NEW YORK, Nov. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- LivePerson,
Inc. (Nasdaq: LPSN), a leading provider of conversational commerce
solutions, recorded a 97 percent increase in messaging
conversations between brands and American consumers through its
LiveEngage platform during Cyber Weekend, the five-day period
between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, and a dramatic 261 percent
rise in conversations handled by automation, such as bots.
Long preferred in Asia, where
China has leapfrogged the US as
the world's largest e-commerce market, messaging through
conversational channels such as SMS, in-app messaging, Facebook
Messenger, and WhatsApp is now accelerating rapidly among American
consumers. As well as an acceleration in overall usage, there is a
widening base of consumers adopting messaging as a way to talk to
brands, with 119 percent more people trying conversational commerce
for the first time versus the year before.
"The significant rise this Cyber Weekend in conversational
commerce, including automation and bots, points the way to a much
better alternative, where consumers have the ability to browse
products, get help, and buy things through mobile messaging and AI
voice assistants, quickly and on their own schedule," said
Robert LoCascio, founder and CEO of
LivePerson.
Of the major messaging channels, SMS showed the greatest
increase in usage this Cyber Weekend, growing 416 percent versus
the previous year. Due to its universal accessibility across all
smartphones, without needing to download a specific app, SMS is
often used as an "entry point" for brands wanting to connect
conversationally with their customers. If previous trends continue,
this will fuel further growth for conversational commerce in the
future, as brands expand beyond SMS to additional messaging
channels or add voice assistants.
The rise in automation and bots was a notable trend this Cyber
Weekend, up 261 percent versus the year before. In fact, almost 50
percent of all conversations on the LiveEngage platform included
some form of bot or automation. This indicates a maturing of
conversational commerce to handle operations at large scale, where
sudden spikes in activity such as the Cyber Weekend must be handled
by intelligent automation, rather than swamping customer care staff
and making consumers wait for service.
From November 1 to November 25,
$15.3 billion in purchases were
completed by consumers on their smartphone, and these devices
accounted for 50 percent of total website traffic, notably higher
than both desktops (43 percent) and tablets (8 percent). On Black
Friday alone, transactions made on smartphones accounted for more
than one-third of all sales and some retailers stated that 80
percent of their online traffic came from mobile devices.
"Forty percent of consumers have reported spending more than
planned because of personalized service, and this rapid rise in
messaging and automation shows that brands understand the value of
personalization," added LoCascio. "After twenty years, websites are
still impersonal and failing to make consumers happy, and the best
way forward is to replace website visits with conversations,
powered by a blend of human and artificial intelligence. It's the
difference between brands talking at consumers — which is
all a traditional website can do — and talking with their
consumers."
LivePerson's LiveEngage platform enables brands to connect with
consumers across popular messengers and voice assistants, including
SMS, a brand's own website and app, Facebook Messenger, Amazon
Alexa, and Google Assistant, among others. LiveEngage brings
together the AI and automations necessary to operate the experience
at scale, along with the back-end integrations to offer
capabilities such as transactions, product recommendations and
order status updates. A workspace for customer care and sales
agents is provided to monitor and support the experience where
automation does not.
About LivePerson
LivePerson makes life easier by
transforming how people communicate with brands. Our 18,000
customers, including leading brands like Citibank, HSBC, Orange,
and The Home Depot, use our conversational commerce solutions to
orchestrate humans and AI, at scale, and create a convenient,
deeply personal relationship — a conversational relationship — with
their millions of consumers. For more information about LivePerson
(NASDAQ: LPSN), please visit www.liveperson.com.
CONTACT: Allison Franzese,
afranzese@liveperson.com, 212-609-4224
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SOURCE LivePerson, Inc.