This is the non-cheesy Valentine’s Day article you’ve been looking for. This is the V-day special you won’t be ashamed to read at work, but which made me cover my screen during research. All that for a good cause though, as today we will see how all the love advice we are served translates to the business world. Because what love is more important than the love your customers feel for your product?

When you search for love advice and relationship tips (of course you never do, but if you did), you might be surprised with the results. It seems they’ve evolved since I was a teenager, when interns at magazines repeatedly published the same old cliches.

Nowadays you can find relationship specialists and psychotherapists who write about the subject without those old one-dimensional platitudes. But instead they serve you overblown statements about self-love and inner purpose. Or worse, they mix in corporate ideas like scheduling relationship one-to-ones every week and using the Pomodoro time management technique for lover’s quarrels.

It’s complicated.

But don’t worry! I’m coming to the rescue. I won’t tell you how to get butterflies back in your stomach after 10 years of marriage. But fortunately, business-related relationships are easier to manage. And platonic love doesn’t require as many heart emojis.

So let’s dig into the subject. Lucky for you, I’m the one who had to read Super Helpful Tips to Get Your Crush to Fall For You and Tips To Make A Good Relationship Great. Pity flowers for Marta-the-writer are welcome at the office.

Don’t go to bed angry

Easy one, just sleep on the couch.

People sometimes get upset or frustrated. Customer service specialists cannot take responsibility for customers’ feelings, but they are responsible for their own reactions and the way they address the problem.

Customer service reps are trained to stay calm and keep emotional distance from work issues. Most of the time they’re able to use tried and true techniques to calm the customer down.

It’s our responsibility as a company, to make sure whatever the customer’s concern is, we’re clear on how the situation looks from our side, what we can do to fix it and how we can compensate for the situation.

Use a problem to win a customer long-term.

A study of customer’s complaints to airlines and wireless carriers on twitter has shown that customer service can turn angry customers into loyal ones. Customers who experienced ‘prompt and personal customer service’ when facing an issue, turned out to be willing to pay more for the service in the future. They would also choose that brand over other reasonably priced options, despite the past problems.

Further research also proved that customers who had interacted with customer service turned out to be more loyal than the ones who had no such interaction.

Turn issues into opportunities to win a customer long-term.

Provide quick, competent customer service and never ever let your customer go to bed angry.

Fall in love with your BFF

Or maybe just let best friends be best friends?

But feel free to mix love and friendship as much as you want with customers.

An example. Targeting the proper audience is the key to a successful business. Knowing your audience well requires a serious commitment. Maybe even a little love. You must understand customer struggles and needs and turn them into insights to deliver an exemplary service or product. Sharing your customer’s beliefs, sense of humor and tone of voice is important to build a connection with customers and make them feel accepted.

‘[The research done by Disney / ABC Television, Omnicom Media Group, and Insight Strategy Group] shows that consumers across all generations want and expect the same things from brands as they do of their friends and family – reliability, authenticity, and the feeling like the brands ‘get’ them and what’s important to them at this point in their lives – whatever that point may be,” said Jonathan Steuer, chief research officer at Omnicom Media Group.

People connect with brands they can relate to.

Maybe in real love opposites attract, but in customer service love, it’s better to find common ground. Company representatives should focus on finding similarities when talking to customers and make sure they feel understood.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Well, it depends. I recommend reading about love languages if you want to know why.

In the business world, creatives lose sleep to come up with catchy slogans or intriguing calls-to-action. Don’t know about you, but the only people I ever saw impressed with these are marketing people themselves. It doesn’t mean words are not important. They help customers connect the dots, they influence the subconscious mind. Yet they mean nothing if they’re not followed by actions.

Great branding wouldn’t be possible without carefully crafted communication. Yet no matter how great the copy is, without action, it’s just a blend of letters.

Deliver positive experiences if you want your brand to be remembered.

If you don’t fix the issue soon enough to satisfy the customer, no sorries or promises will help. No copy in a newsletter or carefully crafted slogan will work as well as being active and delivering positive experiences to customers.

Love Like You’ve Never Been Hurt

I’m sorry, the wrinkles I got from wincing during my last relationship are hard to be ignored.

Customer service reps, though, have a tough challenge. They have to approach every conversation with a customer as if it was the one and only interaction. Talking to hundreds of people on a daily basis requires lots of self-control and even more soft skills. It’s easy to treat all the customers as a group, however, every customer is a different person and has a different story.

Customer service employees need to pay special attention to starting every chat or conversation with a fresh attitude and an open mind. It’s important for customers to feel valued, respected, and not just another number in the company’s statistics.

According to the research from NewVoiceMedia, 49% of customers switch companies because they feel unappreciated.

Approach every conversation with a customer with an open mind.

Imagine it’s your first interaction. Likely for them – it is. It will help you to stay patient and understanding, and appreciate the relationship with every single customer that chose your brand.

Share your flaws and imperfections

Any better ideas of spending time together rather than indulging in self-pity and letting your partner hand you tissues? Anyone?

However, for a brand, it’s a different story. Brands are designed to shine bright and attract people. Yet one of the easiest and most efficient ways to make people like your brand is to show them it’s led by people. People who make mistakes, who do their best but sometimes they simply fail. And to show your customers you know how to say sorry and you’re not afraid of being wrong.

Customers love brands with a human face.

People tend to be distrustful when something looks too good to be true. As brands are meticulously planned out from top to bottom, they usually seem as such. But sharing some imperfections in a professional way can easily fix this impression.

It’s called The Pratfall Effect and it was proved through a study run by a social psychologist Elliot Aronson, together with colleagues Ben Willerman and Joanne Floyd, The effect of a pratfall on increasing interpersonal attractiveness.

‘An experiment was performed which demonstrated that the attractiveness of a superior person is enhanced if he commits a clumsy blunder; the same blunder tends to decrease the attractiveness of a mediocre person. We predicted these results by conjecturing that a superior person may be viewed as superhuman and, therefore, distant; a blunder tends to humanize him and, consequently, increases his attractiveness.’

Make sure your brand doesn’t intimidate people. Make it more human through honesty and openness about struggles or challenges it faces. Sharing them in the form of useful and inspiring case studies will not only humanize the brand but deliver valuable content at the same time.

Choose to serve your customers every day

To be honest it’s pretty easy to make fun of the common love advice. I could go on like this all day, but I guess some of you may already have plans. #valentinesday

Cheers to the last cliche today.

Choose to love your partner every day. I have to admit it got my attention. Turned off my sense of humor, made me feel a bit sentimental. But as to what makes for real love advice, I’ll let you decide.

Anyway, enough of these touchy-feely vibes. The point is, outstanding customer service and long-lasting relationships with customers require that decision, that action from the company every day. Therefore let’s start every day by choosing to serve our customers, the best we can.

Ha. You didn’t think I’d let you go like that, being all serious?

Let’s end this article with a little creative task. I couldn’t resist noticing there’re enough love cliches to form the whole dialogue. The Romeo and Juliet kind of tragedy. The customer-service drama.

I take responsibility for the customer service advice given in this article, however, I strongly discourage treating the love-business idea too seriously. Do not follow the Customer Service Rep from our tiny performance below.

I also discourage you from getting any sort of inspiration, other than artistic, from the Romeo and Juliet tragedy.

Now, sit down, enjoy the show, don’t try this at work and no popcorn, please!

