Tag Archives: Customer feedback

What Is Customer Lifecycle Management? 2024 Guide

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What Is Customer Lifecycle Management?

Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) is the process of tracking and managing each phase of a customer’s interaction with a business.

It starts from awareness and continues through to purchase and loyalty.

Businesses assign metrics to each stage and analyze these metrics to measure performance.

This helps them understand how well they are meeting customer needs.

Key Stages of CLM

  1. Awareness: Customers first become aware of a product or service.
  2. Consideration: Customers evaluate options and compare solutions.
  3. Purchase: Customers decide to buy a product or service.
  4. Retention: Ensuring customers remain satisfied and continue to use the service.
  5. Loyalty: Building a strong, ongoing relationship with customers.

Benefits of CLM

  • Improved Customer Retention: By understanding each stage, businesses can better meet customer needs, leading to higher customer retention rates.
  • Increased Revenue: Tracking and optimizing each stage can lead to more successful sales and marketing strategies.
  • Data-Driven Decisions: Businesses can make informed decisions based on metrics collected throughout the lifecycle.

Tools for CLM

  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: CRM tools help manage interactions with current and potential customers. For a detailed guide on CRM systems, visit HubSpot’s CRM Guide.
  • Marketing Automation Software: These tools streamline marketing efforts, making it easier to target customers at different lifecycle stages.

Many companies use customer lifecycle marketing to personalize their approach and enhance customer experiences. This integration helps create a seamless journey from discovery to loyalty.

How Can Customer Lifecycle Management Improve Your Online Store Metrics?

Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) can significantly impact your online store performance by improving key metrics such as conversion rates and customer retention. Implementing effective strategies can lead to increased revenue and business growth.

What Metrics Should You Focus On?

Conversion Rate: This metric measures the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase. By tracking the customer lifecycle from awareness to loyalty, you can optimize each stage of the sales funnel.

Customer Retention: Keeping existing customers can be more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Focus on retention metrics to maximize lifetime value (CLV) and enhance profitability.

Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measure the effectiveness of your ads and email campaigns. A high CTR can indicate that your marketing strategy resonates with your target audience.

How Do You Implement Effective Strategies?

Developing effective CLM strategies involves a mix of target audience analysis, relevant content creation, and leveraging technology. Use social media platforms and SEO to boost your online presence.

Target Audience Analysis: Understand the needs and behaviors of your ideal customer. This can help tailor your marketing message to meet their specific goals and incentives, leading to more effective ad campaigns and promotions.

Technology: Employing tools like customer lifecycle management software can streamline your efforts. Tools such as EngageBay are useful for CRM, email marketing, and lead generation.

Content Creation: Produce relevant content that engages different stages of the customer lifecycle. This can improve retention and loyalty metrics by continuously providing value.

By focusing on these key metrics and strategies, businesses can effectively enhance their online store performance and ensure sustainable growth.

What Are The Key Stages In Customer Lifecycle Management?

Customer lifecycle management includes several crucial stages that help businesses build strong relationships with their customers. These stages ensure that a customer’s journey is smooth, from initial contact to retention and advocacy.

What Is The Acquisition Stage?

The acquisition stage focuses on attracting new customers. This involves creating awareness about the brand through marketing efforts such as advertisements, social media campaigns, and referral programs. Businesses aim to reach potential customers and persuade them to make their first purchase. Effective acquisition strategies can significantly enhance customer lifetime value.

During this stage, companies analyze data to understand what attracts customers. They use this information to optimize their marketing campaigns. An important metric to track in this phase is the cost per acquisition (CPA), which helps businesses measure the efficiency of their marketing spend.

What Is The Retention Stage?

The retention stage is about keeping existing customers engaged and satisfied. After the initial purchase, businesses aim to build loyalty through exceptional service, loyalty programs, and consistent communication. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat buyers, increasing their lifetime value and contributing to long-term success.

Customer satisfaction and loyalty are key metrics in this stage. Tools such as customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and customer retention rates help businesses assess their performance. Implementing feedback loops allows for continuous improvement and ensures that customers feel valued and heard. By focusing on retention, companies can reduce churn and foster brand loyalty.

How To Analyze Customer Behavior?

Analyzing customer behavior involves using various tools and focusing on key data points to understand how customers interact with a business. It’s essential for improving customer experience and making informed business decisions.

What Tools Should You Use?

To analyze customer behavior, businesses should employ a combination of analytics platforms, CRM systems, and customer feedback tools.

Analytics platforms such as Google Analytics track website interactions, giving insights into how visitors navigate and what content holds their interest. CRM systems gather data from various touchpoints, creating detailed customer profiles and tracking engagement across the customer journey. Customer feedback tools, like surveys and online reviews, provide direct insights into customer experiences and expectations.

Using these tools collaboratively can help businesses create a comprehensive customer journey map, highlighting pain points and opportunities for improvement. They facilitate personalized recommendations and targeted marketing efforts, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Which Data Points Are Most Important?

When analyzing customer behavior, several data points are crucial for gaining valuable insights.

Demographic information helps in segmenting customers and tailoring personalized marketing strategies. Behavioral data, such as pages visited, time spent on the website, and products viewed, provides insights into customer interests and desires. Transaction history reveals purchasing patterns and preferences, guiding inventory management and product recommendations.

Customer feedback is vital for understanding customer satisfaction and identifying areas needing improvement. Engagement metrics, including email open rates and social media interactions, show how well marketing efforts resonate with the audience.

Customer journey maps help visualize all interactions and events, recognizing key touchpoints and stages in the customer lifecycle map. By analyzing these data points, businesses can make well-informed decisions to meet and exceed customer expectations, resulting in a better overall customer experience.

What Are Common Mistakes To Avoid In Customer Lifecycle Management?

Customer lifecycle management involves tracking customer interactions and improving their experience. Avoiding common mistakes can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What Are Examples Of Ineffective Strategies?

One major mistake is neglecting to use proactive customer service. Relying solely on reactive measures can lead to customer churn. Instead, businesses should anticipate issues and offer solutions before customers face problems.

Failing to personalize customer interactions is another error. Using generic messages instead of tailored recommendations can alienate loyal customers. Companies should leverage data to provide relevant content and exclusive offers.

Ignoring self-service tools is also a common pitfall. Many customers prefer to resolve issues on their own using FAQs, tutorials, or live chat support. Not offering these options can frustrate customers and increase support costs.

How Do You Identify And Rectify Mistakes?

Identifying mistakes involves regularly analyzing customer feedback and interaction data. Tools like surveys and support tickets can reveal pain points. Monitoring these metrics helps pinpoint areas needing improvement.

Rectifying these errors requires implementing best practices. For instance, introducing proactive support efforts or enhancing self-service tools can mitigate issues. Offering exclusive offers and personalized discounts can also improve customer relationships.

Engaging in consistent competitor analysis ensures that your strategies remain competitive. Observing how competitors handle customer lifecycle management can provide insights into effective practices and areas of improvement.

Frequently Asked Questions

This section addresses common inquiries about Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM), outlining key differences with CRM, stages involved, practical examples of implementation, and importance for strategy.

How does customer lifecycle management differ from customer relationship management?

Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) focuses on the entire journey of the customer, from awareness to advocacy. Unlike Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which mainly handles the ongoing relationship and interactions, CLM tracks and optimizes each stage of the customer journey to improve satisfaction and retention. For more details, visit Customer Lifecycle Management.

What are the primary stages involved in the customer lifecycle?

The customer lifecycle usually includes five stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Advocacy. Each stage represents a different phase of the customer’s interaction with a business. Managing these stages effectively can help in increasing customer loyalty and encouraging repeat business.

Can you provide examples of how businesses implement customer lifecycle management?

Businesses implement CLM using various strategies like personalized marketing campaigns, automated email sequences, and customer feedback systems. For instance, a company might use customer lifecycle software to automate and track interactions, making it easier to provide tailored experiences at each stage.

Why is understanding the customer lifecycle important for business strategy?

Understanding the customer lifecycle allows businesses to tailor their marketing, sales, and support strategies to better meet customer needs at each stage. This comprehensive approach can lead to higher customer satisfaction and increased loyalty, which is crucial for long-term success.

What strategies are effective for managing customers throughout their lifecycle?

Effective strategies for managing the customer lifecycle include personalized communication, targeted promotions, and data-driven insights. Offering excellent customer service at each touchpoint and regularly evaluating the effectiveness of strategies can significantly enhance customer experience and retention.

How is customer lifecycle management adapted for the banking industry?

In the banking industry, CLM involves personalized financial advice, tailored loan offerings, and proactive support services. Banks may use customer lifecycle management to track customer interactions and provide timely, relevant services to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Live Chat Metrics And KPIs to Improve Customer Service

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Want better customer satisfaction and loyalty? Use these ten metrics to optimize your live chat support experience.

Monitoring and optimizing the following ten live chat metrics is an important step to improve your live chat performance. Use these customer support metrics to identify opportunities to improve the quantity and quality of your customer service.

How Live Chat Increases Opportunities

When customers land on your website, they probably have questions and concerns about doing business with you. When a question or worry pops into potential customers’ minds, you can connect with the potential buyer. While static website content like product descriptions and other pages lay a great foundation, there’s no replacement for having a conversation.

Once those conversations start flowing, measuring live chat performance is crucial. Also known as live chat performance metrics, metrics are essential for management. Regularly reviewing metrics will tell you where additional training or resources are needed to reach your goals.

With Live Chat, your employees can easily interact with your customers at scale while providing a personalized experience. That means you get greater customer loyalty. A high customer satisfaction rate means more return buyers and a positive impact on sales.

Two Ways To Use Generative AI To Improve Live Chat Effectiveness

Traditional methods to improve live chat KPIs or metrics are the foundation of your success. Agents need the right tools and training to carry out their work. Management needs good data to support their teams. After you have that foundation, generative AI tools (think chatGPT but business focused) can help.

1. Answer routine questions based on a knowledge base.

Do you have a knowledge base or a section of your website with frequently asked questions (FAQ)?

If so, generative AI tech can use that resource to provide company-specific responses to customers. This type of focused generative AI is developing, so now is a great time to investigate it for your business.

2. Provide product recommendations

Your live chat KPIs might emphasize customer support metrics. What if you could use live chat to improve revenue directly? That’s an exciting possibility with generative AI.

For example, add a live chat window to a product page and use it to provide specific product recommendations. This capability works well with products with straightforward, easy-to-describe differences (e.g., different types of TV have different sizes, resolution, and other features).

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

Ten Live Chat Metrics To Watch & How To Improve Each One!

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Live chat metrics are only meaningful if they support your business goals. For example, you may aim to improve the effectiveness of your customer service agents by decreasing the average wait time by equipping your team with canned responses to common questions.

When you first start offering live chat, pick a few metrics to measure your performance. After those initial metrics are well integrated into your team, you can continue developing your systems by adding additional metrics to realize your chat strategy.

1. First Response Time (FRT) Live Chat Metric

The first live chat metric focuses on measuring the response speed. In brief, you measure how long your chat agents take to respond to a customer’s first message.

The FRP metric is critically important to impact your customers positively. A fast response tells your customers that you value their time. On the other hand, keeping a customer waiting for a long time is likely to hurt customer loyalty and word of mouth.

The first response time metric is also helpful for management. If FRT responsiveness decreases over time, it may signal that you need more chat agents. It may also indicate that your chat support teams need more support in the form of playbooks, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and other resources.

The average First Time Response is 15 minutes so you can use this timing as a starting point for your organization. In general, the lower this number, the better the customers’ satisfaction with the service. If the response takes more than the average, it will likely cause frustration and negative referrals.

Ways To Improve The FRP Metric

Tracking live chat key metrics becomes truly valuable when you use this data to improve performance. Use these tips to improve your live chat performance over time.

