In this guide, we’ll take a look at what live engagement is and how brands can use it to maximum effect. We’ll look at some brands already using it successfully, and why it’s so important and useful.

1. A Guide to
Live Engagement

2. A Guide to Live
Engagement
In the modern, hyper-connected world, customer
engagement is more important than ever before.
Today’s online consumers have a shorter attention span
than ever before, and higher expectations from brands when
it comes to engagement, interaction, and service.
And, in many cases, businesses are failing to meet these
expectations — 54% of customers now say companies need
to fundamentally transform how they engage.
The rewards for doing this are impressive. Customers who
are fully engaged represent a 23% higher share in
profitability, revenue, and relationship growth. Plus,
research from the Temkin Group found that companies
earning $1 billion annually can expect to earn an additional
$700 million within 3 years of investing in customer
experience.
The message is clear: it’s never been more important to
connect with your customers at every stage of the funnel.
Brands that fail to do this effectively will pay the price, and
those that get it right stand to make big gains.
One of the best ways to do this is through live engagement.
Done right, live engagement allows you to connect with
your customers, capture their attention, and achieve your
goals at every stage of the sales funnel.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at what live engagement is
and how brands can use it to maximum effect. We’ll look at
some brands already using it successfully, and why it’s so
important and useful.

3. What is Live
Engagement?
Engaging with your customers — constantly and effectively
— is essential in today’s online world. There are multiple ways
to do this, from blog content and email campaigns to social
media posts and YouTube videos.
Most engagement, while it’s highly effective, tends to fall
short in one key area — it’s not live. Customers read blog
articles published several months ago, they watch videos
recorded last November. You’re still talking to them and
engaging with them, but it’s not happening in real-time.
To really ramp up your engagement efforts, then, it’s
important to think about ways to connect with your
customer in a more immediate and live way. This is what we
call live engagement, and we think it has the potential to
transform digital marketing and sales.
Live engagement involves striking up a real-time
conversation with your customers at any stage in the sales
process. Whether they’ve just stumbled upon the first piece
of content by your brand, or they’re getting ready to hit the
buy button, or they’re already a satisfied customer, you can
engage at any point in the best way for the situation.
It’s highly effective and represents a more intimate
connection and deeper satisfaction. Before we move onto
the stats supporting this, let’s take a quick look at some of
the channels that are used in live engagement:

4. What is Live
Engagement?
One-to-one selling platforms.
Chatbots have the ability to qualify
leads and send these customers to a
member of the sales team for one-
to-one interaction. This is the
pinnacle of live engagement, quickly
putting an interested and engaged
customer into contact with
a human to complete the sale.
Live engagement allows brands to take a
more hands-on role in working with their
customers. Instead of relying solely on static
content, they can engage with their
audience in the moment, dealing with
questions and issues as they arise.
It’s a much more dynamic way of
approaching the sales process and has a
huge amount of potential. In the next
sections, we’ll show you how to use live
engagement in your own business.
First, however, let’s take a look at some
statistics that highlight why live
engagement is so valuable.
Chatbots. Chatbots are an
increasingly popular way for
customers to interact with your brand
simply by sending instant messages
through a chat platform. Sales
chatbots can solve basic problems
quickly, refer users to sales staff, and
guide interested customers through
large chunks of the buying journey.
Live videos. Unlike traditional video
content, live videos are broadcast
to your viewers in real-time.
This means they feature cutting-
edge information, a highly relevant
vibe, and the opportunity for
viewers to ask questions and
interact with the host there
and then.

5. Why use Live
Engagement for
business?
Live engagement techniques are extremely popular among
customers. The data shows that adopting these methods is a
sure-fire way to delight your audience, increase engagement,
and grow your brand.
Let’s take a look at the stats supporting some key live
engagement techniques.
Live videos.
Live video content is an extremely effective way to
connect with customers in a way they consistently love.
Video has always been a popular medium, and combining
it with real-time interaction has proven to be a big hit.
Social media live alternatives.
Whisbi allows you to broadcast video directly from your
brand's website. Our broadcast solution isn't banned
from anywhere. Customers can access your broadcasts
and interact with your brand, allowing for truly global
reach. Imagine your live video broadcast platform helping
you sell more: a great alternative to connect with your
audience instead of Facebook and Youtube. Lead capture
is built into the broadcast, and viewers can be directed to
a landing page by a chatbot during the online event. This
allows you to gain full control and harness your own
traffic and audience.
80% of consumers prefer
to watch live videos from
a brand than read a blog
80%
In 2019, internet users
watched a total of 1.1
billion hours of life video
1.1billion
The online live streaming industry
has grown by 99% between April
2019 and April 2020
99%

6. Why use Live
Engagement for
business?
Chatbots.
Chatbots are developing at a rapid rate. It wasn’t long ago
that they were fairly basic, limited to answering simplistic
questions, and essentially functioning as glorified FAQs.
Today’s chatbots are much more advanced, capable of
walking customers through fairly complex procedures,
handling the bulk of the sales process, and handing users
to real staff to complete a transaction.
57% of businesses now agree that
chatbots deliver a large ROI with
minimal effort, making them
almost a no-brainer for brands.
57%
And — perhaps surprisingly — the popularity of chatbots spans
all generations. It might not be shocking to learn that 70% of
Millenials report positive experiences with chatbots, but baby
boomers also seem to like them.
70%
Real-time marketing works.
Engaging with your audience in real-time is clearly a
successful approach. 85% of respondents in one survey said
providing experiences that are responsive to customers based
on real-time, in-the-moment behaviors is fundamental,
significant, or important to their future business.
And marketers in the UK reported a 26% increase in
conversion rates from real-time marketing. It’s clear that
there’s a big demand for this kind of immediate, dynamic
interaction between brands and their followers, and that’s
reflected in the bottom line of companies that can deliver this.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also had a major impact on how
customers want to interact with brands — driving more
demand for real-time marketing. Here are some stats to
highlight this trend:

7. Why use Live
Engagement for
business?
So how can you build real-time marketing and live
engagement into your sales and marketing process, reaping
all the above rewards and many more?
75% of consumers have changed
their shopping behavior in
response to economic pressures,
store closings, and changing
priorities
75%
20% of those consumers
that have changed their
shopping behavior have
tried a new digital
shopping method.
20%
80% of those consumers
that have tried a new
digital shopping method
will continue to use it in
the future. McKinsey, 2020
80%

8. 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.

9. 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.
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:
How to implement
live engagement
“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.”

10. 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
How to implement
live engagement

11. 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.
How to implement
live engagement
>
>
>

12. Live engagement
success stories
Let’s take a look at a few examples of how Whisbi has used
live engagement to help brands connect with their
customers and achieve their goals.
The challenge: Hyundai knows that the ease of purchase will likely affect the buying
decision more and more. The brand took note of how consumers want to shop, how they
want to interact online and make the experience as easy as possible. The goal was to
create a smooth buying process coupled with a good product that would allow for a
significant gain in the market
Hyundai wanted to capture new car buyers attention online, early in their research process
and be able to show their new cars on their website in an engaging and interactive way.
The solution: We’ve integrated Whisbi Sell into the Whisbi Engage solution, allowing them
to offer personalised experiences to clients that already watched a live broadcast. Hyundai
Mexico set up a small showroom space in one of their dealerships with 2 presenters
broadcasting live from Monday to Friday, from 10AM to 1PM and from 2PM to 6PM, using
just a tablet.
461% increase in leads
461%
124% growth in requests
124%
3:1 ROI
3:1
Auto industry
Hyundai Business Case

13. Live engagement
success stories
Auto industry
Toyota Business Case
The challenge: Like Hyundai, Toyota’s customers were losing interest in the dealership
model and wanted to go through the car buying process online. Cutting-edge tools on
the website weren’t resulting in more conversions, and customers were finding it difficult
to get all the information they needed online, leading to friction.
The solution: Toyota used live engagement, driven by Whisbi’s platform, to create a
dialogue with customers via live chat or voice call. This way, they were able to eliminate
friction by providing information as needed throughout the buyer’s journey.
Customers also gained the ability to choose a date and time to speak with sales experts
with click-to-call.
The results:
56% of all leads booked
test drives through the
Whisbi One-to-One
solution.
56%
On average Whisbi
delivers more than 200
test drives to Toyota
every month!
200
95%
95% of customers loved
the service

14. Telecommunications
Vodafone Business Case
The challenge: Vodafone, like many companies, was witnessing a rapid shift from
traditional high street stores to ecommerce.
One major challenge was that their website contained insufficient information for
visitors, and they were finding it hard to get everything they needed to make a buying
decision. Vodafone was getting a high level of traffic to their website, but sales were
comparatively low.
The solution: Vodafone implemented Whisbi’s one-to-one and one-to-many solutions,
allowing live engagement with their customers at multiple points in the sales process.
They were able to provide lots of detailed information, offer interaction at every stage,
and overcome friction to deliver a more rewarding and successful customer experience
The results:
25% increase in online
conversion rate and
gained over 400K sales
leads/month
25%
Online sales share
increased to 20%, and
Whisbi represents 50% of
these sales
50%
Gained market innovator status
*
Live engagement
success stories

15. Travel & Hospitality
Bahia Princepe
(luxury hotel chain)
The challenge: Customers typically do a lot of research before booking a trip, and with
luxury hotels, customers will be hesitant to make a commitment unless they have as
much information as possible.
Bahia Principe wanted to make the booking decision and process as easy as possible for
their customers by making it easy for them to access all the information they need.
The solution: Bahia Principe used Whisbi’s live engagement tools to connect with their
visitors more easily at all stages of the customer journey. They used live video, voice, and
chat to walk customers through the booking process one-to-one, in real-time.
This allowed the hotel chain to build greater trust and a closer connection with their
customers, making the decision-making process that much smoother.
The results:
Able to connect every
web visitor with an agent
in less than 6 seconds
6s
35% increase in
conversion rate
35%
20% of bookings made
with Whisbi & $1597
average ticket value
20%
Travel & Hospitality
Bahia Principe Business case
(luxury hotel chain)
Live engagement
success stories

16. The future for live
engagement
As time goes on, customers will continue to demand more
and more from brands when it comes to online interaction.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this
process, closing high street stores all over the world and
forcing companies to ramp up their ecommerce capabilities
to handle a market that is, in many cases, now taking place
entirely digitally.
The ability to deliver live engagement to customers,
connecting with them on a human level in real-time to
answer their questions and guide them through the buyer’s
journey, is proving to be crucial in this new world.
This ability will separate successful brands from failures and
could turn out to be one of the main predictors of success in
the future.
To find out how Whisbi can help you implement live
engagement across your sales funnel and online experience,
schedule a demo with us.