Play: Customer and CS Rep

Act One Thousand Twenty-One, Scene 1

A chat window, Enter Customer, typing starts

Customer: What’s happening with the server, we’ve been struggling to access our website since yesterday morning!
CS Rep: Excuse me, If You Can’t Love Me at My Worst, You Don’t Deserve Me at My Best
Customer: What are you talking about?! I’m PAYING for this service
CS Rep: Well, You Can’t Buy Love
Customer: Mate, you don’t understand, we lost $120 000 yesterday, because of that bug on your side
CS Rep: Time Heals All Wounds
Customer: Time? You say I’m paying premium but you still make me wait two days to get back to my email?
CS Rep: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder
Customer: I don’t understand. I checked your competitors’ offers and they all offer 24/7 support!
CS Rep: Oh, Once a cheater, always a cheater
Customer: Can we please talk seriously for a moment? I pay a premium price, I expect premium treatment
CS Rep: It’s All About Compromise, and Love Means Never Saying You’re Sorry
Customer: That’s ain’t funny, I want to cancel my subscription entirely. I’m done.
CS Rep, with passion:
Love Will Set You Free.
There is Plenty of Fish in the Sea.
My dear, It Isn’t You, It’s Me.
It Wasn’t Meant to Be.

/Customer left chat/

Chorus: Everything Happens for a Reason. If You Love Them, Let Them Go.

Jokes aside, don’t let your customers go. Otherwise, you might not be able to afford that Valentine’s Day dinner.

The post Love cliches that make good customer service advice appeared first on LiveChat.

Some Sundays are more special than others. Can they get any more unique than Super Sunday? I don’t think so. When you think about it, hardly any other sporting event can compete with the buzz generated by the Super Bowl.

I come from a corner of the world where football has a slightly different meaning than it does in America. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that I couldn’t wait to see what the end of the NFL’s 100th season brings to the table. I am not going to lie. Like many people, I was far more interested in the Super Bowl commercials than the game. As a marketer, can you blame me though?

Those who decided to air their latest creative efforts during the game had to reach deep in their pockets. A 30-second ad spot cost a record-breaking $5.6 million this year. To get the biggest bang for their buck, some of the brands started teasing their ads weeks before Super Sunday.

I didn’t want to create another recap of all the ads that aired during the Super Bowl. Instead, I focused on the marketing lessons we can all learn from this year’s big spenders. While some brands decided to take the ever-popular humorous approach, others took a stand on crucial social matters.

Telling a Story Well Always Works

I don’t think there’s a marketing concept that’s been emphasized stronger than storytelling in the last couple of years. It’s not about telling stories just for the sake of it, but using them to get people’s attention for specific reasons and connecting them to fundamental brand values and beliefs.

One of the highlights from this year’s Super Bowl ads is Be The One from Microsoft. The 60-second clip tells the story of Katie Sowers, an offensive assistant coach for the San Francisco 49ers. She’s just made history as the first female coach at the Super Bowl, and the ad focuses on how, since she was a little girl, she always wanted to become a coach.

The reason why this story resonates so well with me is it’s relatable on many different levels. We all have dreams, even if we are sometimes too young to realize how serious they are. There are so many roadblocks on our way to realizing them, as there are on Katie’s path. As she says in the final seconds of the ad, “All it takes is one, and then it opens the door for so many.” Thanks to her perseverance, she created a breakthrough in an environment heavily dominated by men. A breakthrough not only for her but also for other women pursuing their goals.

I love how Microsoft branding is almost non-existent throughout the video. Yes, Katie is using their Surface Book. Still, it’s just a tiny detail that complements her hard work. The message is that you’re never out of your depth if you back your talent with hard work.

Secret and Olay struck similar cords. Their ads are not as much about telling personal stories as they are about emphasizing the equality of women: whether it’s in sports, space exploration, or any other area of life. A football field or spaceship simply serve as examples. The most important fact is that more and more brands are embracing and incorporating equality into their message. People are no longer afraid to fight for what they believe in, and they want brands to take a stand too.

People Will Never Have Enough of Pop-cultural References

I bet you’ve all watched at least one ad that stuck with you because of a song or catchphrase they used that you couldn’t get out of your head. Puppy Monkey Baby anyone? If overdone, it can be super annoying. No doubt about that. On the other hand, add some creative spin to a timeless classic, and you can stay top of mind with your target audience for months, or maybe even years. Mountain Dew learned this lesson, and their parody of The Shining puts them among the best ads of Super Bowl LIV. They brought back one of the most iconic scenes in the film history and added their own, branded, twist to it.

If you feel like this type of ad could work for your brand, it’s a recipe for success. Other brands that pulled this off successfully last night were Pringles, with their Rick and Morty impression, and Jeep taking us down memory lane with their Groundhog Day-themed ad. This played out exceptionally well, especially with Groundhog Day falling on the same day as Super Sunday this year.

Small Businesses Are Not Going Anywhere

While it’s just a single example, Squarespace’s ad is among my favorites out of this year’s line-up. We find Winona Ryder laying down under the “Welcome to Winona, Minnesota” road sign and building a website about the town of Winona. So meta, right? And when you realize Winona was also born in Winona… Okay, I am getting dizzy.

Anyway, the takeaway here is local businesses and communities are as important as ever. Even if sometimes only the locals know about them, Squarespace points out, “A website makes it real.” The message is that you’re just a few clicks away from putting your business out into the world. Don’t we all have local businesses we love? That’s what makes this ad relevant and so relatable. If I had a business and wanted to build a website for it, Squarespace would definitely be top of mind for me, thanks to this ad.

The Future Is Now

Remember The Jetsons? This futuristic cartoon was way ahead of its time. I watched it twenty or so years ago as a little boy, and it seemed set so far into the future. Fast forward to 2020, and voice assistants are picking up more and more steam.

Amazon and Google looked at the same subject from two completely different angles. The Alexa ad starring Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi jokes about what life looked like before Alexa, going as far back as medieval times. Loretta, on the other hand, is a tearjerker with an elderly man using Google Assistant to relive and remember the highlights of his relationship with his wife, who has passed away.

There’s more and more tech around us, and whether you like it or not, it’s going to increase in the future. From a marketing standpoint, these two ads are a good indication that we should incorporate voice assistants sooner rather than later to stay ahead of the curve.

We Need to Take Care of Our Planet

Many of us are well aware of the environmental crisis the Earth is going through. Global warming and pollution are no joke even if we really wish they were.

The good thing is, many businesses realize that and are doing their best to remind us how important it is to take action right now. I’m talking about serious issues, but the brands that decided to run their Super Bowl ads on that subject took a more light-hearted approach.

Audi hit us with an unconventional match between Maisie Williams and Let It Go. Even if you haven’t watched Frozen, you must have heard this song at least once. Anyway, the ad is straightforward with what its key message is. The Game of Thrones star, this time stuck in a traffic jam and fed up with fumes filling the air, does a U-turn and drives “to a more sustainable future” in her electric e-tron model from Audi.

The theme is particularly intriguing when we remember the emissions fraud crisis that hit the Volkswagen group hard in the recent past. This year’s ad is a step in the right direction on the way to recovering from “diesel-gate.”

Porsche came back to the big game for the first time since 1997. The German automaker takes us for a wild ride around Stuttgart, just seconds after their first all-electric Taycan is stolen from the Porsche Museum. While I might have enough of the Fast and Furious franchise, I have to admit I love the dynamics of it. The question is, does it convey a message of an eco-friendly vehicle clearly enough?

