Airship Launches Live Chat

Customer engagement company Airship today launched Airship Live Chat, a two-way chat solution that leverages its mobile marketing automation platform to proactively create live customer conversations within mobile apps or SMS.

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 marketing channels like 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.

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 interface where sales and service agents interact with customers. These teams can use auto-responses for common questions that can link to further self-service information, as well as message templates for common conversations that can be personalized using existing customer data.

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, customer data platforms, or sales enablement solutions, are supported bi-drectionally through external data feeds and Airship Real-Time Data Streaming.

"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 of Airship, in a statement. "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."