  • Share FRP Metric Widely

Empower your employees by sharing FRP metrics widely and discussing them at each chat team meeting. Sharing live chat performance metrics with your team will help them become more innovative in improving the customer experience.

  • Investigate FRP Metric Changes With An Open Mind

The FRP metric is helpful, but it has limitations. Like other chat customer service metrics, this measure doesn’t show the root cause of problems. Start by investigating technology problems that are interfering with service standards. In addition, chat responsiveness may suffer during periods of high volumes.

2. Total Number Of Chat Sessions Live Chat Metric

This live chat performance indicator is a volume measurement. It shows the number of live chat sessions that have been launched. Compared to other metrics for live chat, it is also relatively easy to track automatically. Tracking this metric is helpful over time; it shows the popularity of live chat for service vs. other customer service options like phone and email.

Ways To Improve The Total Volume of Chat Sessions Metric

Use the following metrics to get business value from this live chat metric.

  • Look For Sharp, Sudden Drops In This Metric

A significant drop in the live metric is a warning sign that something is going wrong with your systems. That’s why we suggest monitoring this metric daily in normal conditions. You may want to track it hourly during times of peak usage.

  • Ask For Feedback From Your Chat Agents. 

The raw volume of chat conversations only tells you part of the picture. It is crucial to touch base with your live chat staff regularly. Ask them about the most common questions they face. Look for patterns in the questions you face so that you can create better answers and solutions for your chat agents to use.

3. Average Resolution Time (ART) Live Chat Metric

This live chat metric is adapted from the world of customer service call centers, unlike the first few live chat metrics. It is focused on the quality of your staff’s customer service.

It is not enough to provide a quick answer: ideally, the goal is to fully resolve a customer’s concern as efficiently as possible.

You generally want your average resolution time metric to be as low as possible. There is a risk of pressuring customer service staff to work too quickly. It is vital to ensure all of a customer’s concerns and questions are fully resolved and avoid cutting off the session simply to boost your chat performance metrics.

The ART metric is typically measured in minutes for most situations. Your ART metric might be days in some highly complex customer service cases.

Tips To Use The ART Metric Effectively

Use the following tips to interpret the ART metric effectively.

  • Examine ART Metric Outliers

You can expect outliers to the ART metric. Consider cases where agents take much longer than average to resolve the question. For example, new customer support employees might take longer to resolve issues. In that case, the higher ART time is understandable and will likely decline.

On the other hand, keep an eye on the chat load that your experienced chat operators have. If your experienced staff have an excessive workload, customers are more likely to have a bad experience.

  • Validate ART With Other Customer Service Channels

Your company probably has multiple customer service channels like phone calls, email, and in-person locations. If live chat ART data looks great, comparing it to your other support options, like the phone center, is helpful. Ideally, you want to see consistent levels of customer service resolution across your critical channels.

4. Chat to Conversion Rate Live Chat Metric

To become a chat leader, it’s essential to convert chat participants into buyers. According to our research, 38% of customers who participate in a live chat session ultimately decide to purchase after receiving excellent support front the customer service team.

This chat experience metric may be the most valuable metric we have covered. It tells you how effectively the chat channel produces revenue or leads. Now, let’s look at ways you can help the customer service team convert more chat participants into leads and customers.

Tips To Raise Your Chat To Conversation Rate Live Chat Metric

  • Use Analytics To Find What’s Working

Not all chat requests are created equal. For example, compare a chat that starts on your home page with a chat on the checkout page. Generally, converting a website visitor to a buyer on certain pages (e.g., a product page) is easier.

When you connect your chat platform to a customer data platform, for example, your chat team leaders may find out that one individual agent has an above-average score when it comes to converting visitors to buyers. In that case, reach out to that person and find out what they are doing. Based on what you learn, develop additional training for your staff.

  • Improve The Customer Experience With Technology

Additional training is not the only way to enhance the chat experience. For example, take a critical look at your chat software. Your current software may not be able to handle the number of inbound chats you are receiving. Or your software may not load in an acceptable time. Switching to a faster chat tool like Arena Live Chat can improve your customer experience almost overnight.

5. First Contact Resolution Rate (FCR) Live Chat Metric

The FCR rate is a critical quality metric. Your customer’s concerns in a single chat session in ideal conditions. It is unrealistic to expect that you will be able to solve 100% of customer complaints or questions on the first attempt. Setting a high bar for this metric is wise to maintain customer happiness.

To calculate the First Contact Response rate, you must track the number of interactions in a case and the proportion of one-touch resolutions. Track this data for at least one month before attempting to improve.

Traditionally, contact centers aim for a 70% FCR rate. Reaching this level of success is easier when your chat team has access to extensive resources like proper answers to commonly asked customer questions. If your first contact resolution rate is lower right now, use the following tips to work with chat team staff to improve.

Tips To Improve Your First Contact Resolution Rate

  • Send A Customer Survey After The Chat Session

Sending a short customer survey with a few simple questions is a great way to gather feedback from your customer base. For example, ask your customers to rate their satisfaction level on a scale of 0 to 10. If the score is below 5, ask a follow-up question about it.

  • Assess Your Chat Queue Data

When customers have to wait a long time, they may be more upset when the chat session starts. As a result, a long chat queue can make it more challenging to solve customer questions quickly. Better training and a high-performance chat system can help here.

6. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Live Chat Metric

The CSAT is one of the most popular ways to develop a customer satisfaction rating for customer support. A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures how much your product or service meets or surpasses your customer’s expectations. A short customer satisfaction survey at the end of the live chat session is all you need to achieve this metric.

How To Improve The CSAT Score

There are a few popular ways to improve. Use these tips to boost your chat quality assurance efforts.

  • Find High Chat Satisfaction Cases

Studying chat transcripts from successful interactions is an excellent way to improve your performance. Look at how your high-performing employees are addressing common customer pain points. Once you identify these best practices, share them with the rest of your team.

  • Identify Patterns In Low CSAT Scores

Persistent low CSAT scores warn that something is wrong in your business. Before creating an action plan, take the time to understand the problem entirely. Look at contact volumes, peak traffic hours, and recent business growth. Your chat staff may be doing their best to help customers but simply lack the resources to serve customers effectively.

7. Net Promoter Score (NPS) Live Chat Metric

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NPS might be one of the best pieces of information to evaluate customer satisfaction metrics. This metric measures overall customer loyalty, not just the chat experience.

The NPS process is simple. You gather consistent customer feedback by asking them a single question: On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our company to other people you know?

The NPS methodology breaks down scores into three categories:

  • The Detractors (0 – 6)
  • The Passives (7 and 8)
  • The Promoters (9 and 10)

Ideally, you want to maximize promoters and minimize the other two categories as much as possible. Use the tips covered elsewhere in this guide to improve your customer experience. Remember that customers can respond negatively to an NPS question for several reasons (e.g., upset with product delivery, pricing, etc.) that have nothing to do with the quality of their chat interaction.

8. Average Wait Time Live Chat Metric

Think about the last time you contacted a company with a question. Did you enjoy waiting for an answer? Even loyal customers hate waiting. That’s why monitoring your average wait time is a crucial metric.

The average chat wait time is usually less than a few minutes. Of course, this metric may look different during your busiest hours when you have a high volume of incoming chats.

There are a few options to improve the average time it takes to respond to customers. Start with examining the resources your chat agents have. Equipping your staff with canned answers, detailed product information, shipping details, and related resources can make a big difference.

While prewritten responses are helpful, they have limitations. You don’t want your customers to feel ignored simply because your chat staff feels pressured to achieve better chat performance benchmarks. This chat metric must be interpreted alongside other metrics, such as the NPS and FCR rate.

9. Website Visitors To Chats Metric

Increasing the number of chats per month generated from your website is a worthwhile goal to pursue. Most of the time, more chat sessions lead to more sales and more satisfied customers.

Keeping track of this metric is easy because you can easily track the data required. As a starting point, aim for a 1% conversion rate. If your website has 100,000 visitors per month, you should expect to have 1,000 chat sessions per month.

This metric is more valuable when read in the context of other metrics. For example, it is crucial to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction (e.g., high NPS rates, high first contact resolution rates, etc.) even as you lift.

Ways To Improve This Metric

There are a few techniques you can use to improve this metric.

  • Use A Better Chat Tool

The right chat technology has an important role in lifting this metric. For example, Arena Live Chat is built for speed and usability. Arena can also support a large volume of chat sessions simultaneously.

  • Optimize Your Chat Session Prompt

Chat windows usually start with a message or a question. Experimenting with different questions (e.g., “Do you have any questions?” vs. “Do you have a question about our Black Friday sale?”) can increase the number of website visitors who start a chat session.

10. Missed Chats Live Chat Metric

The missed live chat metric gives insight into whether your chat team can keep up with incoming chat requests.

A single experienced live chat agent can handle approximately 6 to 7 simultaneous conversations if they are relatively simple. Once your chat team hits capacity, missed chats will become a problem.

It’s not just a question of workload influencing this metric. You may also face a mismatch between working hours and staff availability. Your website is open 24/7 for business, but your chat support team is only available between 9 am to 5 pm.

Therefore, the raw volume of missed chats is only part of the story. It is also essential to track when missed chat requests occur. If missed chat sessions occur during regular working hours, use the other techniques mentioned in other parts of this situation.

Ways To Improve The Missed Chats Live Metric

Improving your performance on this live chat metric can be relatively challenging.

  • Manage Expectations For Non-Business Hours Service

When you have a significant chat volume outside your usual work hours, give your customers other options. For example, show your customer service email address and invite customers to message your team.

  • Extend Chat Service Hours At Peak Periods 

Chat handling time and chat volume will likely increase when you run sales. In those cases, average response time and missed chat measures may suffer. To avoid this problem, ask more employees to work as customer support agents to handle the demand. ‍

How To Go Beyond Standard Customer Service Chat

You may already have a chat app in place for day-to-day needs. But, what about events like live shopping, livestreams and other virtual events? These events are an exciting way to launch products and bring your community together. In these situations, a different chat solution is needed.

Arena Live Chat is the perfect solution for digital events because your customers can message each other, ask support questions and build trust with your brand. Learn more about Arena’s capabilities today.

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Customer Engagement Explained: Definition, Strategies & More

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Customer engagement is the new way to think about building trusting relationships with customers. It’s broader than related concepts like customer loyalty. Encouraging customer engagement makes your company more valuable for the long term. 

What Is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is how your customers interact with your brand over time. A high level of engagement means customers are interested in new products, online events, and content that you release. Highly engaged customers likely spend significant time visiting your website and interacting with you online.

At its highest level, customer engagement means you have fans who eagerly introduce other people to your brand. This level of passionate engagement makes marketing more efficient because word-of-mouth efforts enhance your campaigns.

Customer engagement is also closely related to other ways of relating to your customers: customer experience and customer satisfaction. Let’s explore how these concepts connect further below.

Comparing Customer Engagement Vs. Customer Satisfaction

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Customer engagement and customer satisfaction partly overlap. It’s unlikely that a brand can achieve high customer engagement levels if satisfaction falls. The scope is a crucial point of difference between engagement and satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction often focuses on rating a purchase experience or customer service interaction. For instance, a customer satisfaction survey may ask buyers if their concern was thoroughly addressed when they asked for help.

In contrast, customer engagement goes beyond purchases and interactions with company staff. Customer engagement also considers if a person is acting as a brand ambassador. In addition, customer engagement examines how a person interacts with your online content and experiences.

Customer Engagement Vs. Customer Experience

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Customer experience and customer engagement are also related. Both can reinforce each other to increase revenue, reduce service expenses and lift a brand’s long-term prospects. Perspective and emphasis are key differences between these two concepts.