We Can Learn So Much More

There’s no secret sauce to a Super Bowl ad. Some of them will stay in our memory for years, and that’s not always because of how well-thought-out they were. There are also those that we wish we would have never seen. One way or another, all marketers can take a page out of the Super Bowl advertising playbook before they plan their future campaigns.

Did I like all of the 47 ads I watched? Of course not. I’d even say that some of them were burning cash (I am looking at you, Heinz). That doesn’t change the fact that I loved taking down notes as I watched all of the ads. Even if they didn’t all serve a higher purpose, the majority of them evoked all sorts of emotions in me. I burst out laughing watching the Bud Light Seltzer ad, and then I nearly burst into tears watching Loretta. Isn’t that what good marketing is all about?

The post 5 Marketing Lessons from Super Bowl LIV appeared first on LiveChat.

In 2020, email is still the major channel for customer support. That’s a fact. According to a HubSpot study, 62% of customers want to use email to communicate with companies.

You know that we’re all about chatting, but we have to admit that email is an important element of any customer support workflow. And it clearly won’t change anytime soon.

Customers are used to sending emails, so we all need an efficient tool to manage them with ease.

A typical scenario is to have two separate apps to manage these two channels. However, app switching can be exhausting. We decided to end this distracting procedure and embrace multichannel communication with our new tool – HelpDesk.

We created and introduced HelpDesk to the global audience last year. Now, we took the next step and integrated LiveChat with HelpDesk to give you an even better experience when it comes to managing multichannel customer support.

Let’s see how the integration works and what benefits HelpDesk brings to the table.

Master the email channel with HelpDesk

With so many distractions around us, asynchronous communication is getting more popular. People want to cultivate deep work and find focus. Sending emails supports that. Finding the right balance between being available in real-time and managing the messages that arrive via email is necessary for any business.

In many cases, email is the most convenient way for customers to contact you. Let them reach out to you using their preferred channel. Forward emails to HelpDesk and convert them into tickets to stay on top of your email communication. Then, assign the messages to the right people and solve any issue within minutes.

Discover HelpDesk features

HelpDesk has your favorite features from LiveChat such as tags, canned responses, and private notes. You can use them in the same way as you do in LiveChat.

But there’s more! We’ve developed new features that are based on our customers’ feedback. We really wanted to create a tool that would match your email management needs.

What are the new features you’re getting with the integration? Let’s take a look at some of them.

Custom domains

With HelpDesk, you can use your own domain as a help desk reply address. Build trust among your customers by always using the same domain.

Delivery statuses

How many times were you unsure if customers read your message? With Helpdesk, you can check the email delivery status. Make sure your messages arrived where they should have.

My views

Tags are useful when you want to categorize your tickets or gather specific feedback. There may be some tags or filters that you use every day. You can save sets of filters and get easy access to custom ticket lists from the main HelpDesk dashboard.

Multiple mailboxes with assignment rules

Create separate mailboxes for each department (e.g. sales, support, marketing). With automated rules, HelpDesk will assign the messages to the right people or teams.

Statuses

Get additional statuses to improve your customer service workflow. There are six ticket statuses: Open, Pending, On hold, Solved, and Closed.

Reports

HelpDesk generates detailed reports for your customer service team. Use them to improve your customer service performance and analyze data related to your response time, peak hours, or statuses.

What’s more, in HelpDesk there’s no default template for your outgoing emails. Your customers get regular messages that don’t look like automatically generated ticket responses.

Take a look at the feature comparison to see all the additional functionalities that you’ll get with the HelpDesk app.

How to integrate LiveChat and HelpDesk

It’s not a regular integration with yet another help desk system. Your new HelpDesk is embedded within the LiveChat app. Every interaction with a customer is stored in the exact same place.

The integration is super easy and takes five minutes or less. All you need to do is to go to the LiveChat Marketplace, install HelpDesk, and connect your LiveChat and HelpDesk accounts. You’ll find detailed instructions on how to integrate the apps in our Help Center.

What happens when you integrate LiveChat and Helpdesk? You will see the HelpDesk icon in the left menu of the LiveChat application.

Both apps are based on the same design system, so their integration is a perfect match. Your team won’t need to get used to a new interface, and that saves a lot of their precious time.

With the Viewer account, you can invite your entire team for free. Pay only for the agents that work with tickets. This way, everyone has access to the customer’s conversation history. Your support agents can see all the details and previous messages, even if they don’t solve tickets on a daily basis.

Try HelpDesk and let us know how it goes

LiveChat and HelpDesk work perfectly together. Chats, ticket form messages, and emails – everything is under control in one app. The ultimate goal is to make communication easier for your customers and your support team.

Give HelpDesk a try and let us know about your experience. We’re improving this product and adding new features every month, so stay tuned for more! Our dedicated team is working full-time on making HelpDesk the best tool for managing emails.

What do you think about this new integration? Do you use help desk software in your company? Share your feedback and thoughts in the comments.

The post LiveChat and HelpDesk Integration: How to Make the Most of the Email Channel appeared first on LiveChat.

It doesn’t matter if you sell a physical product, service, or software. All of them are associated with brands that carefully created them for you to think about in very specific ways. Those brands are the reasons why you choose one product over another.

The way brands communicate with people has been continually changing over the last decade or so. One of the reasons for this is that brands started embracing the concept of community building.

Things to keep in mind before you build a community

Regardless of what your objectives are, building a community is a strategic process that involves a fair bit of planning that will guide you in achieving your goals.

While we’re at it, remember that we build communities for people, and your business benefiting from it is just a nice addition. This brings us to the community engagement cycle, an interesting concept introduced by CMX, a home for community professionals. It consists of four stages you should keep in mind while building your community:

This means that a community member’s identity aligns with the identity of the community. He trusts the community and its members, actively participates in it, and feels rewarded for being a part of that community. If members meet all the criteria, you’re on your way to managing an engaged and healthy community.

An endless debate

After you’ve set up the goals for your community, you should think about one, highly important aspect before you put your plan into action: using SEO.

There are two ways to go about it. If you want your community to help improve the ranking of your main domain, you should use a subfolder. For example, yourwebsite.com/community. With this structure, the keywords your community ranks with will strengthen the SEO of your main domain.

Alternatively, you could put your community into a subdomain. For instance, community.yourwebsite.com. However, I think it’s a good idea only if you want it to rank separately, outside of your main domain.

Outsourced or in-house? That’s the question

Both scenarios described above tie in with the following question: should you host a community on your domain, or use a third-party tool for it? Let me explain the differences.

There are quite a few third-party tools available for you to build communities externally e.g., Tribe, Mobilize, Discourse, or Mighty Networks. However, a majority of them create communities for their clients in subdomains. If your community contributing to the SEO of your main domain is not a priority, go for one of them. Discourse, for instance, can custom-build a community in a subfolder for you, but that requires a lot of additional work from them on the back end.

You might as well try with a Facebook or LinkedIn group, Twitter chat around a chosen hashtag, or a Slack community. If you choose one of these options, make sure you think about how it aligns with the long-term strategy of your community. You never know when one of those platforms will erase your community out of the blue, and you don’t want all your effort to go up in smoke in the blink of an eye.

