so fast and free shipping is about to become a brand differentiator.

Hitches and slowness aren’t allowed anymore and might push the demanding, time-sensitive customer away.

Let’s say your marketing team has invested time and money in delivering a campaign to attract customers to a unique sales promotion.

However, as soon as the customers engaged with your campaign get to your eCommerce, they catch themselves face to face with slow loading times, confusing pages, and unclear product descriptions.

Let’s also imagine that, as soon as customers put the products in the cart, the price previously exposed to your eCommerce suddenly increases.

Bad news: You have just wasted all the money your company invested in an effective acquisition campaign.

Studies say 14% of customers percent will begin shopping at another site when waiting for a page to load. Imagine how negatively this can affect your churn and conversion rates.

By neglecting convenience, there is a high chance your metrics towards digital initiatives might not perform the way you’re expecting them to and indicate opportunities you’re losing in the business.

Ways to improve eCommerce customer experience

There are many ways to improve your eCommerce customer experience once you decide to invest in meaningful customer-centric experiences.

One thing is universal for picking and implementing the right technologies to optimize your eCommerce customer experience: your improvements must be data-based.

This means every page and feature on your eCommerce should rely on vital customer information, such as what type of interaction your consumers prefer depending on the journey stage they’re at.

For example, have you ever considered developing a solution that allows your customers to buy from you while driving? Or delivering your products to consumers’ vehicles and other appliances?

Perhaps one of the above might make huge sense and generate even more value to your customers. But you’ll only know for certain if you rely on trustworthy customer data.

This is such a trend that customers will agree to sell their information to brands they choose. 

Whether it is their in-store movements, their location, or online browsing, customers are aware data access is essential to create personal experiences—and they’re counting on you to use it wisely to reward them with the best eCommerce experience ever.

Many eCommerce leaders and professionals worldwide have been doing that and benefiting from Customer Data Platform outcomes to personalize and elevate their eCommerce customer experience.

Improving your eCommerce customer experience with a real-time engagement platform

In the process of improving your eCommerce customer experience, you should strongly consider a few tools to help you build the best user experience.

Arena’s real-time engagement platform is the choice for you. It is equipped with Live Blog and Live Chat that can easily be embedded into your eCommerce to generate leads, increase engagement, and boost your revenue.

Keep reading to find out how both tools can optimize your eCommerce customer experience. We highly recommend checking out how Shoply leverages Arena for their Live Shopping experience.

Live Blog for eCommerce

A Live Blog is a new way to blog that embraces live content to a real-time audience.

When you live Blog, you combine different post formats and sources to create a refreshing coverage feed with the latest news towards an important event in your field. 

Live Blogs are huge in many sectors, such as sports, elections, protests, and conferences. However, these powerful engagement platforms can do much more, especially when we bring your eCommerce to the scenery.

Could you Live Blog a product launch? Sure! Could you live Blog a new promotional sale? Yes! Could you live Blog a special gathering for your loyal top-level clients? Absolutely.

Live Blogs transcend the way blogs have been building content over the years and should be adopted by eCommerce’s that care about the content they’re providing customers with.

Live Group Chat for eCommerce

Have you ever considered working on your eCommerce to embed tools that promote customer real-time interactions 24/7?

Live Chat Groups are an amazing option to achieve that!

As the name suggests, Live Chat Groups are chats that can easily be implemented on eCommerce to allow real-time conversations between your customers and representatives and your customers alone.

By implementing one on your eCommerce, you allow new types of interaction that add on more credibility to your pages and don’t make your customers wait for a response when customers reach out for you.

Live Chats have been used by support and sales teams for years, but now marketers have opened their eyes to its potential to engage and offer excellent customer experiences.

The advantages of Live Chat Groups are:

  • Availability: Consumers want businesses to be available 24/7, and Live Chat Groups are always there to prevent your customers from waiting for a response
  • Support: Sales representatives use Live Chat Groups to give customers great support, whether they’re in the checkout process or in doubt about a specific product
  • Real-time engagement: Replying quickly to customers should spare you the chance to leave them without an answer and lose them to other eCommerce on your field
  • Lead generation: Want a fast, simple tool that collects customer data and lets you smoothly guide shoppers through the customer journey? Live Chat is the answer!

As you read, consumers are expecting your next eCommerce customer experience move

We know how fast you need to implement changes that will give you quick and remarkable results. 

That is why we have decided to let you download our engagement platform for free and get started as soon as you want!

Start now and add Live Chat and Live Blog to boost your eCommerce customer experience!

Which one is best for your business?

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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.

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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!