Customer engagement assumes that the customer is an active participant. Moment by moment, the customer decides how much time and money they want to spend with your brand. 

Customer experience, in comparison, brings together the company’s departments and capabilities to design a consistent, integrated experience. For instance, robust customer experience ensures offline and online interactions are aligned in copy, offers, and strategy. 

A robust customer experience journey makes it far more likely that customer engagement will stay high. The opposite is also true. A dysfunctional customer experience will likely cripple efforts to foster ongoing customer engagement. 

3 Ways Customer Engagement Boosts The Bottom Line

Building and sustaining a customer engagement program takes effort and resources. So, it’s reasonable to ask what return you should expect. The return on investment from strong customer engagement takes a few different forms.

1.Improves Marketing Effectiveness

A highly engaged customer base makes it easier to boost the effectiveness of your marketing in a few ways. Engaged customers are more likely to refer other customers – a growth channel that is free for you. In addition, highly engaged customers are more likely to share a steady stream of data about themselves and their preferences. This stream of first-party data makes it far easier to create personalized marketing campaigns which are proven to deliver excellent results.

2. Improves Product Development

Changing or launching an existing product takes time and effort. Fortunately, customer engagement can reduce the risk of product development missteps. 

For example, you can ask your best customers for feedback on features and prototypes before launching them in large campaigns. In addition, early customer feedback can yield reviews, feedback, and other forms of social proof, which make it far easier to launch something new to the market.

3. Reduces Customer Service Costs

Highly engaged customers are often willing to provide help to other customers. For example, take a look at the forums dedicated to software. 

It’s common to see experienced users provide tips and advice to other users on social websites like Stack Overflow. One should not expect customers to take on all customer service responsibilities, but every bit helps to ease the burden of customer service.

Customer engagement has the potential to boost profitability. It’s important to know whether or not your program is trending in the right direction.

7 Signs Of Healthy Customer Engagement

How do you know if your customer engagement efforts are working? The best way is to build a strategy and develop custom measures associated with that strategy. As a starting point, the following indicators will tell you if your customer engagement program is on the right track.

1. Your Loyalty Program Is Thriving And Growing

High levels of participation in loyalty programs are an excellent sign of customer engagement. If customers take the extra step to register in your program, activate offers, and so forth, they are engaged with your offers.

However, relying too heavily on a customer loyalty program can be misleading. A brand offering unusually lucrative rewards may see a short-term increase in loyalty program engagement. To provide a more balanced view, look at some of the other signs below.

2. Your Online Events Pull In Excited Participants

Look at the attendance numbers and quality of engagement in your digital events and experiences. It’s a good sign if you have a cadre of loyal customers who consistently join your events month in and month out. 

You might measure the number of people who take action during live events (e.g., the number of clicks on your conversion cards using Arena Live Chat).

3. You Receive Positive Reviews

Positive reviews written directly by customers indicate that your customers like your product. In addition, a steady stream of positive reviews is an even better sign of a highly engaged customer base.

4. Customers Submit Feature Requests, Ideas & More

When customers reach out to ask for changes, such as feature requests in software or different colors in apparel, that is an excellent sign. Your brand can also encourage this type of engagement by seeking feedback in surveys, live chat sessions, and other venues.

5. You Recover Effectively From Most Complaints

This signal of effective customer engagement is associated with customer service. Simply put, it’s challenging to eliminate all customer complaints. However, a company that effectively responds to complaints promptly is more likely to retain content customers.

6. You Have An Active And Growing Referral Program

While this measure of engagement has drawbacks, it is an excellent sign of engagement. If you see consistent referral volume, that is an excellent sign of engagement.

7. Customers Are Interacting With Your Online Content

This sign of customer engagement is essential for publishers. A paying subscriber who never visits your website, downloads a podcast, or views a video is at a heightened risk of disengaging and leaving your community.

For non-publishers, interacting with your online content is also essential to track. A high level of engagement tells you that your content program is on the right track. In addition, interactions with your content are an excellent opportunity to generate first-party data.

Customer Engagement In Practice: The Customer Engagement Lifecycle

Lasting customer engagement is a lifecycle process leading to continuous improvement. Every time you go through the process, you can deepen customer relationships and trust.

1. Gather Data From Your Customers

Data gathered directly from your customers, also known as first-party data, is the foundation of customer engagement. When designing programs and initiatives for your customers, measuring your efforts and collecting feedback are vital. 

The way you gather data from your customers also matters. Email and website analytics can automate some of this to see which pages and content drive opens, clicks, and user attention. In other cases, using surveys and other direct approaches to solicit feedback is wise.

2. Analyze Your Customer Data

Arena Personas (Beta) makes it easier to get a clear picture of your customer engagement across multiple channels like email, website, and chat interactions. Gathering all of that data in one place is the starting point. Your next step is to analyze the customer data. Use the following questions to get started:

  • What customer engagement patterns are we seeing (e.g., the highest-value customers tend to attend webinars and other live experiences)?
  • Are there any gaps or quality issues in the customer data (for example, do you need data from your customer relationship management app)?
  • Does this data help us make better predictions about purchases, referrals, and other valuable actions?

3. Develop Customer Engagement Tests

Reviewing customer engagement data is interesting. However, the data on its own will not drive growth. It’s crucial to take some well-thought-out risks using customer engagement data. 

The tests could be small in scope, like creating a test around marketing copy that succeeded with your website audience and rolling it out on display ads. Or it might be more involved, like adjusting incentives to encourage past customers to return and make more purchases.

4. Observe The Results And Iterate

Once you have a few marketing tests in mind, allow some time to pass to gather meaningful data. Unless you have an extensive customer base, thirty days are usually enough time to pass. 

Once you have the new customer engagement data in, review your test. Ask yourself whether your assumptions are correct or need to be changed. Once you have gleaned whatever insights you can, iterate on the process and start the lifecycle process again. 

Customer Engagement Strategies

There are several proven strategies that drive higher customer engagement. To boost (or launch) your customer engagement program, pick some strategies to delight your customers.

1. Launch (Or Enhance) Your Loyalty Program

A loyalty program is among the best ways to encourage ongoing customer engagement. Retailers, airlines, and other companies have proven the value of these programs for years. Yet, you don’t have to build a complex program to get started. 

Your initial program could start by offering premium content or products to members first. Another approach is to offer a discount or another incentive to registered members.

2. Encourage The Right Behavior In Your Online Community

Customer engagement is ultimately built up through individuals interacting with your brand positively over time. When your online community starts, setting expectations with your audience is essential. 

Executing this strategy will generally have two elements: positive and negative. The positive element is to look for highly engaged customers and praise their actions (e.g., like their comments, send thank you messages, and so forth). This praise will help to encourage your customers to keep up the excellent work. 

The negative element is to have a set of ground rules and live up to them on your standard. For example, a brand may have a strict policy against hate speech, profanity, and other “not safe for work” content. If a community participant runs afoul of these rules, take appropriate action, such as sending them a private message to stop the behavior or potentially banning the person from your community if the negative behavior continues.

3. Invite Engagement Through Online Experiences

Creating the right environment is another way to boost customer engagement. Your website can potentially be the center of your brand’s online community. With Arena Live Chat, you can run live events from your website efficiently.

Offering a live chat experience to your customers is one of the best ways to grow relationships at scale and, what’s more, this kind of experience tends to be very popular with Gen Z… You might already have a chat in place for customer service. While helpful in solving problems, one-on-one customer service chat interactions do little to grow your community.

Instead, looking for ways to boost your community through live events where like-minded people can come together is more powerful. For example, you might invite your customers to join an “Ask me anything” online event with your CEO to bring a more human touch to your brand.

The Easiest Way To Lift Customer Engagement On Your Website

Customer engagement is good for the bottom line, makes marketing easier, and gives your customers a social experience. To bring your customer engagement strategy to life, it’s crucial to have the right technology. 

Installing Arena Live Chat on your website only takes a few minutes. Discover more about building your online community with Arena.

What is Customer Service | Arena

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Customer service gives companies an edge over their competition. It is one of the most powerful ways to retain customers. At the same time, customer expectations are rising. They expect faster answers to questions and concerns. If they don’t get those answers, you might not get another chance to win that customer’s loyalty.

To help you succeed in today’s competitive environment, use this guide to build and develop your customer service department.

Bookmark this page so you can come back to it as needed to achieve your business goals.

What is Customer Service?

Modern customer service is crucial for a few reasons. First, high-quality customer service directly contributes to customer loyalty. Second, strong customer service keeps your company safe from social media criticism. Third, robust customer service gives you insights into the concerns and needs of customers.

Customer Service Definition

Customer service means answering questions, responding to complaints, helping your customers use your products, and services and creating a memorable customer experience. 

How To Set Your Customer Service Strategy

Your business goals are fundamental to making customer service decisions. For example, a company focused on growing word of mouth referrals and high lifetime customer value should invest heavily in customer happiness. On the other hand, a company with low customer lifetime value may decide to keep its annual support costs to a minimum.

Step 1: Set Your Business Goals For Customer Service

Let’s assume that your business goals include growing your Customer Satisfaction Score. This goal will inform the types of customer service you provide. Through customer feedback and discussions with your team, you may find that customers want longer service hours, faster answers to their questions, and the ability to speak with somebody on the phone when they have a problem. 

Step 2: Choose Your Customer Service Channels

In this situation, your customer service strategy should probably include the following options: phone support and customer service live chat. To manage your operating costs, you might limit phone service to standard business hours and offer live chat until 9 pm. This combination means that you can offer more service to customers.

Step 3: Create Your Customer Service Metrics

In addition, your plan should include objectives for customer service quality. It is not good enough to say that you want to meet customer expectations. To manage customer queries effectively, you need specific numbers and metrics. To get you started, see our guide to the top 10 live chat metrics. These measures will help you to determine if your customer service agents are responding to customers with prompt, high-quality service.

Your metrics should a variety of scenarios including proactive and reactive customer service. Reactive customer service means quickly responding to the customer when they pose a question to you. Proactive customer service means improving your company’s processes to solve common problems. For example, you might notice that customers have problems entering their payment details. Instead of manually solving this problem repeatedly by issuing a service ticket, ask your IT colleagues to develop a lasting solution.

Step 4: Apply Continuous Improvement To Your Customer Service

Few companies have fully optimized their customer service capabilities. There is almost always an opportunity to enhance the quantity and quality of the service you provide to customers. If you are not yet delivering customer delight, use these two strategies. By using these strategies, you will also find it far easier to keep your loyal customers.

1) Offer more customer service 

While basic, it’s important to start here. Start by comparing your typical customer service hours of operation with customer needs. For example, a company located in California may have a significant number of customers on the east coast. In this situation, you may have a mismatch because 9 am to 5 pm Pacific is equivalent to 12 pm to 8 pm Eastern time. As a result, frustrated customers may have to wait all morning for your customer service to open. This means many customers will have a negative experience due to long response times. Adding customer service reps on the east coast (i.e. increasing the quantity of customer service) can solve to solve this problem.

By the way, your approach to customer service should offer multiple options. For example, you might have the following customer support channels: live chat, phone support, and a knowledge base. Some of your customers might prefer to interact with your agents digitally while others might prefer the human interaction available through calls.

2) Improve customer service quality 

When consumers walk away from their customer service interactions with all of their questions answered, it becomes easy to grow relationships with customers. By reducing the number of bad experiences, customer retention will also get easier.

Each company will have its own approach to customer service training. Some organizations emphasize scripts while others offer a comprehensive knowledge base. Equipping customer service professionals with training and knowledge is essential to raising the quality of service. Without a knowledge base and other support documents, customer support agents will struggle to effectively solve problems or answer questions.