Hosting a community on your domain is pretty self-explanatory, especially considering the SEO dispute mentioned above. Once you decide to build your community in-house, you have to do all the hard work of building it from scratch on your own or adjusting a WordPress plugin to meet your needs.

Engage, engage, engage

Now that we have the initial planning and setting up of your community out of the way, it’s time for the fun part. Let the people in, and start engaging them.

Think about how to divide your community into different categories, and what would be the best ways to engage your members. Each sub-category will have different kinds of discussions that are typical for them. There’s also space for you to create routines, such as weekly or monthly AMAs (Ask Me Anything) posts. So, one week, you could invite a community member specializing in a given area to answer questions and give back to the community with his expertise. Then, in the following week, a different specialist, and so on.

It’s also a good practice to create a chit chat/watercooler kind of space where the community members can just hop in to talk about their favorite TV shows or share pictures of their pets. It obviously has nothing to do with the business goal of your community, but it provides your members with the human touch and a sense of belonging.

What’s in it for you (or your brand, to be precise)?

While you work hard with your sleeves rolled up, you’ll start noticing how your business benefits from building a community. As Community Strategist at Buffer, Arielle Tannenbaum says:

“Building a community around a brand is the best way to build deeper relationships with your customers. These deeper relationships help you learn more about their needs (so you can design for these needs in your product/service), create positive experiences for them to learn and grow, and help them feel more connected to your brand.

By facilitating connections between your customers, you are involved in growing their networks and being a key part of their story. Being part of an engaged, supportive community is a powerful thing for anyone, and if you can create that for your customers, that’s incredibly meaningful!”

A branded community is a source of endless, mutual opportunities for brands and people creating those communities. I’ve been a member of the Buffer community for years. If there’s a blueprint for a successful community, it’s theirs with Arielle at the wheel.

Collecting customer feedback

I might be wrong, but I assume a majority of your community members will be people who already use your product or service, at least in the beginning. I can’t imagine a better way of collecting customer feedback than simply tuning in to what the people in the community have to say. They will share their pain points, suggestions, or feature requests in one place. In fact, it’s one of the most common use cases of our community at LiveChat.

If they don’t do this on their own, you can always spark discussions by asking questions yourself. They are in the community because they want to be there. That’s why it’s easier to get such priceless information from inside the community instead of an email survey.

Your community can act as your customer support

I reached out to a community building expert and Head of Community of Quora in Polish, Gloria Ziencina-Kawula on what she thinks the key benefits of building a community around a brand are:

“Your community could be a group of loyal customers who will support the brand, who will let you know if something about your product or service could be better — the group of your customers who will likely test new features and share their feedback. The feeling of being listened to, being part of the team, is very important for your customers and lets you build a group of engaged brand advocates, and position you as a supporter.

Building a community of customers around the product lets you also be closer to them in real-time, to know their needs better, educate them, and through this increase their time spent in a product, improve retention, and lifetime value. The same way you can reduce the costs of educational campaigns, customer service, research, gaining feedback, or even advertisement.”

I couldn’t agree more with the message Gloria sends. Chances are, some of the community members know your product or service almost as well as if they worked for you. Think of them as additional support agents that take a little bit of weight from your dedicated agents’ shoulders. Many community members won’t have to come to your live chat or ping you on social media because they will get advice on how to solve their problems from fellow community members.

There’s no better place to build up your brand advocates

Apart from customer feedback, Gloria also mentioned brand advocacy that’s intertwined with brand loyalty and brand evangelists. You want your brand to get bigger and bigger, and that’s impossible without those highly dedicated people.

Ever seen a line of people waiting outside an Apple store? It’s probably going to be challenging to reach that level of commitment. Some people would even call it overkill, but you get the gist.

Still, if you constantly provide value to your community, evangelists will grow organically over time because they’ll want to give back to the community. This can take the form of bringing in new community members or simply advocating for your brand outside the community.

You can encourage your people to spread the word about the brand. One way to do this is by introducing gamification into your community, with the most active members gaining upgrades on their current plans of your product, for example.

Let the community shape your brand

Listening to what your community has to say is essential. Some of their ideas can be life-changing and will help you reinvigorate your product or service. Recently, I found out LEGO was close to going bankrupt at the beginning of the ‘00s. As technology developed, people were bombarded with more and more new forms of entertainment, which made it difficult for LEGO to keep up with.

Like any other wise brand, they had to change something in the way they communicate with their audience. As a consequence, LEGO launched its Ideas platform in 2008. Ever since, all their fans can submitLEGO set ideas that are later voted on by other community members. The most popular sets are then reviewed by LEGO employees who decide which ideas will officially hit the shelves.

As of now, we know that the user base of the Ideas platform has reached more than 1 million users. Over 26,000 ideas for LEGO sets have been submitted so far, and 28 of them were eventually produced. In case you’re wondering, a playable LEGO piano was one of them.

Building a community is a long term process, but it’s well worth it

You have to remember that building a thriving community takes a lot of time and dedication. It’s not going to blow up with engagement by itself, so try not to get discouraged. It’s going to take longer than a month or two to produce the desired results.

The days of communication between a brand and consumers being a one-way street are long gone. That’s a great thing. Communities already play a big part in shaping many of the brands we know, and their influence is only going to get bigger and bigger.

No matter what industry you’re in, the competition is as fierce as ever. At the end of the day, it’s your community that could be a key differentiator between you and your business rivals.

The post Why Building a Community Is Crucial for Your Brand appeared first on LiveChat.

]]>

With over 175 thousand attendees and more than 4.5 thousand exhibiting companies at CES 2019, I couldn’t wait to see what this year’s edition would bring to the table! For those of you who are not up to speed with what CES is, it’s an annual show hosted in Las Vegas that’s been home for innovative and revolutionary technologies for over 50 years.

It’s no different this year. The biggest brands across consumer electronics took to the stages with their latest gadgets. I picked some of the most exciting inventions that the people attending the conference from January 6-10 could witness with their own eyes!

Gary Shapiro, the CEO of Consumer Technology Association, the producer of the event, said in his welcome keynote that “We can’t settle for today because tomorrow holds such promise” – the best possible tagline for CES one could come up with.

Dream big and defy barriers with Samsung

Even though the official date for the show is January 7-10, 2020, it actually started on Monday, January 6, with a number of Media Days News Conferences from companies like LG and Bosch, and a number of different sessions on different conference tracks.

It was not until HS Kim, the President and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Division at Samsung, appeared on stage in the late afternoon that the real fun began. After a brief introduction to what they understand as the Age of Experience, the executives that followed focused on explaining some novelties in areas such as:

I am a little skeptical of the GEMS exoskeleton which, combined with AR glasses, stands in for a fitness coach. It’s not because I don’t like working out, but it’s this Black Mirroresque vibe that makes me feel uneasy.

Anyway, it was Ballie that stole the show! The little spherical robot that is meant to understand and support your needs serves as the host of your smart home. It can open your curtains, as long as you have smart curtains, play with your dog, or turn on your vacuum cleaner.

Meet #Ballie, Samsung’s human-centric vision of robots that takes personalized care to the next level. The small rolling robot, “understands you, supports you, and reacts to your needs.” #CES2020 #SamsungCES2020 pic.twitter.com/YzwgZN1Lgw

— Samsung US Newsroom (@SamsungNewsUS) January 7, 2020

I just hope all pets will be as friendly to Ballies around the world as the dog in the video is!

