A New Kind of CMS — LiveWorld’s Conversational Marketing Software Drives Customer Engagement Through Social Media and Messaging

TL; DR: LiveWorld helps large enterprises serving thousands of customers monitor brand mentions and customer interactions wherever they happen. The company’s all-in-one software platform collects and consolidates conversations from a variety of social media networks and messaging applications to gather marketing insights that will help brands better engage their audiences. With special attention and expertise paid to the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, LiveWorld leverages personable chatbots and teams of support agents to streamline and improve online communication.

In the realm of online marketing and brand management, CMS are three letters that make a big impact. Content management systems like WordPress power the websites for the full range of individual bloggers, small business owners, and Fortune 500 corporations.

At LiveWorld, however, the acronym takes on an entirely different meaning.

“We call it a conversation management system,” Vice President of Marketing Jason Kapler said of the company’s all-in-one software platform. “We don’t call it a CMS or even a social content management system.”

LiveWorld leverages supportive technology to deepen the relationships and interactions its clients have with their audiences. Instead of monitoring countless communication channels, the company brings all online conversations about a brand to an easy-to-use portal that enables teams to gauge campaign effectiveness and detect any issues.

For instance, billions of global users communicate across dozens of social media networks, messaging apps, and online review sites. Instead of being flooded with disparate data, enterprise organizations can use LiveWorld to scale and improve customer service by compiling interactions into a single system that lets support teams spend their time more effectively.

“You get a lot of time back for your business that you can use on other tasks,” Jason said. “It helps organizations scale across extremely large volumes of constant conversations, which is what happens when your customers are using eight different platforms and messaging apps. It seems like an impossible task to manage that, but we make it easy by pulling it in, organizing it, and triaging the important things so that your people can look at the things that really matter and automate a lot of the rest of it.”

For more than two decades, LiveWorld has worked to foster online communication between companies and their customers. A handful of top executives at Apple had created an online social community platform in the late ‘90s. The product was a little ahead of its time, but the employees struck out on their own with a clear vision.

“People go to communities because it’s the best place to get information that’s authentic and direct,” Jason said. “It can be an excellent place to have pure conversations with peers. We recognized the power of conversations early on to help benefit the community as a whole on a variety of topics.”

Through the years, online communities shifted from forums and message boards to social networks. LiveWorld uses APIs to ingest content from social networks, messaging apps, and even reviews from places like Yelp or Amazon.

“A lot of our services start with user-generated content moderation and monitoring so that we can provide a safe experience for users and for the brand as the owner of that community,” Jason said. “You can pull in every conversation from everywhere across the digital landscape, and you don’t have to do a series or patchwork of tools.”

By learning what their customers are talking about, brands can use LiveWorld’s data and insights to impact their marketing campaigns and customer service programs, according to Jason.

“The unique way it’s geared toward conversations, mapping those together, lets our clients find out about the important dialogue that’s happening online anywhere,” he said. “It’s built around and designed around that particular notion, just the power of conversations.”

With the world of social media perpetually changing, Jason said LiveWorld is constantly adding support for new networks and technologies to its platform. The team started with Facebook and other established platforms and continue to cast an ever-wider net.

“All the ways that people can have conversations, whether it’s one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many, can all be consumed by our software and managed from the brand’s perspective,” he said. “You can really start to get a lot of audience insights into the conversations going on, which is huge and powerful for companies to understand.”

As the company pushed to stay ahead of social media’s global footprint, the advent of messaging and chat applications represented another major challenge for LiveWorld to answer.

“That was a huge shift because messaging was taking the very authentic one-to-one communications between individuals and opening that up to businesses with Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat,” Jason said. “There are so many ways to manage conversations and expand the use of online communities to produce stronger customer relationships and support.”

LiveWorld’s close relationship with customers enables the company to quickly identify emerging technologies and develop new features to meet organizations’ needs. Because the company serves a select group of the world’s most recognizable enterprise organizations, including American Express, FedEx and Pfizer, Jason said the company’s developers will build new tools after hearing only a few requests.

“We have an agile process by which we can test them very rapidly and roll them out quite quickly,” he said. “Our road map is very much based on what our clients want, as well as us looking out for the new capabilities we can offer proactively. We are our clients’ social media experts, and we need to help them understand what they need to start to adopt.”

As it extends the messaging applications and the technology’s influences on customer support, LiveChat has witnessed — and innovated upon — the rise of chatbots to boost efficiency and scalability. Jason said the specialized products don’t typically come with the management portal or integrations enterprise organizations require, especially when it comes to transferring customers to live agents.

“One of our differentiators is that you can build a chatbot on our platform or bring one in from somewhere else, and you can actually have a system to manage chatbot interactions and transition conversations in a very seamless way,” he said.

Organizations can use chatbots to collect customer information, solve common problems, and provide a sense of immediacy when responding to inquiries. Once the chatbot reaches the limits of its expertise, customers or chatbots can summon a live agent who will have the full context of the customer’s conversation.

“It’s the right blend of automation and a human agent,” Jason said. “Having an agent step in and take over anything that’s more sensitive or at a higher level than what a chatbot can do really frees up a lot of resources.”

LiveWorld’s chatbot management program emphasizes seamless transfers between chatbots and live agents based on urgency, subject matter, and support team availability. The real-time logging and capturing of chatbot communications with customers means agents can deliver faster solutions and greater satisfaction.

“That’s one of the big issues, especially in customer service, of getting stuck in a phone tree and having to repeat all your information,” Jason said. “We focus on the strategic tasks for companies that are looking for efficiencies, scale, and the opportunity to manage conversations that way.”

Although the company’s solutions serve a wide range of industries, LiveWorld has built added services for the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. For instance, companies needing to rapidly scale their support operations can request to use LiveWorld’s workforce of support agents.

“We have that expertise, and we have those agents we can deploy who know our software, know the majority of the other social media software pieces, and the industry jargon as well so we can step into the trenches with our customers,” Jason said.

Although he calls the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries “kind of broken,” Jason said LiveWorld’s platform is poised to help hospitals and doctors better communicate with patients, who are increasingly demanding lower prices, increased efficiency, more choices, and greater flexibility.

“There are a lot of innovators who are coming in and trying to unseat some of the old guard by using technology to disrupt the market in a good way,” he said. “We already have the platform for it, and we already have the ability to integrate chatbots, so there’s a lot of room for innovation when it comes to enabling patients, pharmacists, and hospitals to directly communicate with one another via some of these conversation platforms.”

By making healthcare more efficient and nimble, organizations can reduce costs and jettison legacy systems — while patients can also receive more immediate feedback and better care.

“There’s a lot of waste and cost associated with the patient journey,” Jason said. “We’ve got several solutions in the pipeline that address exactly those issues. That’s something I’m really looking forward to because it’s game-changing and something directly in our wheelhouse.”