The 6 Key Barriers To Delivering Excellent Service

Now that you have established your customer service strategy, channels and metrics, it’s time to face the challenges. Delivering stellar customer service in today’s environment is tough! Customers have been conditioned to expect instant gratification thanks to ecommerce and other advances. 

Consider the following significant customer service challenges and discuss them with your managers and reps. If you find that your company is experiencing multiple difficulties, you’re not alone. Few companies have solved all of these problems. However, making progress on these challenges is well worth the effort because you can gain a competitive advantage.

  1. 33% of customers are most frustrated by having to wait on hold. (HubSpot Research)
  2. 53% of shoppers believe their feedback doesn’t go to anyone who can actually act on it. (Microsoft)
  3. Over 70% of consumers believe that companies should collaborate on their behalf so that they don’t have to repeat information to different representatives. (Zendesk)
  4. For 33% of consumers, the most important aspect of a good customer service experience is getting their issue resolved in a single interaction. (Microsoft)
  5. Over 40% of customers consider having to deal with automated systems that make it hard to reach a human agent a frustrating experience.
  6. Over 40% of customers are frustrated at having to repeat information  multiple times.

Solving these causes of poor customer service is well worth the effort. Research indicates that 82% of customers will spend more money on companies that deliver great online service. 

Preventing these issues requires multiple strategies including equipping your staff with effective training and encouraging collaboration between customer service. Finally, the right customer service technologies are also critical. For example, a customer service agent should be able to enter a customer’s details into a service ticket into a customer relationship management platform. If a customer has to repeat themselves, call back or contract multiple people to solve a problem, that is a sign that your customer service processes are not working well. 

Five Key Traits & Skills Your Customer Service Team Must Have

Human interaction is at the heart of strong customer service. Therefore, getting clear on the specific traits and customer service skills your customer service reps must have is vital. Keep these capabilities and traits in mind when recruiting new customer service representatives, developing training, and coaching your reps.

1) Communication skills

Communication is the key skill of customer service. It starts with active listening and the ability to express yourself are crucial skills in customer service. This skill set is so important that it is worth testing candidates on their communication skills during the recruiting process. 

For even greater results, it is helpful to break down communication skills into different sub-skills like listening, speaking, reading, and writing. For example, a customer service agent may need the ability to answer phone calls in the morning and then switch to answering live chat questions in the afternoon.

Customer service managers should regularly coach their employees on communication skills as well. Our ability to interact effectively with other people, especially when there are problems, is a crucial business skill. To help your reps deliver a consistent experience, make sure your customer service training covers communication skills in detail, especially listening skills.

2) Company and product knowledge

New hires may join your company with strong communication skills. However, few people will have the right level of company and product information when they join your customer service team. Even if your staff has good technical skills, you still need to train them on how to apply your organization’s customer service standards. That means spending significant onboarding time on company and product training.

There are three popular ways to help new customer service representatives acquire product knowledge. Start by developing a structured training program or handbook covering the most common support questions. New representatives should be equipped to answer common questions before they start interacting with customers. After newly hired customer service representatives have a basic understanding of your products and company policies, you can move to the next phase.

The next phase of developing customer service representatives is to use a job shadowing process. This is a simple way to build relationships between staff and encourage knowledge sharing. Pair your new customer support reps with an experienced rep. Let me listen in as the experienced employee works with customers. After a few interactions switch roles (i.e. let the new person interact with the customers and have the experienced person listen in). Through this process, customer service representatives will learn more about how to deliver a seamless customer experience.

Finally, recognize that all customer support teams need access to ongoing training. Your company will continue to come up with new products, company policies, and change processes. Equip employees to thrive through these changes by giving them access to a knowledge base. This is a common resource where customer support staff can ask questions and share solutions to problems.

3) Problem-solving

Problem-solving skills are critically important when serving difficult customers. Extensive training on your company’s processes will help your customer service staff to solve many problems. However, do not expect training to cover every situation. Therefore, it is crucial to recruit employees who have a track record of solving problems with people.

4) Empathy

Logical problem-solving skills will only take you so far in the customer service world. It’s also vital to have empathy – to listen and understand a customer’s feelings. Finding common ground with customers goes a long way to creating a human connection with the customer.

For example, a customer might be angry if an important Christmas present did not arrive on time. Immediately attempting to solve the problem without acknowledging the customer’s feelings is unlikely to be productive. Instead, acknowledge the customer’s feelings and how this delay may have ruined their day. Instead, it is more effective to spend some time listening to the customer and understanding their disappointment. Only after the customer feels heard will they be open to a solution (e.g. a refund, discount on a future purchase, or something else).

5) Patience

Patience is another vital customer service trait that matters. In a customer support role, you will often interact with frustrated customers. Without the patience to calmly listen to the customer’s comments, a customer service representative may anger a customer even more!

It is challenging to develop patience if you do not already have this trait. Therefore, it is especially important to ask about a person’s customer service experiences during the hiring process. For example, if a customer service representative has had jobs in retail, restaurants, or hospitality in the past, there is a good chance that they have developed patience.

How Excellent Customer Service Boosts Sales

Delivering outstanding customer service is also crucial to lifting sales. When your sales reps have a happy customer base, it is far easier to ask for referrals. High customer satisfaction levels also make it easier to upsell customers on additional products and services.

Offering customer service via live chat is especially valuable as a way of lifting sales. After the interaction is complete, spend some time reviewing the most common customer requests. For example, a software company might find that its customers want hands-on implementation support. Offering that package to customers during the sales process can bring new revenue to your company and ease pressure on customer service.

Lifting sales and customer service becomes easier when you give options to customers. Industry research shows that 41% of customers prefer live chat as a way to interact with companies. With Arena Live Chat, you can meet serve customers quickly and efficiently through your website. Sign up for a free trial of Arena.

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!

How to boost user engagement with Live Chat

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Beloved brands like Apple and Playstation have used Live Chat to inform and engage customers. Read on to learn how this tool can transform the relationship with your audience.

If you are looking to harness real-time interactions between your brand and its customers, you have probably heard of live chats before. Often seen as a tool for customer support, Live Chat is a popular alternative to email and phone support channels, as it allows instant discussions to resolve simple queries.

Most customers already prefer Live Chat to other support channels. Around 46% of consumers prefer live chat over email and social media, for example.

Besides, Live Chat applications allow brands to communicate with website visitors automatically via chatbots, or through live customer service teams, helping to drive conversions and build longer-lasting relationships.

That is vital in the age of omnichannel experiences. Customers expect every touchpoint with companies to provide them with a consistent experience, otherwise, they won’t come back for more.

Live Chat materializes the cliché that brands should “send customers the right messages at the right time.” In your website, users are just a few clicks away from becoming actual customers, so why not use Live Chat to guide them through the browsing experience?

With Live Chat, you can engage customers in the best time to reach your business goals.

In this post, we will explore:

  • Reasons to use Live Chat
  • Live Chat triggers that can boost engagement in your website
  • Live Chat examples from global brands
  • Basic steps to creating engagement with Live Chat

Reasons to incorporate Live Chat into your strategy

Boost your brand awareness

Word of mouth is one of the best ways to attract new customers. If you offer great customer support through Live Chat and delight users with it, you can bet they will tell their peers about it.

A study from Kayako found out that 29% of consumers have told friends or colleagues about a positive live chat experience. Live Chat allows your brand to create a loyal customer base and build awareness.

However, make sure your Live Chat is well implemented and that you have well-trained agents behind it since a bad Live Chat experience can work against your brand. According to the same study,  20% of consumers have spread negative impressions after poor live chat experiences.

It’s the same old story: it takes years to build a company’s image, but just a single customer’s bad experience to take it down.

Understand customers’ behavior and have real-time feedback

Great companies are always trying to find new ways to spot customers’ pain points and improve their customer experience.

With Live Chat, you can have access to real-time customer feedback and spot gaps in the customer experience, which can make customer service, product, and marketing improvement cycles much quicker. Instead of running long surveys, you can get relevant insights just by asking questions to customers.

Besides, many Live Chat platforms offer analytics tools to help you analyze customer service both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Strengthen relationship with your customers

Social media and messaging apps have made customers get used to instant gratification in every aspect of life. In that context, Live Chat gives them reactivity and personalization in a way no other support channel could.

By sending targeted and real-time messages with Live Chat, you can make your customer service more personal and show customers their specific requests matter. No more standard emails that take days to solve simple queries.

Having Live Chat portrays your brand as more approachable, helpful, and customer-centric than the ones that don’t offer it.

Increase conversion rates

Even before a customer buys from you, the support channels available can have a big impact on the likelihood of conversion. According to CrazyEgg, 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company if they offer Live Chat Support.  

Plus, Live Chat is a great way to bring visitors back to your website. An Emarketer study shows that 63% of customers were more likely to return to a website that offers Live Chat.

Boosting customer loyalty

Think of the brands you’ve bought from more than once. They probably offer more than great products, right? More often than not, customers are loyal to companies that once provided them with great customer service.

According to Kayako, 51% of consumers are more likely to stay with or buy again from a company if they offer live chat support.

Using Live Chat triggers to drive user engagement

You can use Live Chat reactively or proactively. In the reactive approach, your company will talk to customers via chat only if requested. In the proactive approach, you can send automated messages throughout the customer navigation journey.

The proactive approach represents a significant way to engage visitors. Many brands have used Live Chat triggers on their websites to send the right message at the right time to the right users.

Here are a few examples of Live Chat triggers you can use:

  • Welcome messages: you can use Live Chat to send specific welcome messages to users, present the company, or offer welcome discounts
  • Content subscription: if your company offers proprietary content, such as a newsletter or blog, you can remind the user of these content channels or make suggestions of content they could enjoy
  • Repeat buyer: Since Live Chat can be integrated into CRM and other data management platforms, you can use it to identify repeat customers and offer them discounts
  • Targeted discount: you can also dig into customer data to offer discounts based on demographic criteria (localization, gender, etc)
  • Category: a great way of using proactive Live Chat is by suggesting new products within the category the user is browsing
  • Inactive user: send a message to users that have been inactive on your website after a few minutes
  • Checkout: let’s say your customers frequently get lost in the checkout process. You can set up your greeting in Live Chat and offer help before they give up on their purchase. Or, you can offer an upsell proposition based on users’ choice, for example.

How brands are using live chat to improve engagement and generate more revenue

Live Chat is one of the best tools to respond to customers’ urge for real-time interactions. No wonder some of the most beloved brands in the digital landscape have used Live Chat to enhance their websites.

Having trouble visualizing Live Chat? Let’s see how successful digital platforms and retailers are using it.

Playstation Live Chat

The famous Sony brand PlayStation has different Live Chat rooms where gamers can talk to its support agents. The chat rooms are linked to PlayStation’s webpage where customers can make requests and queries about account access, game purchases, and charge refunds.

Apple Live Chat

Apple, which is known for its great customer experience, also placed a real-time customer support team on Live Chat. Through the chat, customers talk to an Apple expert who specializes in their exact question. Everything happens within Apple’s website, so the customer doesn’t have to worry about sending messages to other support channels and waiting for emails and phone calls.

Groupon Live Chat

Groupon also allows customers to reach out for support through Live Chat. Customers can be routed to specific departments and support agents according to frequent topics:

  • Change My Order
  • Order Never Arrived
  • Refund My Order
  • Update Account Info
  • Voucher Code Won’t Work

If the request is not related to any of those topics, then the customer can talk to a general agent. According to Groupon, more than 1.7 million users have used Live Chat to contact customer support in the last 18 months.

Walmart Live Chat

The world’s major retailer, Walmart, offers a Live Chat window along with an FAQ page. If the customer can’t solve their problem after browsing frequently asked questions, then they can contact Walmart’s Help Center through an automated support assistant.