Mercedes travels to Pandora (and I am not talking jewellery)

Following the South Korean giants, Mercedes took the stage for the final keynote of the day. Ola Källenius, Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes-Benz Cars, gave their presentation.

Remember the 2009 blockbuster hit Avatar? Well, it’s exactly what inspired the design of the Mercedes-Benz Vision AVTR. James Cameron even actively took part in the design process.

It’s not just another autonomous electric vehicle. It drives forward just as any car, but it can also move sideways like a crab. What’s the most fascinating about this vehicle, though, is the idea of sustainability and moving the car closer to nature and humans.

Besides the electric power, these are the clear doors that make you feel closer to nature while driving. Human connection, on the other hand, is about becoming one with a car. As weird as it sounds, you get to navigate the car with biometric sensors and and the car’s interface displaying on your body.

(Image: Media Daimler)

Even though it’s just a concept car that is unlikely to ever be available for the consumers, I think its unique design makes it one of the prettiest gadgets presented at CES.

The city of tomorrow

Let me stick to the automotive industry and unexpected ideas for a little while. Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota Motor Corporation, announced during his keynote that the company is planning to build a city of the future.

It would be situated at the foot of Mt. Fuji, at the site of a former factory. It’s called Woven City and, according to Toyota Newsroom, it “will serve as a home to full-time residents and researchers who will be able to test and develop technologies such as autonomy, robotics, personal mobility, smart homes and artificial intelligence in a real-world environment”.

(Image: Toyota)

Still, the design from Bjarke Ingels Group, who are also responsible for Google’s London headquarters and Two World Trade Center in New York, makes me believe this thing is going to work sooner or later.

Most of the buildings will be made of wood, with the use of traditional Japanese wood joinery, supported by robotic works, of course. On top of that, roofs will be covered with photovoltaic panels that will support the power generated by hydrogen fuel cells.

Bjarke Ingels says “With the breadth of technologies and industries that we have been able to access and collaborate with from the Toyota ecosystem of companies, we believe we have a unique opportunity to explore new forms of urbanity with the Woven City that could pave new paths for other cities to explore.”

I haven’t seen anything remotely similar to this idea and am thrilled to see how it pans out. I am sure there’s enough technology behind it to make it work, and I hope similar solutions could be implemented worldwide sometime soon, even if the scale of early projects is limited.

When you’re waiting for PlayStation 5 and instead get… a car

Perhaps the most unexpected automotive unveiling came from Sony. Yes, you read that right. I was in the majority of the people waiting for the big reveal of PS5. Well, to my and everybody else’s surprise, the Japanese giants took us aback with their Vision S car.

(Image: Sony)

When it comes to the design, Vision S looks much more like a car of today than the aforementioned AVTR from Mercedes. It has hints of a Tesla, but at the same time, it has its own style. The interior is packed with all the tech you would expect from Sony, including a 360 sound system and a wide screen control panel spreading across the dashboard.

I was going to say it’s a concept car but it’s more than that. It’s a prototype that could be realistically driven on the roads today. Sadly, the company is not planning on mass production or even putting out a limited series.

You can be an Iron Man too

Delta had the honor of opening the first official day of CES 2020 on January 7. They revealed a bunch of cool stuff related to the air travel experience, most notably Parallel Reality. Ever felt lost in an airport, walking through the terminal looking for information about your gate and departure time? Now, imagine there’s a group of people walking alongside you, looking for the same information. What if I told you each of you could see information specific to your flights, in your preferred language? That’s what Parallel Reality from Delta does.

As interesting as that sounds, it was Sarcos’ Guardian XO exoskeleton that stole the show. The suit looks like it was taken out of the Avengers. It was reported to be as lightweight as the average backpack. Despite that, it can lift up to 200lbs. This pretty much means that wearing the Guardian XO, you could carry objects that you’d normally need a few people to even lift from the ground.

CES participants witnessed, during the product demo, a man named Ben lifting an airplane tire and putting it on an axle as if it was your regular car tire. Check out the video of Guardian XO in action.

You’ll never mix up your streaming services and favorite shows again

Moving a little bit away from futuristic and robotic novelties, meet Dabby. Dabby’s a tablet-like device that helps you manage your consumption of streaming services in one place. Switching between all the different apps can be a tad annoying and Dabby is here to help.

(Image: Dabkick)

Quoting the information from the product’s homepage, “Dabby is designed to play any online content on your TVs without forcing you to download apps or load 3rd party software.” This means you can watch any content online as long as you’re subscribed to a given streaming service, or watch free videos posted on YouTube or any other social media.

Among Dabby’s most valuable features is its intelligent subscription manager. It suggests which streaming services you should cancel, and can even cancel them itself (if you set the preferences to allow it to do so). Who would say no to saving a few dollars instead of paying for something you’re not using anyway?

The idea of having all those subscriptions in one place is tempting. Add audio content into it and I’d be pretty much sold if it wasn’t for the $399 price tag.

Too much amazing stuff to mention it all

I could go on and on with the list of companies and their exceptional new devices and technologies, but it would have probably taken a series of blog posts dedicated to each day of CES 2020!

Plant-based pork from Impossible Foods? I am a meat-eater myself but I’d happily give it a go if I ever have the chance. If I take their word for it, it tastes as convincing as their beef alternative from last year’s CES.

And then there’s Neon with their artificial humans that are meant to be conversation partners rather than just personal assistants. The company is still in the early stages of the project but it already gives you an idea of what the end product is going to look like.

Despite all the reasons to worry in 2020, CES also gave us reasons to be optimistic and excited about the future. That said, it’s natural to feel a little scared at the same time. I like to think that even the fancy robots and artificial humans at CES would tell me the same thing, if I’d had a chance to discuss the matter with them.

The post CES 2020 and What the Future Holds for Us appeared first on LiveChat.

Most content marketers focus on traffic. They write more content for more keywords, all with the hopes of getting more sales, and the competition is getting fierce. There are only so many spots on the front page of Google, right?

As a result, smart marketers are looking for ways to get more from the traffic that they already have. How to keep them engaged, how to convert higher, and how to interact faster-anything that will help them gain an edge on their competition.

What can you do to pull ahead? Try story studies.

They’re designed to not only help you write case studies that convert sales and close clients, but to actually drive more traffic to your website. In fact, using this method, I managed to generate $3 million dollars in client requests from a single post. To help you get started, I’ll walk you through the method below, show you how we use it in our own business, and then break down each step so you can write one for yourself.

What are story studies and why do they work?

Story studies are a tool for converting readers into buyers.

Here’s how they work: You start with a standard case-study result that you got for a client or customer. Then, you add in both a narrative and actionable advice. You take the reader on a journey, seeing the process and problems through the client’s perspective.

You start at the beginning with the problem, the issues it was causing the client, the struggles they had to get past, the emotions they had, and the process they used to get their results. You break it all down and explain 99% of the process that they followed.

This method works well for a few reasons:

And that’s what your audience cares about. Not about you and your offer, but themselves and their problems. The better you can help them connect the dots, the easier it is to make the sale. In fact, in a recent quote by Michael Brenner, former CMO of Nielsen, he states that:

The biggest mistake that brands make today is making it all about themselves… you have to make the customer the hero of the story. The elements of any good story are a hero and a villain – the customer and their problem. You should spend 90% of your time letting your audience know that you feel their pain.

