The rise of brands that embraced live streaming video & live engagement in 2020 will continue in 2021

In 2020 we helped around 100 global enterprises accelerate their digital transformation due to COVID-19. We wanted to make sure all of our customers took full advantage of what our Live Engagement solution had to offer. 

This meant that when the world entered a full lockdown, our existing customers were able to quickly shift their strategies towards digital channels and use their retail locations & staff to serve customers online. And as big call centers were shutting down too, the call center agents could continue working from home, connected to the Whisbi platform! This not only saved companies’ revenues but also helped them to keep jobs and avoid mass firings. 

We also had many new customers jumping on the Live Engagement wagon and connecting their call center and retail staff to our platform to ensure some sort of “business as usual”.

In total Whisbi saw a remarkable +140% growth YoY in 2020!

Live Streaming E-commerce: the new way to sell online

Started in China around 3 years ago, live shopping already makes up more than 10% of the country’s E-commerce sales! The US and European markets are catching up fast, mainly due to high customer adoption and familiarity with live-streaming platforms. Needless to say that the “add-to-cart” sales rates from retail-streaming are incomparable to any other channel. 

Live video is the ‘now’ for E-commerce retail and the ‘future’ for more complex sales and higher ticket purchases. Whisbi is leading the way in live video broadcasting that has proven to drive engagement and increase online conversion rates. Simply put, our solution allows brands to catch up with existing customer expectations around live streaming and enables brands to bring the in-store experience online through live video.

Looking back at a remarkable 2020

Last year was outstanding, in so many ways. It has been very unpredictable: our customers had to adjust to the new market conditions almost overnight. For Whisbi it was a record-breaking year, with highly increased demand as the switch to Live Engagement for many global brands went from a ‘nice to have’ to ‘must-have’. Our statistics speak for themselves.

Outstanding growth in Whisbi Engage adoption

Let’s crunch some numbers and take a look at how this turbulent year has contributed to the tremendous growth within our company. The most engaging way to be in touch with your customers is through Video Broadcast by Whisbi. Within this ENGAGE solution it is possible for Enterprises to broadcast live from their website to an unlimited number of viewers online. Brands can widen their top of the funnel, increase customer engagement by delivering a better customer experience.

It’s clear that Conversational Sales has an edge over traditional sales, and that’s only going to get bigger as we enter an increasingly digital and remote work environment.

Let’s dive into the numbers of our Engage solution:

Big volume of sales through our Guide & Sell solutions

Through our GUIDE solution, Enterprises are able to transform their existing sales workflows into a guided conversational experience that qualifies and converts online visitors into customers completely unassisted. 

Customers that need help with their purchase decision can connect in real-time to brand experts through our SELL solution and get a store-like experience online. In Q4 we’ve achieved a 45% growth YoY in terms of usage for this product – and it’s been the best quarter of the year!

Revolutionary forecast for 2021

Great things are coming this year! We’re focussing on Live Engagement more than ever before  – we strongly believe that live streaming is the biggest thing that happened to retailers since smartphones (Amazon Live is also betting on this new trend). We already have global customers like Samsung & Hyundai that were early adopters of our broadcast solution and believe live video is the best experience a brand can offer to their online customers.

Have a look at our Q1 2021 Product roadmap to see what new developments are already in the making. Our Product team is driven by our customer feedback and strongly believes in continuous improvement. They are already hard at work to deliver an even better experience through our products:

Our ENGAGE solution is becoming even more powerful:

• Add support in the Whisbi Deck dashboard for the reporting of the new architecture
• Implement new regions in launcher within our Widget, so we can support regional distribution
• Select Wowza US/EUR server: the user can choose to broadcast to the US or European server
• Improve the tracking, apply the Web accessibility guidelines and enable a configurable Lead Capture on top of the Broadcast Widget
  

Our GUIDE solution will continue to grow in 2021:

• Pre-built conversations: ready-built modules that are easily configurable to each customer’s needs
• Personalize and personify the flow depending on the end-user’s needs and data to have a more human-like conversation 
• Enrich the capabilities and improve conversions from the chatbot thanks to third-party technologies such as Lead Ratings
• Send SMS reminders of online scheduled calls
  

Our SELL solution will be expanded with the following features:

• Mobile notifications if an agent becomes unavailable
• The option to adapt the cloud environment to specific business needs, e.g. frozen versions of Whisbi
• Whisbi admin module to easily configure workflows with automatic SMS or triggered calls within the Lead Manager

About Whisbi

Whisbi is a global provider of a video-first conversation sales platform combining, live video, chat, voice, web/content sharing, and chatbot. Our solution transforms Digital Sales & Marketing with a differentiating online customer experience to improve Live Engagement and increase sales conversion.

Alex Bisbe

CEO & Co-Founder