Other Live Chat formats

Live Video and Voice Chat

As great as Live Chat might be, brands are aware that modern communication goes way beyond texting. Customers have become used to interacting with pictures, videos, and voice messages, so why couldn’t Live Chat incorporate other messaging formats?

Some companies are adding Vídeo and Voice Chat to their Live Chat experience. Such formats make resolutions quicker and make interactions more dynamic since customers’ requests sometimes can be complex or take too long to explain by text.

With voice and video chat, customers can easily solve queries related to physical products and services, for instance.

One of the brands testing video chat is IKEA, who are using it in Sweden as part of the customer support, sales, and shopper consulting services. According to Rickard Mansson, a Customer Experience Business Developer at IKEA Sweden, the company decided to test video to streamline customer support.

4 basic steps to create a proactive engagement strategy with Live Chat

  1. Know your audience

There is no use having a good Live Chat tool if you don’t know the specifics about the audience you would like to engage within your website. It’s important to set up audience criteria to give you more control over the type of language you’ll use in the Live Chat, your priority customers, etc.

  1. Consider timing

When shaping your Live Chat strategy, make sure to consider time-based targeting options if your idea is to have proactive Live Chat.  You should be able to send messages in real-time or delay messages until visitors are more engaged with your page or website – just so they are more likely to interact.

If you are more prone to adopting reactive Live Chat, your concern should be about availability. Does your Live Chat support team work 24/7? If it doesn’t, can you send automated messages outside business hours? These are some things to consider before implementing Live Chat to prevent bad customer experience.

  1. Craft your message

You also have to be very careful when crafting your live chat engagement messages. Make sure your brand is personal and specific, as Live Chat is a one-to-one communication tool. If you have a human team behind the chat, make sure they answer quickly and ask only the necessary questions. Now, if you have automated Live Chat, make sure your messages contain calls-to-action (CTAs) to guide users through the buying journey.

  1. Measure results and optimize your Live Chat

Make sure you monitor your company’s Live Chat periodically to understand how it’s performing, if there are new frequent queries related to specific events and how you can use Live Chat information in favor of different departments – Customer Service, Product, Marketing, etc.

You should measure Live Chat quality and performance and analyze key Customer Service metrics through it. From here, you can adjust the tone of messages, timing, and overall agent training.

Ready to add Live Chat to your website?

Live Chat can optimize many aspects of 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.

Hasn’t your organization incorporated Live Chat yet? It’s time to change that.

Arena has one of the most complete Live Chat solutions on the market. You can try it for free and start engaging your customers in real-time right now.

How to build an eCommerce strategy with Live Chat

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The best retailers use Live Chat tools to inform and engage online shoppers. This post will show you how to use it on eCommerce and give examples of successful use cases.

Have you ever thought about what defines conversion on eCommerce? Most online retailers believe that the checkout process defines sales. However, many variables lead the customer to the purchase, so the conversion process involves much more than the checkout page.

Build an eCommerce strategy with Live Chat

In a messy and pulverized eCommerce market, where online brands are often competing for customers’ attention, it can be a struggle to lead users from research to purchase.

An excellent strategy to maximize sales and engagement could be through Live Chat. Look at the most successful online services – from marketplaces like Amazon to digital retailers. You’ll see that all of them have a Live Chat window in their webpages and applications, where they offer the possibility to talk to customer support or sales agents.

Beyond just a convenient button, Live Chat serves as an essential touchpoint with the customer across the decision-making process and after the purchase. It’s as if brands are transposing the classic tagline “How can I help you?”, the cliché of physical retail, to digital spaces (but in an organic, non-intrusive way). 

In the age of immediacy, digital marketers and salespeople need tools that help them quickly respond to customers and solve problems more dynamically. In that sense, Live Chat can be a great option for companies who want to professionalize their eCommerce operations.

In this post, we will explore:

  • The concept of Live Chat
  • Examples and use cases of Live Chat in eCommerce
  • Specific benefits of Live Chat for eCommerce
  • Using Live Chat beyond Customer Support

What is Live Chat?

Live Chat is a tool that allows customers to comment and interact via messages directly on a company’s website, usually while browsing products and viewing content. The Live Chat is generally presented as a window in the page’s corner or as a pop-up button. It can sometimes be hidden in the customer support section.

Live Chat makes communication between brands and their customers much quicker and organic as it emulates messaging platforms. That is crucial for brands that want to build more personal connections with clients. 

Also, Live Chat allows users to speak directly with companies, without having to reach them by email or phone, for instance.

One of the main benefits of Live Chat is that it allows multiple interactions in a single web interface, which is vital in the age of digital multitasking. According to a study from E-Consultancy, 51% of customers prefer Live Chat to other channels precisely because it allows them to multitask. 

Sales and customer success teams typically use live Chat to provide customers with support and personalized answers in real-time. It can be used by companies in different sectors, from marketplaces, online retailers, entertainment, and media companies. What varies is the person behind the live Chat.

If you run a media company, you might have editors commentating live events and sales reps behind the Chat offering subscription services. Now, if you run a fashion eCommerce, for example, you might have a customer support professional offering to help with product and shipping information, and so on.

Why using Live Chat in eCommerce

When it comes to the experience in eCommerce websites or marketplaces, customers want more than great products and a neat catalog curation. Interactivity has become a key element of shopping, and customers want the chance to have their problems and doubts solved all at once if they can. 

That’s where Live Chat comes to play. It can boost your eCommerce strategy, improve customer experience (CX), and give your teams more instruments to convert customers and gather business insights.

Let’s explore a few benefits of Live Chat for eCommerce and how it can enrich Customer Experience.

Fast customer support

Online retailers know that the longer they take to answer a customer, the less likely they are to convert and stay loyal to the brand. The truth is nobody likes waiting for replies through email, SMS, and other support channels.  

Because Live Chat is instantaneous, it’s a lot more attractive as a customer support tool. A recent research suggests that it takes only 42 seconds for a live chat support staff to solve a customer query, which makes the customer experience (CX) much better. 

Human touch

In the age of automation and chatbots, a human approach to customer experience might actually give you extra points in the relationship with customers. Even though automated emails and chatbots can be a blessing for optimizing customer support, studies show that users 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.

Non-intrusive

Unlike other communication channels, Live Chat shows customers that the brand is available to help without disturbing customers’ attention. This non-intrusive approach is crucial for a customer-centric strategy and shows respect for customers’ time, which might help them reach a purchase decision.

Integrated shopping experience

If your company sells products online, you know how complex communication with customers might be. Let’s say a customer just checked out of your website and realized he registered an old shipping address. 

Traditionally, they would have to leave the website and reach out to the right customer support email address or phone to solve the problem, something that could take a couple of days to resolve.

Live Chat, however, can remove this type of friction by integrating the communication cycle in real-time, which is smarter and more effective than executing communication through different channels. 

Besides, E-consultancy shows that 29% of customers want to be in control of the conversation with brands, and Live Chat gives them that. 

Improve Conversion rates

While offering customers rapid solutions to their queries, Live Chat can speed up the decision-making process and improve conversion rates. A study by Emarketer found that more than 60% of consumers would return to a website that offers Live Chat, and more than 79% of consumers feel that having quick answers impacts their buying decisions.

Make personalized offers

While Live Chat is great for solving transactional problems in eCommerce (related to payment and orders, for instance), it can also be a great channel for offering product recommendations and special discounts. A study by ATG Global Consumer Trend found, for instance, that more than 90% of customers think Live Chat was helpful for them while shopping online.

By offering customers personalized recommendations or coupons, brands can use Live Chat to get them out of “research-mode” and convert them into actual buyers. Ecommerce players can also use it to upsell frequent customers. 

Optimize customer support costs

Live Chat represents a cheaper and effective way to communicate with customers from an operations standpoint if compared to call centers. With Live Chat, you don’t have to put your customers on hold, and a few representatives can talk to multiple customers at a time. 

Increase Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Every marketer’s goal is not just to convert customers, but to make them satisfied and loyal to your brand, so they always come back. Ultimately, customer satisfaction is related to customer convenience. 

An eDigital Research survey found that 73% of customers who used live chat support for online shopping were highly satisfied and willing to come back for future shopping. Another study by J. D. Power discovered that overall customer satisfaction was higher when customers used the Live Chat window than in other channels. 

Examples of Live Chat in eCommerce and digital platforms

If you look at the digital landscape, you will see that many highly regarded brands have used Live Chat to enhance their websites. 

Still having trouble visualizing how Live Chat can be incorporated into eCommerce? Let’s see how successful digital platforms and retailers are using it. 

Amazon

One of the global references when it comes to marketplace and eCommerce experience is Amazon. They offer Live Chat options that allow users to chat with customer support specialists about account details, orders, and shipping processes. 

The customer can choose the topic he wants to chat about (memberships and subscriptions, ordering and shopping preferences, Login & Security, etc.) before being redirected to a specialized support agent. 

PlayStation

Can you imagine how many customer queries PlayStation, from Sony, receives in its customer support channels everyday? Probably loads of them. In order to make communication with game players easier, the company has Live Chat rooms linked to its webpage, whereby customers can chat with support agents about things like account access, game purchases, and charge refunds. 

Apple

Among the companies that offer great user experience is also Apple, which has a real-time customer support team on Live Chat. Through the chat, customers can arrange a chat with an Apple expert who specializes in their exact question. Everything happens within Apple’s website, so the customer doesn’t have to worry about sending and waiting for emails and phone calls. 

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Shoply.tv

Shoply.tv is a project which was developed collaboratively with Arena, unifying a great live video solution with a powerful live chat tool. Even though some features are currently being developed, the results are already used by more than 2,600 clients around the world, and we’re still counting. Shoply used Arena Live Chat to develop a live video shopping solution that enhances customer experience by enabling the best sales and engagement tools.

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How to derive even more value from Live Chat in eCommerce

So you have learned that Live Chat has many benefits for your eCommerce operation. However, in order to effectively sustain its value, you have to manage it wisely. Here are a few tips to take advantage of Live Chat beyond customer support.

1) Share customer feedback with marketing teams

Insights from Live Chat can be useful for other departments, not just customer support and sales. Online stores can share customer feedback with marketing teams as well, just so they can make changes in their strategies according to what’s best for your audience. 

2) Integrate Live Chat leads to your CRM and Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Live Chat tools can also provide information to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and be integrated into Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).

You could choose to add CRM contact information to your Live Chat tool, integrating valuable customer information that can be used by support and sales professionals during sessions with customers. 

By having all customer information available, you can reduce friction and improve conversions. After all, your team should focus on answering your users’ needs, without spending too much time searching for customer information.

A CDP, on the other hand, can use Live Chat information to determine customer profiles, products bought by single customers, and the value generated by chat conversations. It can also integrate Chat information to data generated by other channels and customer platforms.  

That way, your teams can follow up with the created leads, having access to easy conversion reports and reducing the friction between different data platforms.

3) Understand where users come from

One of the challenges for eCommerce players is to understand how their marketing efforts connect to online conversions in a granular and accurate way.  Talking about Live Chat, how can they track what led to a conversion in the Chat?

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 keyword, or landing page.  You could integrate your Live Chat to Google Analytics for instance, and see a bigger picture of chat conversions and Adword campaigns that 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. That allows companies to optimize campaigns more accurately according to the insights.

Want to try Live Chat on your eCommerce?

If your company still hasn’t adopted Live Chat support, maybe it’s about time to change that!

Not sure where to start? Arena has one of the most robust Live Chat tools in the market, and the best part is that you can try it for free! Access our free trial and get the best out of the Arena Live Chat.

How Customer Data Platform is reinventing customer relations

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Using a Customer Data Platform is helping companies to focus obsessively on their customers and benefit from their engagement.