How I used story studies to generate $3 million dollars in client requests in 14 days

A few years back, I used to run a small ad agency that focused on paid traffic. Rather than have all my eggs in one basket, I wanted to look at implementing content marketing for our company. I figured that if it worked well, then we could get traffic, and the worst-case scenario was that it would help convert more customers.

Why? Well, one of my biggest issues was that we would have a lot of back and forth conversations with clients, explaining what we do, and how we do it, etc., before we would make the sale. So, I decided to write a case study with a twist. I would not only share the results of the campaign, but I would also write about exactly how we got those results. Better still, I would position it from the client’s point of view so that it would resonate with the audience.

The results were crazy. Within two weeks it had been read 50,000 times and led to 300+ requests from clients. Not only that, it ended up being voted to the ‘Top 10’ marketing articles of all time on inbound.org and continues to get us client requests even today.

The story study not only presold our audience, but the process was far faster and automated. Someone would read the article and then request to work with us. So, no more back and forth emails.

Since then, I’ve used this same method for other case studies and seen crazy results. For example, this case study on paid content promotion has over 100+ linking domains, helping to drive traffic and rankings. Doesn’t seem like a lot right? But in a recent study of 912 Million articles by Backlinko, they found that 94% of articles have less than a single backlink.

Ready to try this out? Here are the six steps to follow.

Step #1: Interview the client

The story study takes the reader on an emotional journey. They connect with the hero of the story, their problems, their struggles, and the path that they took to get the result. Because of this, you need to know more about your client and their background.

You need to ask them the following questions:

Each of these questions will help you find the information you need to make sure that your content resonates with you readers. I highly recommend that you interview them over Skype, so you can record the conversation. This will help you to not only remember the clients answers, but to also see the language that they use to describe their issues. Copywriters call this ‘mirror language’.

Why should you care? Because explaining the audience’s problems in their own words, helps them feel like you have the best product or offer for them.

Step #2: The headline

Case studies are all about results and solutions. They need to connect with the reader and their issues right now. So a good headline is:

‘How to get X results in Y time, while avoiding Z problem/objection’

This speaks to your audience and stands out. If they have that problem or want to achieve that goal, you now have their attention.

Step #3: The introduction

The introduction follows a standard B.A.B sequence:

Before – The reader describes their problem in their own language.

After – What do they want to achieve?

Bridge – How the results were accomplished, how that ties into the reader’s goal, in a certain time frame.

This is short and to the point. It helps the reader know that this article is relevant to them, and it hooks them in. So, they keep reading.

Step #4: Emotion, proof, and context stacking

Humans work off a system of stimulus and response:

The goal of your case study is to get your reader to do something. They should read it and then want to take action. So, how do we do this? Well, in story writing, they build tension. They develop the character and the world, so you care about the end result. We do something similar. Our goal is to stack the problem, then stack the desire for the result, all while ‘setting the scene.’ We want them to feel so emotionally invested that they want to keep reading and then act on your call to action.

It looks like this:

By doing this, the reader is invested and they feel that connection. Not just for the hero of the story, but they also see themselves in it. By this point, they want that same transformation.

Step #5: The ‘how-to’ steps

The how-to section makes up around 80% of the article. You break down the entire process into fine detail, step-by-step. Each step looks like this:

You follow that pattern for each step that your hero took to get the result. Go into detail about each thing that they need to do. Not only that, add images for context and to remove any ambiguity or ‘what-if’ questions that might stop your reader from taking action.

This will help convert those skeptics and worriers They see how it’s done and why it works. This not only builds trust and sales, but it actually shortens the amount of interaction that you need with them. They know what they’re getting and how it works. Now, they just want to buy.

Step #6: The call to action

This is quite possibly the most important part of your entire guide. You always need a call to action. If you want them to buy from you, to book a call, to set up a meeting, or anything at all, then you need to ask them to do it. It’s as simple as:

Easy right?

Now, it’s your turn

Story studies might seem overwhelming, but they do get easier. All you’re really doing is adding a narrative, some plot points, and some actionable advice. You simply follow this structure, answer those questions, and you have all you need to write one for your own business or even a client.

So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and write your own story study now, and before long you’ll see more sales, backlinks, and traffic.

The post How to Write a High-Converting Case Study appeared first on LiveChat.

Employee training can bring you countless benefits, some obvious and some welcome, yet surprising, side-effects.

However, not all employee training programs bring the desired results. You could be using the best knowledge management software and still not get what you expected from it.

The best way to improve your training program is by adopting a data-driven approach.

The question is, how do you do that?

Data collected in the right way will tell you everything you need to know about how to boost your training programs and increase your productivity.

According to Oracle’s HR Analytics Report, human resources departments in various organizations are using data analytics to drive business growth. If you want to benefit from data-driven methods and make the most out of your online training software, you need to know what data-driven decision making is. You’ll also need to know what kind of data will be useful to you, and how you can use that data in employee training.

Let’s take a closer look at each.

Source

What is data-driven decision making?

It’s the process of collecting and analyzing data, then using the insights you’ve gathered to make informed business decisions. A data-driven approach, whether you’re using it for your employee training program or improving your business management analytics, offers you objective insights that are easily measurable. Instead of relying on your gut feeling or intuition, you rely on valuable data that points you in the right direction and improves your decision-making processes.

Types of data

Data comes in all shapes and sizes. The sheer volume of information that you can collect makes it impossible for you to start your data-driven decision making without separating the data into different categories.

Depending on your needs, the goal of your training program, and what stage you’re at, you’ll find different types of data useful. Keep in mind that the accuracy of any analysis will depend largely on the accuracy of data collected. If your data collection methods are inadequate or if you’re using the wrong data, no analysis will come up with useful insights.

Predictive data

Over 60% of companies rely on predictive analytics in their day-to-day operations, showing just how popular and useful predictive data is. Predictive data is by far the most commonly used type of data.

How to use predictive data for training

With predictive analytics, your systems can make an educated guess on how well a certain employee is expected to perform in your training course.

It does so based on:

With predictive analytics, you’ll know an individual employee’s skill gap, goals, and preferences and it can even help you reveal hidden employee skills.

Predictive analytics engines can use an employee’s education and experience to find out if they’d be perfect for a different or higher job position. This way you can train current employees instead of searching for new recruits. If a current underperformer shows interest in self-improvement by regularly accessing the course materials, you’ll know that investing in their ongoing education will be worth it.

Descriptive data

Descriptive data offers detailed information on what’s happened in different areas of your company. It’s used to summarize and examine your decisions after they’ve been made.

How to use descriptive data for training

Canned reports are commonly used in employee training so that the managers can analyze how well their program is performing. If your company isn’t reaching its employee training goals at the expected pace, for example, descriptive analytics can tell you exactly what’s been happening.

All the relevant historic data will be accumulated and presented to show which areas of your training course are the most problematic, and this can help you determine what to do about it.

Prescriptive data

Prescriptive data helps you determine which course of action to take to solve a current problem. Prescriptive data analytics relies heavily on AI and machine learning and offers real-time data insights to enhance your decision-making process.

How to use prescriptive data for training

Knowledge management systems can use prescriptive analytics to identify which skills your employees have, and which ones they may be lacking. Then, they can use this information to offer recommendations on which training courses may be the best suited for a specific learner.

Diagnostic data

Finally, diagnostic data analytics can help you answer the question of why something happened. This type of data gives insight into the causes of a problem.

