Airship Expands its Platform to Revolutionize Live Chat for Consumers and Brands

Customer engagement company Airship today announced the availability of Airship Live Chat — the industry’s first two-way chat solution that leverages the power of a leading mobile marketing automation platform to proactively create live customer conversations within mobile apps or SMS, increasing conversions, engagement and satisfaction. With Airship Live Chat, marketers can leverage customer behaviors, their location, lifecycle events, or their progress within key journeys, to trigger contextual, real-time and personalized invitations to in-app and SMS chat delivered across existing marketing channels — push notifications, in-app messages, mobile wallets, email and more. With a tap on these messages, customers are connected to sales and service teams either in-app or over SMS to get real-time assistance with purchases or upgrades, discuss questions or concerns, or provide feedback via a conversation. Airship Live Chat makes it quick and easy for brands to create better one-to-one customer experiences across marketing, sales and service, and grow customer lifetime value throughout the customer journey.

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“A largely digital-only, mobile-led year has conditioned consumers to easily compare many options, try new products and services, and commit to new brands longer-term through subscriptions, replenishment and re-ordering, all of which are driving significant brand switching and new loyalties”

Forrester Research recently stated: “Among those firms we surveyed that are implementing chat in mobile, only 44% cited cost reduction as a reason while 86% mentioned improving CX … The first step to creating a differentiated customer experience is understanding your customers’ behaviors and intent. Deep personalization requires the ability to track real-time interactions and customer journey information, areas in which many vendors are lacking,” (Forrester Research, Inc., “The Case For Asynchronous Messaging: Apple Business Chat, Messenger, WhatsApp,” July 27, 2020).

As part of Airship’s Customer Engagement Platform, Airship Live Chat leverages its rich behavioral data, real-time automation, personalization and journeys optimization to bring in-the-moment relevancy to live conversations with customers. Invitations to chat and customer responses appear as threaded messages within the Live Chat Manager, a centralized UI where sales and service agents interact with customers. These teams gain productivity and scale with auto-responses for common questions that can link to further self-service information, as well as message templates for common conversations that can be easily personalized using existing customer data.

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A recent evaluation of 190 brands with chatbots found that only six percent of mobile app chatbots and three percent of mobile website chatbots could facilitate escalations to a live chat agent. With Airship’s Open APIs, chatbot conversations can be passed to Live Chat Manager for real-time, human-driven conversations, or, if necessary, forwarded from Live Chat Manager to other sales or support solutions with specific capabilities. Integrations with systems-of-record like CRM, CDP platforms or sales enablement solutions are supported bi-directionally through external data feeds and Airship Real-Time Data Streaming.

Use cases for Airship Live Chat are as varied as real-life conversations and marketers’ imaginations in removing friction and moving customers through marketing, sales and support funnels. Beyond providing exceptionally effective one-to-one experiences, Airship Live Chat can serve very specific use cases:

• Automatically reach customers on their preferred channels to spark a live chat if they are stalled in completing important goals, from completing purchase form fields to abandoned shopping carts or appointment bookings
• Include a live chat support link on mobile wallet receipts for curbside pickup, product warranty cards, or travel concierge-enabled mobile boarding passes, with transaction-specific context passed-along to operational teams once activated
• Send a post-purchase email or SMS that opens a live chat enabling customers to easily upgrade their subscription, set replenishment timeframes, sign up for loyalty programs, or provide feedback

“A largely digital-only, mobile-led year has conditioned consumers to easily compare many options, try new products and services, and commit to new brands longer-term through subscriptions, replenishment and re-ordering, all of which are driving significant brand switching and new loyalties,” said Brett Caine, CEO and president, Airship. “What’s been missing is the more human-side where one-on-one conversations assist customers to close sales, complete enrollments or follow up on service experiences. Airship Live Chat embeds our decade-plus, mobile marketing automation expertise to give brands a fast, easy and highly contextual way to start real-time customer conversations and deliver high-touch sales and services experiences that accelerate business value, grow customer satisfaction and engender loyalty and advocacy.”

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