You need to know your customers—this isn’t any news. It doesn’t matter if you want to make them more engaged, optimize your budget for campaigns, or improve your ROI.

Customer accurate information is at the heart of every company and should be treated correctly to generate powerful outcomes from your marketing efforts.

If you don’t have a consistent understanding of your consumers, then all your strategies will likely go down the drain.

But how exactly do you get to act like you know your customers? The answer is simple: by managing their data.

To treat data thoroughly and reach your customer relationship goals, you might come across the need to use the right technologies. This is when the Customer Data Platform (CDP) walks in.

A customer data platform monitors and tracks multiple data sources to bring relevant information to a single hub that is easy to access and understand.

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Once implemented, CDPs collect, integrate, manage, and analyze customer data continuously. These automated processes help many teams to focus on solving complex problems that require a human brain. At the same time, a Customer Data Platform brings current, real-time data to be leveraged and turned into marketing master plans.

Why do companies use Customer Data Platforms?

Is there a reason why companies implement a Customer Data Platform in their business models? Yes, many.

According to Gartner, plenty of marketers look to customer data-driven strategies to deliver growth. For example, marketers invested two-thirds of their budget in supporting relationships with their customers in 2017 and 2018. 

Still, they have found the technology they were using to be frustrating—until CDP’s unique upshots came out as a solution to their problems.

A Customer Data Platform reaches out for several channels and concentrates real-time data in a single place your team can access whenever it is convenient.

This stimulates a collaborative work environment and speeds the pace of operational routines. Customer Data Platforms are also known for making marketers’ lives less complicated since automating workflows would take too many working hours to be accomplished.

The other reason companies use Customer Data Platforms is that they are much more than a simple database. According to the CDP Institute, the ideal Customer Data Platform should contain five essential capabilities:

  • Absorb data from any source
  • Give full details of ingested data
  • Store data without end and frequently
  • Create unified profiles (such as personas)
  • Share data with any system that needs it

All of the five skills above drive brands into having a vigorous understanding of their customer base by collecting and analyzing reliable data across their marketing channels.

What types of data does a Customer Data Platform assess?

The types of customer data assessed by a CDP can be quantitative and qualitative. 

In other words, by using a CDP, you will be able to figure out:

  • How to identify your customers, using personal data
  • How to interact with your customers, using interactional data
  • How customers expect to be impacted by experiences, using behavioral data
  • How your customers perceive your brand, using attitudinal data

The datasets above are being generated at all times in any digital environment and should be combined to create an unbeatable and absolute customer understanding.

But how do CDPs gather such different information?

They reach out to analytics reports, engagement measures, support occurrences, eCommerce metrics, and customer feedback (to quote a few), to maximize your knowledge and equip you with fast, accurate moves.

This is the main reason why CDPs are revolutionizing the way brands communicate with customers and vice-versa. They are an unlimited and underlying base for companies to create remarkable customer experiences and increase customer engagement in a way we have never seen before.

The effects of CDP in customer experience

A Customer Data Platform grants companies an invincible competitive advantage: passionate customers who keep being fed with reasons to remain brand loyal.

Historically, we can see customers have adopted technologies faster than the brands they interact with. This made companies try to embrace digital transformation technologies focused on customer experience to reach out to consumers where they are and how they want.

Expanding your brand’s online presence to talk to customers in multiple channels isn’t enough, in any case. Any company can create an Instagram account and interact with its audience then and there, right?

However, the ones that truly stand out are focused on delivering personalized, relevant, well-designed interactions that take place as soon as customers want.

Tailored customer interactions should happen anywhere, at any time. This is the main reason why organizations around the world are digitizing their business models. According to the Boston Consulting Group Research, personalization will drive an $800 billion revenue shift to the top 15% of companies that work best on it, in only three industries.

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I know what you’re thinking: that’s much profit for a small number of companies—and yes, it is. Even so, it sounds like a warning: companies that aren’t ready to turn personalization ordinary in their marketing campaigns, will be left stranded.

As you know, doing a great job on personalization is all about knowing everything there is to know about your customers and quickly activating your knowledge when needed.

Can you notice any coincidences between this goal and the usage of a CDP?

How CDPs are reinventing customer relations

Suppose you’re leading digital initiatives to deepen the relationship between your customers and your brand. In that case, you should pay attention to the changes CDPs are leading in customer management and how it differs from other popular marketing tools.

A Customer Data Platform is way more complete than a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

CRM will tell you how to personalize and improve existing customer relationships. Meanwhile, a CDP will do that and indicate how you can promote products and services and what you should do to attract new customers.

With the new untapped potential CDPs unleash, companies are increasingly confident in meeting market changes and customers’ preferences. Hesitating in our competitive world is no longer an option, and data-driven marketing plays a vital role in feeding companies with unequivocal customer interactions.

Ahead, we have numbered a few ways Customer Data Platforms reinvent customer relations to inspire you and your team.

1. CDP enables segmentation opportunities

While it simultaneously optimizes strategies, a CDP provides companies with a 360-degree view of customers to act on an essential customer experience requirement: segmentation.

Segmenting customers by specific traits, behaviors, attitudes, and others is a fantastic opportunity to create tailored marketing touchpoints throughout their journey and attract them with meaningful content.

When based on data, segmentation is an unmatched growth engine that encourages customer loyalty and enhances profitability.

2. A CDP gives your interactions a personal touch

Similarly, you can not spell personalization without customer data.

Owning a Customer Data Platform will help you quickly access reliable information to customize customer interactions, making your consumers feel special, and long-term relationships feasible.

Many companies are using CDP for Customer Data Management. See below how their tactics connect with top-level personalization:

3. A CDP enriches customer relationships

There isn’t enough emphasis on how knowing your customers is essential for customer relations.

People expect to be treated accordingly to their visions as much as they wish to connect emotionally with brands. A single miscommunication can harm brand-customer relationships irreparably.

As soon as you have a panoramic view of your customers’ habits, preferences, needs, and issues, you should feel more confident in building specific touchpoints that elevate the customer journey and make customers want to hang around you for longer.

Owning a Customer Data Platform will also measure your customer loyalty programs’ effectiveness and help you find what groups of customers deserve attention according to their life cycle.

4. A CDP is agile

Agile methodologies are the perfect response to a world that is changing every day, every hour. CDPs consider our ever-changing environment and let your team access specific data whenever it needs, contributing to an agility mindset.

Agility layers can be used to shape CDP frameworks that adjust to your company’s infrastructure, turning data sharing into a reality. CDPs also absorb data from other internal systems, like CRMs and Data Management Platforms (DMPs), you might already have.

Apart from that, CDPs update in real-time. This allows you to assess micro-moments data and instantly operationalize it.

5. A CDP ingests data from any source

Your customers are everywhere these days, right? You can find them on social media, navigate your website, read your emails, download your app, and take a look at your physical store. The interaction possibilities between your customer and your brand are countless.

If truth be told, it truly doesn’t matter where your customers are and what they’re doing. Whether they’re reading your blog or using your chatbot, data is being generated at all times, collected from simple interactions to complex operations.

A Customer Data Platform reaches out to any source of information, from Live Chats to SEO, from blogging to Twitter, from customer loyalty to affiliate marketing programs to provide your company with everything you know about your potential and current consumers.

6. A CDP elevates digital transformation

Simply, a digital transformation process should rely on—and a lot!—on a Customer Data Platform.

By watching digital-native organizations, it becomes clear that many technologies can be embedded to digitize businesses.

However, it is worthless to implement technologies that don’t accurately connect with customers’ needs. Digital transformation starts and ends with the customer, transcending traditional marketing, sales, and customer service roles.

That being said, without a reliable Customer Data Platform, companies who are digitizing their operations will mostly fail to unleash the real potential of a digital transformation.

Digital-native companies have already built their business model based on data collection and responding to customers’ needs with high-level experiences.

These companies combine traditional marketing strategies, such as loyalty programs, with groundbreaking digital initiatives that connect with customers in real-time and engross their engagement.

Remember: It is crucial to direct your digital transformation efforts into interactions that engage your audience, and a Customer Data Platform is intimately related to that.

It taps into your databases to unify relevant information and operationalize customer knowledge, delivering targeted experiences that will delight and retain your customers.

It should also be stated that CDPs assist companies in taking a step back and revisiting their processes to leverage technology cleverly.

For example, Netflix was quick to turn its service into a scalable streaming platform that replies to customers’ demands. The now-sector-leading company could only reinvent itself because it took a very attentive look at customer data and responded accordingly.

Align your digital initiatives with the power of a Customer Data Platform

While IT staff has been skeptical for a while, digital leaders worldwide have been engrossing CDP in their workflows and getting amazing results from data management automation.

Not only has perfect treating data been helping these leaders come up with customer-centric solutions, but it has optimized their budget and turned manual work more effective.

Forbes Insights highlighted that 44% of surveyed organizations stated a Customer Data Platform is helping drive customer loyalty and increase ROI.

Arena serves customers from 120 different countries and sees firsthand how the fast-paced digital environment influences global market changes day after day.

That is why we work to build awareness for digital leaders and marketers to embrace Customer Data Platforms in their full potential and boost customer engagement.

In case you need to further your research towards the CDP role for the upcoming years, download our Customer Data Platform 2020: the future of marketing and sales ebook and take a deeper dive.

An essential guide to Customer Data

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Customer data is the key to understand customers beyond the confines of your own strategy, which makes you avoid dangerous assumptions to create relevant products and experiences.

Continuously data analysis will help you to come up with strategies that cover the market’s lacking points and elevate your marketing to a more meaningful approach. 

We are witnessing a new customer era. Every company’s engines work daily to think, develop, and incorporate business and marketing strategies that put customers at the center of everything they do. 

This new approach does not strike the market as a surprise. For the past years, with so much information in the palm of their hands, customers became more demanding and more willing to connect with brands that make proper use of their information to deliver more than just basic products and services.

If you have been paying attention, you already know customers value experiences more than anything else these days. This means true engagement will only be achieved by a remarkable customer experience that elevates your brand and creates a sense of connection with your audience. However, planning an exceptional customer experience takes a wide understanding and a sharp knowledge of how to solve consumers’ issues.  

That is why customer data is definitely here to stay.

What is customer data and why does it matter?

Customer data is all the information a company gets from consumers whenever they interact with it. Whether it is personal, psychological, or demographic, customer data help companies clarify facts and avoid assumptions when thinking and refining business strategies related to customer experience.

The importance of customer data is related to the incessant need to build a strong customer understanding. Many organizations have already noticed that, by using data as a pillar, their operations draw near customer satisfaction and proper marketing approaches that return investments and reduces waste. On the other hand, without concise information about their customer base, companies fail to engage their audience and make sense of the many market opportunities datasets provide. 

Customer experiences are tremendously affected by customer data, which means the right data extraction, validation and analysis are crucial to generate accurate outcomes that will enhance marketing and business plans. Customer data matters so many companies have embarked on customer data management (CDM) to correctly address data in their goals and daily work.

With trustworthy data at the palm of your hand, you will feel more confident in tactics to contact, acquire, and retain your customers, keeping their interest, and offering them exceptional engaging interactions. Customer data will also support your financial decisions, assisting you in where and when to allocate your budget.

How is customer data created?

As you read, a massive amount of data is being created. All around the world, people are navigating desktop and mobile devices. It doesn’t matter if they are shopping, replying to an online survey, or filling a lead form to get in touch with a software development company. Each of their digital interactions with brands creates data — which continuously provides the basis for algorithms to produce more data.

According to Deloitte in its Global Marketing Trends 2020 report, 90% of all global data were produced in the last two years, considering more than 26 billion smart devices circulating the globe.

Aware of data potential, the market has amended digital initiatives to maximize data collection, extraction, and validation methods. Big data analytics have been embedded to extract useful information from huge datasets, such as CRMs, that can’t be manually validated. Simultaneously, data scientists have been growing as popular as the need to adopt a data-driven culture. 