Diagnostic data can be used to analyze patterns, which can be helpful when similar problems keep reoccuring. You’ll quickly learn why there’s a new problem and how you can solve it.

How to use diagnostic data for training

When it comes to your employee training program, diagnostic data can help you monitor performance, find problematic areas of your program, and come up with solutions. Instead of assuming you know why your employee training program isn’t working, you’ll see the exact reason with diagnostic data analysis.

Perhaps most of your employees are struggling with a specific topic within your course. You’ll know which topic it is, and why it’s so complicated. You can then use this information to enhance your program. For example, you can divide the topic into more easily digestible chunks of information, or give your employees more time to master it all.

Now that you know how different types of data analytics can help with training, let’s explore how businesses put them to use.

Best examples of data-driven decision making

Over 63% of cross-industry businesses report that relying on data-driven decision making and business management analytics has given them a competitive advantage. But what kind of advantage are we speaking of here?

Google

Besides relying on data to improve search results, Google relies on data to improve its employee training programs. One famous example is when Google used data to assess whether having managers was important for its employees.

Performance reviews and employee surveys concluded that managers were, in fact, important, and then it was only a question of what makes a good manager. Again relying on data, Google concluded that there were 8 behaviors that defined a great manager, and 3 that defined a bad one. The company then adapted its management training programs to ensure that all management newcomers had the necessary skills to become great managers.

AmeriCorps

AmeriCorps has developed an extensive employee training program because 16% of employees state that training would positively impact their productivity and engagement levels at work. The company believes that 20% of employee’s time at work should be spent on personal and professional development, so they’ve developed the renowned VISTA program.

The goal is to provide all VISTA participants with the opportunity to learn and improve their leadership, collaboration, and project management skills. The company primarily relies on data for performance measurement. This allows them to document achievements and refine the program. They use both quantitative and qualitative data to measure the impact of their training program.

AmeriCorps also relies on data-driven decisions for their pre-service training (PST). The data is used to assess their employee’s needs and skills, then adapt their PST to address them.

The benefits of relying on a data-driven approach

How to use the data-driven approach to boost management decision making

Define your goals

By outlining your goals, you’ll see which pieces of data are essential for your employee training program, and you’ll know how to collect them.

Stay organized

Once you begin data collection and analysis, you’ll see that raw data stacks up quickly. It can be overwhelming to deal with, so it pays to stay organized.

Focus on data protection solutions

There’s a huge buzz about business data security and for a good reason. Businesses rely on sensitive client and employee data to operate, so keeping it secure is crucial. When you’re trying to improve your employee training programs, you’ll collect information about who uses the program, from which device and account, when, even where. You’ll probably collect even more personal information about your employees, so selecting and deploying effective security measures is a must.

Educate your employees

When you adopt the data-driven decision making in employee training, you’ll need to keep your employees up to date.

Primarily, they’ll have to know:

Secondly, you may need to update your employees on your data collection and analytics practices. So, besides using data for management decision making in employee training, you’ll need to use employee training to teach about the data-driven approach you use.

Make better training decisions

As long as you’re clear on your data collection and analysis practices, you’ll be able to use that data to enhance your employee training efforts and boost your productivity. Data-driven decision making is here to stay and, if deployed properly, can only be beneficial for your business.

The post How to Make Data-Driven Employee Training Decisions appeared first on LiveChat.

As you might have noticed, we moved things around in the Reports section. Now, there are five categories, plus the summary and data export. Don’t worry, all reports are still there, we just wanted to make it easier for you to find a specific type of information. For example, in the agent category, you will see all reports that help you manage your team’s performance.

Want to know what else we shipped? Let’s dive into features that have been released these past few months.

Analyze tags with ease

Agents talk to customers about many different things on a daily basis: from bugs on your site or app to questions about shipping to product requests. With tags, you can quickly add more context to these conversations so they are easy to find and analyze later on. This is where the new tags usage report comes in handy.

Now, all your tag stats are in one place. You can use the report to check the differences in chat volume between particular teams or keep an eye on certain subjects (e.g., requests for a product or reported bugs). To see chats with a specific tag in Archives, choose the tag from the table and click on the chart.

Quickly improve your greetings

More meaningful conversations with your customers mean more opportunities to sell. Greetings let you target the right customers at the right time and encourage them to start a chat. But knowing what works and what doesn’t when setting up greetings isn’t that easy at first.

To make working on greetings more comfortable, we’ve added a data breakdown to the greetings conversion report.

Now, all greetings are displayed in a table with information about the conversion rate and the number of chats. It’s easy to see which greetings bring you the most chats and which need some tweaking. You can start editing a particular greeting right from the report. Less clicking in the app equals more customers served.

Get in front of your competitors

How are you supposed to know if the first response time of 10 seconds is good? Now, you can see how your competitors are doing, and draw a conclusion yourself.

With benchmark data in reports, you can see your competitors’ average for total chats, chat satisfaction, chat duration, and response times. All you need to do is flip on the toggle switch next to a chosen report to see how you stack up against your competitors. Time to start celebrating with your team or working on the areas you need to improve.

Note that this report is available for customers on Business and Enterprise plans.

Dig deeper with new filtering logic

We’ve added OR logic to our filters. This means that you can set them to show results that match either value. For example, you can find all chats that were either tagged item request or not in stock. You can also find chats that were handled by agent X or Y. These features make it easier to analyze your customer service data.

Coming soon: Agent performance report

As I mentioned at the beginning, we rearranged things in the Reports section to help you get the data you need without distractions. A step forward in that direction is the agent performance report that will be released in the upcoming months.

It will include information about chat satisfaction, number of chats, or first response time to let you keep an eye on key metrics for each agent individually. You will also be able to easily compare stats between people on your team. No more skipping between reports and selecting filters over and over again.

Tell us what you think

Your feedback really helps us make LiveChat better. How do you like the newest changes? Is there any feature you’d like us to add? Please share it with us in the comments section.

The post LiveChat for Managers: What’s New in Reports? appeared first on LiveChat.

Let me share something interesting with you. Around 40% of people online use ad blockers. The rest? They’re blind to ads. That means there’s no easy way of reaching your customers. The future of ads looks bleak. It’s almost non-existent as more and more people are shutting ads out of their lives.

Even if you were able to somehow break the barrier set up by ad blocks, there’s little use. Around 96% of internet users view ads with distrust, says a study by the American Association of Advertising Agencies. That’s an overwhelming majority. So, even if you get before people with ads, all you’re accomplishing is coming across as untrustworthy.

To build trust, you should show your brand as a trustworthy company. You can set your hopes on influencers. Influencers are making a splash. To know how big the splash is and how you can benefit, read on. In the next few paragraphs, you’ll learn how to get in front of a targeted audience with the help of influencers. And, while you’re at it, how to get them to have a great customer experience.

How do influencers generate trust?

According to a study from TrustBarometer, 61% of people find information from a person like them to be trustworthy.

Customers often make a purchase based on an influencer’s recommendation. Social media users share product recommendations that come from influencers. With social media influencers, you stand to gain trust and connections for your brand. When an influencer promotes your product, that’s social proof for your brand.

Why does social proof work? Social proof is an innate need among us to trust others. It’s also called herd behavior. We tend to look for cues to guide our own actions when unsure and in unfamiliar situations. To meet our need for social proof, we look at what the crowd does. If a popular influencer promotes a product, it’s as if many people choose that particular product. The product under its association with an influencer becomes superior over others that don’t have the same association.

