How to implement live engagement

At Whisbi, we break our live engagement process into three main steps, which roughly reflect the stages in the buyer’s journey that most customers progress through on their way to making a purchase.

In this chapter, we’ll break down these main stages and explain how live engagement techniques can be used each step of the way to connect with your audience members and walk them through the journey to becoming a happy customer.

Engage

This is the first stage of the process, aligning with the top of the sales funnel and the beginning of the customer journey. This is where customers are just getting to know your brand, consuming content in the form of social media posts, videos, and blog articles.

They’re usually not ready to make a purchase at this point (although they might be), and the focus should be on informing them and giving them all the resources they need to get on board with your brand. How can we use live engagement to do that?

One great way is with one-to-many video broadcasts, allowing you to educate and inform multiple customers at once about your products with dynamic video content. Encourage questions and have your presenters interact with viewers in real-time. This allows you to connect with your customers from the very start — forging a bond and setting the stage for your future relationship. If you would like to learn more about Live Broadcasting, read our guide.

The popularity of video as a way to interact with brands has skyrocketed in 2020. According to the Global Customer Engagement Landscape Report by Vonage:

“Since January, globally, there has been 140% growth in the number of people who prefer to connect with businesses via video. Video chat has also become a mainstream addition to people’s everyday lives, and U.S. adoption has experienced four years of growth in just seven months, with 43% of Americans now video chatting with businesses regularly.”

Guide

Once your customers have gotten to know your brand a little better and are getting ready to make a purchase, it’s time to guide them towards the sale.

This is the middle part of the sales funnel, and usually takes the form of things like landing pages, case studies, and email sequences. Your goal should be to give your prospects everything they need to make a decision and become a paying customer.

Chatbots can be a powerful tool at this stage. You can use bots to guide, inform, and convert your visitors into customers. As we covered in the previous section, chatbots are increasingly popular and effective tools and allow you to open interactions with customers without the need for a human staff member.

Chatbots can also help minimize lead response time, which has huge implications when it comes to qualifying leads. According to the Harvard Business Review: “Brands who respond to online leads within the first couple of hours are more than 60 times as likely to qualify them as potential customers than those who wait 24 hours or longer.”

Research based on 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies in the U.S.

Sell

The final stage of the process, and perhaps the most important, is the sale.

This is where good sales chatbots really come into their own. Whisbi’s sales chatbots can quickly qualify whether or not a lead is ready to be referred to a member of your sales team, simply by asking some basic questions.

According to a report by Mulesoft, 93% of consumers see real-time help beneficial during their online customer journey, and 51% were more likely to purchase from a website if they could get answers via live chat.

If the lead is ready to buy, it’s simply a case of connecting them to a human sales rep to complete the sale. Our solution also makes it easy to carefully track and report at this stage, which is crucial to understand why customers are behaving the way they do and make changes to improve your sales process and generate more revenue.