These market signs alone are an extremely important indication that data is everywhere, and companies that don’t welcome it proactively will be in a tight spot.

Types of Customer Data

Customer data is separated into four main categories. In their own way, these categories will help you enhance the customer experience in different and empowering perspectives. 

Personal data

Also known as identity and basic data, this type of information allows customers to be recognized by individual details and is divided into linked and linkable information.

Every information that can be used to identify a person without extra details is linked personal data — full names and emails, for example. Date of birth, physical address, and phone numbers are linked personal data too.

Now, linkable information doesn’t identify on its own. Still, when combined with other pieces of information, it is useful to draw a bigger picture. ZIP codes, age, gender, job titles, education level, marital status, and number of children are examples of linkable personal data.

Interaction data 

If you ever wondered how your customers behave on your website, or how they interact with your emails and your social media accounts, interaction data will answer all of your questions.

Sometimes known as engagement data, interaction data brings a meaningful and solid viewpoint of how customers interact with your brand’s touchpoints. 

Examples of interaction data are: Time spent on your website, page views, social media engagement, traffic sources, customer service feedback, and paid ad conversions.

Behavioral data

If you want to know how customers respond to experiences with your products and services, pay attention to behavioral data. 

This type of data assists you to have a deeper understanding of behavior patterns your customers have throughout the purchase journey. This means interaction data may or not be considered behavioral data — it depends on the big picture and the goals you wish to achieve.

Some examples of behavioral information you can track are: Previous purchases, website heat-maps, customer loyalty program usage, repeated actions related to your products, and CTAs clicked. 

Attitudinal data

The fourth and last type of customer data is related to how consumers perceive your brand. Unlike metrics you can easily measure, such as product purchases, click rates, website visits, and social network interactions, attitudinal data refers to emotions and individual opinions. It embraces feelings, which makes them highly subjective — that explains why this type of data is also referred to as qualitative data. 

Continuously mining through attitudinal data will get you closer to proactively responding to consumers’ issues and anticipating trends they might be interested in. This is the perfect chance to get to know your consumers’ individual preferences and their point of view towards topics that interest you.

Attitudinal data examples are: Customer lifestyle, motivations, pain points, sentiments, and desirability. Customer reviews are excellent to gauge this sort of information.

Collecting customer data

As we have already emphasized, digital transformation has made every channel a powerful source of customer data. If your customers are interacting with your marketing and shopping channels, you can easily extract customer data from them using Customer Data Platforms (CDP).

There are several ways to collect customer data from distinct data points, and they depend on your goals.

That being said, before jumping to conclusions on which channel is the best to collect data from, make sure you address your data goals first. Is it to accelerate revenue? Develop new products? Get a more precise understanding if you ought to invest in a new marketing campaign? Start with the why, and then move forward.

More than predicting upcoming trends, recall that customer data should be highly attached to things that happened in the past. Past customer sales, buying decision patterns, abandonment rates (and much more) can be extracted from customer data to develop better strategies that respond directly to what your consumers did and said months, weeks, and days ago.

We have compiled some collecting data options ahead.

1. Website Analytics

Web analytics reports are excellent to understand what is resonating with your audience and how they are talking back to you. 

When investigating this type of report, remember behavioral data insights can be extracted from heat-maps, bounce rate, page views, and even the devices your target market uses the most.

2. Social media engagement

Social media-based data can tell you a lot of things. Shares, likes, and comments on social media are basic engaging metrics you can measure to understand what customers think about your brand and what type of message they enjoy. You will likely get a good amount of data from social media analytics to make sense of customers’ sentiment towards you.

We highly recommend you to go even further and run social listening while analyzing social media insights. This will guarantee you interpret your customers’ interactions more accurately.

3. Customer interviews and feedback surveys

Feedback is crucial. Whether customers love what you’re doing or criticize it, you need to be available to take their considerations and opinions into account.

When done right, customer interviews, and feedback surveys will gather your audience’s interests, opinions, preferences, and how you can improve your products and services to serve them better.

Another data collection suggestion is to investigate customer churn. This explains the reason why some customers buy from you for a while and then leave. What affected their experience so they felt like not coming back? Is there anything you can do to improve this experience and avoid other customers from turning their backs on you?

If you’re looking for ways to extract behavioral and attitudinal data, consider searching for customer feedback and combine this information with other data to get a bigger picture.

4. Contact information 

Contact information is vital to customer data. If you wish to communicate with your consumers, you should know where to find them according to the stage of their journey.

From phones to physical addresses and social media, contact information is needed to build a good amount of personal data you can rely on.

5. Customer service

Customer service is related to feedback but contains high potential itself. It is critical to allow customers to reach out to customer service software enabled to bring useful data your way. 

As a consequence, customers can quickly seek help for big and small issues and solve their problems more easily all while providing you with more information.

Validating customer data

As vital as it is, customer data is useful when you are ready to properly extract and validate it. This means you need to find actual helpful information from your data sources, and pull them out to understand how valuable they are. This is what we call data extraction — and it will prevent you from swimming in a random sea of data.

Data extraction uses the right tools to streamline data from customer experience to marketing, and makes sure the information provided is useful for your teams to make better decisions.

To avoid wasting all the money, time, and effort you put into collecting data, there are some essential considerations about customer data validation you should pay attention to:

  1. Customer data must be a source of truth and facts about your audience: Above all things, remember customer data is supposed to assist you in using factual information to come up with fitting solutions. For this reason, the data you extract must be reliable and revolve around your clients. If the data you’re extracting isn’t customer-centric, you better reconsider why it is important.
  1. Customer data must be goal-oriented: Exploring multi-channels to extract data from without a clear goal in mind might lead you to conclusions that don’t make much sense. Make sure you know what your goals are from the beginning and set milestones to measure your progress. This will help you visualize how much data is affecting your operations and what else can be done.
  1. Customer data must be integrated: Thanks to technology, data can now be transferred from one channel to another in a matter of seconds — and that is essential to every company that needs fresh information to anticipate opportunities and maximize their potential. By using customer data integration (CDI) tools, you ensure information gets to the right people and set a pattern to collect, organize, unify, and visualize customer data wholesomely. Best of all, CDI automates these processes and cuts down routines that take time. This means your human resources will have more time to focus on what they’re good at: Finding perfect responses to all the data software and algorithms have extracted and assembled for you.
  1. Customer data must be contextualized: In-house data, also known as first-party data, should be combined with external data to give the information you’re putting your hands in a more precise context. There are two types of external data you can blend with your in-house insights to ensure a broader understanding: second party data and third party data. The second party data is the information provided by another company towards the audience that interests you — this type of data is usually shared between partners. In the meantime, third party data is collected by companies that don’t have a link to customers and sell information to other organizations. These data types can enrich your first-party data and elevate your insights.

Customer Data Analysis

Customer data analysis is crucial to any customer data strategy. Wrong data analysis might cause disconnected and poor responses from brands to erupt and bother customers with interactions they don’t need nor asked for.

As complex as it might sound to gather validated data to be analyzed, some special technologies can help the process be smoother and more efficient. Data mining is one of them. By mixing machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence (AI), data mining can analyze loads of data using sharp techniques —and the greatest thing about it is that its analysis is automatic.

Analyzing quantitative data

When it comes to quantitative data, you might come across the need to categorize it according to some classifications and segmentations. Or, perhaps, you will notice it is necessary to relate different data points and comprehend how specific characteristics affect the customer experience. Luckily, data mining provides many programmatic settings that can be adjusted to return the insights you are looking for. 

If you’re willing to fragment customers to create more dynamic and creative ads, customer data analysis will help you find segmentation opportunities. If your team needs to associate behavioral patterns to develop a new campaign, customer data analysis will gather helpful information to predict how people will respond to your strategy. The opportunities are countless.

Analyzing qualitative data

On the other side, when we talk about qualitative data, many companies face the challenge of making sense of subjective information, such as sentiment. People’s emotions and feelings vary individually, and being stuck in the middle of so many variations is an uncertain place for your company to be at. If you’re wondering how to absorb valuable insights from this context, we have good news for you: there are ways technology can track important keywords to translate qualitative data into actionable decisions.

When analyzing qualitative data, pay attention to patterns that might make the situation clearer. Are your customers using the same keywords when they give feedback? Are the stories they tell somehow similar? Are there common elements in the ideas they communicate that can help you create a further sense of how they feel about your brand?

Take advantage of what customers say to you in feedback interviews, surveys, and methods of the sort, to gather enough data and take action. 

Benefits of Customer Data Analysis

Relying on customer data will benefit you in countless ways. To help you understand how, we’ve listed some benefits in-detail right ahead:

1. Segmentation

Segmenting your customers is a smart way to get a broader view of what their issues are and how you can reach out to them more effectively. Separating them by age, demographics, gender, job title, and more makes it easier to plan specific marketing campaigns that will straightforwardly attract them, whether your goal is to attract them, engage them or make them buy more.

2. Personalization

People no longer wish to be contacted with general messages that lack a personal touch. Customer experience is a synonym of personalization and, if you don’t use data-based strategies to customize interactions with your consumers, it is highly likely that they will get frustrated by irrelevant content and mass communication. In contrast, personalization increases service quality and customer satisfaction.

3. Deeper audience understanding

Data is becoming the centerpiece of companies that desire is to remain relevant in customers’ minds. This happens because, without a detailed and precise understanding of their audience, companies will hardly add value to their customer base. 

Customer data is the key to understand customers beyond the confines of your own strategy, which makes you avoid dangerous assumptions to create relevant products and experiences. Continuously data analysis will help you to come up with solutions around creative, data, and media — the right combination to empower your marketing and business approaches.

4. Revenue

When used correctly, customer data helps you understand how to increase your consumers’ loyalty and lifetime value, reducing churn at the same time. It also gives you a better understanding of where to invest in valuable campaigns and trends that will bring you more ROI.

5. Humanization

Human connection isn’t just another trend. The fact customers need to embrace companies with a purpose is changing their relationships with brands. People don’t want to be treated as a transaction. On the contrary, they expect companies to act authentically and be transparent in what they believe in, treating them individually. Pulling the right customer data contributes to humanize your brand so it corresponds to these expectations. It also frees your team to have more time to focus on how to genuinely engage customers. 

Data-base your decisions

Now that you’ve come to the end of this article, you know there isn’t space for assumptions to guide your brand’s decisions anymore. More than ever, new ideas and improvements need to connect with customers’ expectations. In this context, embracing the right technologies to collect, extract, validate, and analyze data is crucial. 

To find out more advantages that the use of Customer Data can provide for your company, contact one of our consultants, and resolve any doubts on the subject.

9 reasons why you should start doing it

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Being all ears to your customers has amazing benefits. It increases customer acquisition and makes them brand loyal. It also improves branding strategies and gives you powerful insights about your industry, connecting you to new market opportunities.

If you don’t want to miss out on these benefits, you better start embracing social listening. 

Reputation is critical to any company that is willing to increase customer loyalty and build confidence in the market. With the many digital channels that allow conversations between customers and brands, organizations from the B2C and B2B sectors work hard to be positively recognized by potential and current clients. One efficient way of generating awareness is to have a strong social media presence and reach out to customers with helpful and engaging interactions.

Still, these interactions can only be valuable if brands are ready to actively listen instead of guessing what people want. 

When customers talk to you, whether they’re feeling good or bad about your brand, they expect you to talk back accurately. The last thing you want is to make them feel like you don’t care about what they have to say – or that you’re not making any effort to understand what they mean.

And that is why you should start using social listening.

What is social listening?

Social listening is the act of monitoring your brand’s social media accounts and channels to search for customer feedback and give appropriate responses. 