That’s why influencer marketing is so potent. When we rope in an influencer, we’re relying on the magic of social proof. Let’s see how influencer marketing impacts customer experience.

Influencers reduce customer effort in product discovery

Customer experience rallies around the belief of reducing customer effort. Influencer marketing reduces the time it takes for a consumer to find something. You’re all too familiar with the usual route. It takes up lots of time. There are far too many steps involved. The prospect has to go through reviews, testimonials, and search for product guides.

With an influencer who they trust, all that can be skipped. An influencer in any niche becomes an influencer because of the value they bring to the table. Their tips, tricks, and ideas elevate them beyond the ordinary.

That’s the reason why we call them influencers. Followers want more of that. They’re confused. They need guidance on what to do and how to lead better lives. This need for insight extends to buying products as well. Followers are keen on knowing what the influencer’s take on a product is.

Here’s an example: YouFoodz, a meal delivery service, partnered with 81 influencers to share their healthy recipes for winter.

Source

The results?

70,000 direct engagements and 500,000 impressions. The campaign reached 1.5 million people on Instagram and Facebook. Along with that, the launch resulted in a 700% increase in revenue.

Here’s another example. Tesco Foods partnered with food blogger Kimberly Espinel, who runs @thelittleplantation. In the post below, she talks about the difficulty of finding affordable vegan meals. She goes on to describe how Tesco makes it easy with their WickedKitchen offerings. To top it off, she shares a delicious picture of a meal from there.

Source

Her post has a great presentation. I love it because of how well she tells the story of the partner brand. Influencers know the pulse of their followers. They often ‘wow’ with their storytelling abilities. Influencers aid product discovery. For one, this improves customer experience. Two, it builds brand awareness and generates a stream of high-quality leads for you. Influencer recommendations are a pretty good strategy for this. Recommendations help people make decisions.

There’s something that can make this even better. Get influencers to make videos.

Influencer videos help people understand the product better

A customer who understands how to use a product has a better experience with it. Brands can use the clout around influencers to spread the word about their products. Their recommendations and reviews guide customers in making informed decisions. Customers are more loyal to your brand as a result.

What better way to air out these recommendations than with videos? Videos are so much better than text. We are visual creatures, which means our brains can process visuals faster. These videos generate a lot of shares. As a result, they get to more people than text alone can. Textual reviews are effective, but they leave a lot to the imagination. With video content, the barrier dissolves. You see the product live and in action.

Here’s what Levi Olmstead, Director of Marketing at 2ndKitchen said:

Video is so impactful because it holds the attention of a user more than written content. In fact, viewers on average retain 95% of a message that they watch in a video compared to just 10% of a text-based message. And in 2019, the barrier to entry for video creation is much lower than it was in comparison to just a few years ago with easy to use and affordable video editing tools.

You could write page after page of descriptive content on a product and get nowhere. With video content marketing, consumers understand things quicker. They understand what the product does, who is it for, and why someone should buy it. As ecommerce marketers, we are at a serious disadvantage compared to retail stores. Physical stores allow people to view all the dimensions of a product. They can touch and feel it. Online, there’s nothing like that. With videos, you get to take your customers close to a product experience. So, here’s how to leverage videos.

#1 Through unboxing videos

Tens of thousands of people search for the term ‘unboxing’ every month.

A lot of them go to YouTube to watch them. Unboxing videos are a popular way for influencers to talk about products. Your product’s features reach a big audience. Customers get to see the product in all its glory. They are not reading a review or testimonial. The experience is much more immersive.

Unboxing videos cover a wide range of industries. Clothing, furniture, and electronics to name a few. Unboxing videos are popular because they tap into our emotions. Do you remember the excitement of opening up Christmas presents? You’d wait a whole year for that day. Unboxing videos take us back to our childhood. They invoke the same feel-good emotions we associate with opening up presents.

Unboxing videos give people a way of viewing what’s inside. They can see the contents of the box without purchasing it. It’s as good as visiting a retail store. You see the product opened and taken out of a box as it is.

The steps to follow to get influencers to make unboxing videos:

1. Do a search for influencers on channels like Instagram and YouTube. First, search for influencers in your niche by typing in industry-related terms. If you’re retailing cookware, search for keywords like cooking, baking, kitchen, and so on. This gives a list of influencers to contact. You can also combine the same keywords with the term unboxing. This way, you’ll see a lot of influencers who do unboxing videos in your niche.

2. Set aside a part of your marketing budget to use for giving away your products to influencers.

3. Look for influencers who promote your competitors. If they’re relevant for your competitors, they’re relevant for you.

4. Finally, contact them and offer them your product in exchange for doing an unboxing video.

Justine Ezarik is the face behind the popular YouTube channel Ijustine. On her channel, she posts unboxing videos many times a week. She has over 6 million subscribers on YouTube. Part of her growth stems from the unboxing videos she posts. It’s a big part of her channel. It’s a win-win for the brands and Justine. From the number of unboxing videos she posts, it seems at least two dozen or more brands contact her every month. This is the latest one I could find, where she unboxes the new Macbook.

#2 Partner with popular channels

Unboxing videos are great, but they’re not the only way to leverage videos. We live in a world that runs behind shows like, “How Stuff Works”. For promoting their new product, Nike partnered with the YouTube channel, “What’s Inside?” The channel creates videos where they cut apart everyday objects to show what’s inside.

The video gathered 3.6 million views with 32k likes. This generated lots of engagement for the Nike’s new product, the Air VaporMax.

You cannot realize any success online without knowing your customers. Influencers help your prospects discover the right product in a short time. People trust influencer recommendations. If those recommendations are via video, they’re so much more effective. Product teaser campaigns, unboxing videos, and video reviews are a few examples. Finally, the goal behind tapping influencers is to make use of the trust they have and to become trustworthy.

That said, there are a few recent concerns about influencers. There’s no doubt that influencer marketing is blowing up. Advertisers are spending billions of dollars to woo customers through influencers. However, there are also examples where influencers with millions of followers failed. This influencer couldn’t sell 36 shirts with 2 million followers.

Source

That calls into question the effectiveness of such campaigns. A study conducted by CHEQ and economist Roberto Cavazos, titled Economic Cost of Bad Actors on the Internet, found that fake influencers can cost advertisers as much as $1.5 billion in 2020. Roberto adds that it’s easy for anyone to buy fake followers and fake likes. This leads to an erosion of trust. If influencer marketing has to thrive, fake influencers need to go.

There’s one more thing. As Techcrunch reports, Facebook is following on Instagram’s footsteps in removing publicly viewable like counts. The like counts will be viewable to the author of the post but not to anyone else.

Source

The immediate impact will be on social proof. You won’t have social proof to display on homepages or other pages. You won’t be able to measure the engagement of your posts on Facebook and Instagram. You won’t have data to benchmark and improve. Social media marketing and influencer marketing will take a dent.

Despite all the concerns regarding influencer marketing, it’s still one of the best ways to market your brand. Influencers take your brand to a new audience, generating sales and revenue in the process. If you spend some time testing if a particular influencer is worth the money you’re spending on him, you can avoid most of the pitfalls we discussed above. This helps you get a better ROI.

The post How Does Influencer Marketing Improve Customer Experience appeared first on LiveChat.