In order to social listen, you firstly need to track your brand’s mentions and discussions, which can be done by social media monitoring tools. Only then, you’ll manage to do its core task: analyze conversations’ context to make better and more proactive communication decisions.

Think about an ordinary conversation. When someone talks to you, you listen before replying, right? You do that because you know dialogues and interactions won’t make sense unless you assimilate what’s being stated. When it comes to brands and consumers communicating with each other, the line of thought is the same.

By being an active social listener, you’ll be able to reply to some very important questions: Why are people talking about you? Where and how are they doing it? What do they truly want? How can you connect with them?

These questions can lead to a powerful understanding of how to improve content for your customers, create better relationships with your followers, and increase consumer satisfaction.

We separate social listening into four important actions: find, listen, understand, and take action.

  • By finding, you monitor and track the right places and discussions that gravitate around your brand.
  • By listening, you pay attention to what is being said.
  • By understanding, you address issues that are being presented and collect important feedback.
  • By taking action, you work on solutions that will remedy the situation and make your customers happier.

Practice makes perfect, so make sure you find, listen, understand, and take action continuously.

Why is social listening important?

When customers talk, they’re doing an amazing job for you. Their feedback lets you know what you should keep and what you should change in your business. If you listen clearly to consumers and give them what they need in return, they will remember you for solving their problems. Now, try ignoring customers to see how bad it can get. An unresponsive customer service approach will cost you a high number of consumers that will never do business with your brand again.

A bad brand reputation can be a way to downfall, and we are not exaggerating. Remember what happened to Kodak? It once led the photographic film market but failed to understand people were growing more and more fond of digital photography and went bankrupt. 

We have to emphasize that customer-centric cultures have never been so popular. By putting customers at the center of everything they do, these cultures put efforts into anticipating consumers’ needs and creating proactive strategies to give them what they want: new products, services, loyalty programs, and much more.

Information is everywhere and anywhere and it’s vital to track your brand’s social media to try and be wary of what people are saying about and to you. And that is the very least.

9 reasons why you should use social listening

Ahead, we give you detailed reasons why you should embrace social listening to proactively respond to your followers and consumers.

1. Customers expect you to speak out accordingly

Responsiveness is very important, as your audience expects you to speak out when relevant discussions and events take place. In 2018, a survey made by Clutch discovered that 76% of people expect brands to reply on social media. When we talk about millennials, 80% of takers expect brands to reply and 90% want to get an answer on the same day.

However, recall that an inappropriate response will only frustrate your customers, no matter how fast you’re able to reply.

If you want to make your clients brand loyal and boost customer retention, you better start replying accordingly to what they say — and, by accordingly, we mean you have to thoughtfully understand your customers’ issues to shape valuable responses. Keep this in mind: replying is good, but replying accordingly is what social listening is all about.

2. Have a better understanding of your audience

One of the many reasons organizations keep clear interactions with consumers is to generate and gather high-perspective data that maps their concerns and issues. Social listening will guide you to big pictures that exemplify your consumers’ concerns and how you can act on them.

Combined with the need to have a better audience understanding, social listening offers fresh data to get audience insights related to the public perception of your brand, from competitive analysis — whether in brand or product level — to how marketing campaigns resonate.

By social listening, you can identify demographics, preferences, and customer behaviors as much as the general sentiment about your brand. Once you have tangible reports, you can analyze qualitative data and leverage it to grow your brand strategy and take action.

We will sound obvious, but it’s true: your social listening data will only be valuable if you know what to do with it. For this reason, it is essential to set up a frequency to investigate the information you’re getting and think about how you’ll keep track of the results from time to time.

3. Monitor new industry opportunities

Is there anything that’s trending in your industry that you should know? Any social issue related to your brand that needs to be addressed? Any gap in your sector that people are talking about? Any questions from customers that you can answer better than your competitors? Social listening can help you find the answers to these questions. 

By tracking industry buzzwords and trends, social listening will bring you precious insights about your area of expertise and shed light on discussions that can be amazing opportunities for your brand. That is an efficient way to keep a hear out for market trends, discover what’s lacking in your industry and what you can do to innovate and attract more customers. 

4. Keep track of your brand’s health

Social listening is an effective way of developing better elements that shape your brand in customers’ minds. As soon as you continuously keep track of what people say on the internet, you’re able to make sense of what and how users would like your brand to communicate. Attentively listening to consumers’ feedback is essential to come up with interesting brand strategies.

Social listening is also an excellent way of providing constant investigation towards bad reviews and comments that can affect your brand negatively. Never forget that anything can go viral on social media. Unhappy customers and displeased staff members know they can freely express themselves on online networks and be heard. Social channels empower their voices and reach people who might be going through the same issues. With that in mind, it is completely possible that a single complaint could be reinforced by others and create unwanted attention. 

Being ready to address brand disasters and manage a crisis isn’t overreacting in this fast-paced environment we call the internet — and, trust us, you’ll be glad to have the right tools and tactics to deal with harmful posts and remedy the damage. 

It’s true that you won’t be able to control everything people say about your brand, but you can control how you react to it and mitigate the negative impact. Learn with your previous experiences and prepare not to just reply to undesirable controversy, but to avoid it before it happens. For example, if your launch sales were affected because your website was down, you better start looking for infrastructure tests that will strengthen your website and avoid outages. 

5. Increase customer acquisition 

Another reason you should embrace social listening is that data provided by it will lead you to create content people care about. When you start shaping your content to followers’ preferences, chances are you’ll attract more users that connect with you and have a genuine interest in what you have to say. 

You already know it — expressing your brand message in social media through responses, hashtags, live streaming, and more, calls the attention of content viewers and make it easier for you to convert them into leads. This works better than driving traffic through ads to people who have never heard of you before.

Pay attention to what audiences are looking for and what type of content they enjoy viewing and sharing. Photos, videos, mentions, polls… All of these are instruments you can use to increase customer acquisition smartly and more humanly.

Quick example: Netflix is one of the top-references for brands that want to stand out on social media and attract public attention. With unique humor, Netflix memes its own shows, retweets Netflix-related posts made by followers, and replies with a tone its audience can positively connect with. 

6. Keep old customers engaged

It is quite simple to understand how social listening can help you maintain old customers engaged and retained. If you ignore what consumers say when they reach out to you, it shows you don’t care about their experiences. By neglecting them, you’re paving the way for your customers to switch for competitors that are ready to offer valuable interactions.

Recall that many consumers’ stories are being told on social media, especially those where customers need your support. It isn’t unusual for clients to reach out to brands on Twitter or Instagram to get an issue addressed. Actually, they message and mention your brand on those channels because they expect you to reply and solve their problems quickly. No one has the time and patience it takes to hang on the line anymore. The good news is that social listening can absolutely help you to excel at fast, assertive support, and keep old customers engaged.

Engaged customers are more likely to be brand loyal, especially when you can keep meaningful interactions going on and offer them what quench their thirst for information, interactivity, and good customer experience.

7. Address common issues

If the same questions are made by your customers over and over, how can you make it easier for them to find the answer? If a considerable number of buyers are complaining about the same products, how can you give them a detailed, honest assessment of the problem? These are more questions you can wisely reply to by social listening.

If the big picture tells you your customers have the same common issues, maybe it is time to find out how to solve those issues and respond effectively to them.

Monitoring social media accounts to find these types of problems can make you arrive earlier in the game to prevent more consumers from being affected and provide the right solution to solve the issues of those who have already reached out for support.

8. Get quick feedback

From knowing how you can improve your products to where your audience is willing to communicate with you, feedback can give you constructive criticism about mostly anything. 

Launched a new product? Want to know how your brand positioning is doing? Have doubts if the last live event you promoted is matching your followers’ expectations? What people post on social media will certainly help you get a clear idea about those, and more.

Plus, if customers are talking about something that’s not working, you should be the first to know. Make sure to take their considerations into account and acknowledge their feedback, then start working on what will fix the problem. A new feature? A new product? A new campaign? Getting feedback — and, most importantly, fast feedback — will help you find your consumers’ pain points and understand how to solve them.

Quick example: Starbucks recently released an open letter based on a user’s negative feedback regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. After social listening to the critique, Starbucks used a respectful tone and gave an immediate solution to what the customer was talking about, showing how its employees can now support the movements while working. 

Don’t forget that positive feedback is important too. If customers love a campaign or the tone you’re using to reply to them, make sure you get it to generate more content that will match their preferences.

9. Identify influencers and user-generated content

You won’t be surprised by the fact social networks are full of potential influencers that can help you promote your brand — or threat it. Remember that even people who only had good experiences with your brand can be influenced if someone important they follow feels bad about you (and good about your competitors).

Another social listening advantage is that it allows you to track user-generated content to keep your followers updated. Being continuously connected to monitor what digital influencers say and do will lead you to understand who you can partner with. Search for hashtags, keywords, accounts, and more to keep your brand aware of what’s going on in real-time. You can also start mapping people who your audience connects with and listen to what they say so you don’t miss out on collaboration opportunities.

The role of social listening on live streaming

It’s no secret to you that people love when you go live and cover news and events as they happen. Live streaming has become extremely popular in the last years and it is a gold mine for brands that want to keep relevant by connecting with customers in real-time. The spectator customer profile is being replaced by the active customer, who wants to join brands in emotional and thrilling experiences.

But how do live events and streaming connect with social listening? Well, social listening is a powerful tool when it comes to combining the right strategies to go live.

From sports games to elections, live streams are effective event coverage mechanisms that allow customers to participate in what’s going on even if they’re far away. Meanwhile, social listening uses social streams to monitor and interpret the viewers’ behavior and comments to get insights.

When done right, social listening can be unbeatable in content creation. The reason why is that live streaming gives you engaging methods, such as live discussions and Q&As, that will transform into data — and, as you know, social listening will turn data into action. 

At Arena, we recognize the power of social listening in social streams and event monitoring.

Our social monitoring stream tool publishes content from different sources automatically or manually and provides results coming in real-time. You can adapt filters and search parameters to improve results and post the freshest content to engage your audience. Besides, our social stream feature easily integrates your search stream with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and more personalized RSS feeds.

[Real case example]

Grow your brand by social listening

We’re a bit biased, it’s true, but Arena is ready to empower companies to grow their audience in their websites by creating meaningful live experiences.

So, if you’re considering having a social monitoring stream and finding interactive ways to get in touch with your followers, we recommend you keep an eye on ongoing discussions related to your brand and make your own website the go-to place for relevant, instantaneous content.

It’s easier to be an authority in your field when you’re able to mix different sources and formats automatically into your website, all while providing your customer with an exclusive space for debating and chatting. Fortunately, we have the perfect tool that will do that for you.

A live blog will give your brand the chance to use a smart variety of tools to cover a particular event and engage users that are watching remotely.

By using it, you can publish news to your website as they happen, all while adding users’ reactions from social media and witnessing in-progress-discussions on live chats. Our tool is highly customizable and handles in-feed comments, connects with your video platform, creates polls, and posts social content that engages and keeps your followers updated.

Join us and be able to:

  • Increase time spent on your website
  • Let users engage with your posts
  • Automate content distribution
  • Cover field events that matter to your customers

From bloggers to large enterprises, from Oscars to Super Bowl, Arena is ideal to manage any type of live experience and to help you grow your brand by social listening.

Want to capture audience attention and feed your followers with fresh content at all times? Learn more about the subject in our Live Blog article!

Listen to your audience – and take back its ownership

When talking to your spectators and customers, you assume they’ll talk back to you. This dialog and communication are what, for the most part, define audience engagement.

In general, the question “what is audience engagement” has many different answers, but all of them will lead to the same essence. Keep reading to learn our Ultimate Guide to Audience Engagement.