LIVID: Taking the Future of Sales Online

 

How LIVID Grew Leads for its Customers by 156% and Website Conversion by 300% Using Wowza’s Video Solution to Revolutionize the Sales Experience.  

 

LIVID believes the future of high-value product sales is “phygital” — combining digital and physical components to bring sales floors and showrooms online. To make virtual sales presentations as realistic as possible, LIVID leverages Wowza Streaming Engine to power one-to-one and one-to-many live streaming sessions for online retailers. 

     

Case Study Snapshot

Challenges:	Solutions:	Outcomes:
Needed the ability to help sales representatives converse with their customers remotely, but with more dynamic and realistic interactions than typical video conferencing. Required a flexible video solution capable of ingesting streams from multiple kinds of cameras simultaneously while delivering streams to thousands of viewers on different devices. Hoped to save time developing a video solution from scratch or piecing together multiple components while still leveraging every functionality the brand needed.	Wowza Streaming Engine, a customizable media server software for deploying video on premises, behind a firewall, or entirely offline.	Successfully created a unique sales tool that has now grown into an entirely new sales ecosystem. Experienced a 300% increase in website conversion thanks to more interactive and personalized live streams. Can now offer improved stream quality, playback experiences, and load-bearing capabilities to organizations implementing online showroom sales solutions .

   

Taking Showrooms Online

As ubiquitous as e-commerce has become, buying goods without talking to an expert isn’t suitable for every kind of product. Human interaction with a salesperson can make or break a deal, as well as the ability to personally examine a product before committing to a purchase. 

This is especially true when it comes to high-value products like vehicles. However, when COVID left sales rooms empty in 2020, LIVID saw an opportunity to invent to something just as valuable: virtual showrooms powered by next-generation video technology that emulate in-person sales experiences as much as possible, with an added element of convenience.  

The technical team behind LIVID had experience with Wowza as far back as 2009, so when they decided to take this new direction, they knew Wowza Streaming Engine was the perfect foundation for its restructured service offering. Sorin Vasilescu, LIVID’s technical director, notes that though the brand is particularly biased toward custom development and considered building its own solution from scratch or combining open-source components, LIVID decided doing so would be too costly and arduous — especially for a startup product.  

Instead, Wowza Streaming Engine empowered LIVID to hit the ground running. The brand was able to create its solution with all the functionality it needed without sacrificing time-to-market. 

“What began as one-to-many video streams where a car dealer presented a model or model range to hundreds of viewers quickly grew into an entirely new sales ecosystem,” Vasilescu says. “Today, the majority of our conversations are one-to-one that individual customers initiate while browsing our website. Live presentations are passed on to other locations or business units on the fly and become sales conversations. The whole platform is a veritable video-enhanced sales tool.”  

Since leveraging LIVID’s solution and Wowza Streaming Engine — which, together, create a new video-enhanced sales tool and ecosystem — LIVID’s high-profile customers’ average conversion rate increased by as much as 300% and improved its Customer Satisfaction Index from a 3.9 to 4.6. 

 

 

Building a State-of-the-Art Sales Ecosystem With Video  

One of LIVID’s most critical goals was to create a platform that made the sales process easier for its customers. As such, the brand sought to create a solution that would make it easy for its customers to broadcast flexible live streams without them needing to install complicated software or dive too deep into the technical details themselves. Such configurations include being able to mix any live or prerecorded audio and video sources, apply overlays (such as names, titles, and product information), record remotely on the server at the push of a button, and further enhance their offering in the future. 

The unique levels of control and compatibility LIVID can grant its customers is a significant part of the brand’s success. Customers can then take advantage of this control to create dynamic and visually compelling playback experiences that influence purchasing decisions. LIVID’s technical team elaborates:  

“We developed tens of Wowza Streaming Engine modules that deal with everything we need, from authentication and authorization, monitoring, command and control functions, on-demand recording, to more advanced features like altering the contents of the streams or even altering parts of the picture.”  

LIVID’s team also notes that Wowza Streaming Engine’s transcoding capabilities enabled it to bridge the gap between protocols like Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC) and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), which would otherwise be incompatible. This comprehensive support for different workflows makes LIVID’s streams more accessible to its customers’ customers. With the ability to ingest and deliver streams to and from all kinds of cameras, mobile phones, and browsers, buyers interested in purchasing vehicles can do so using whichever devices they choose. 

LIVID’s technical team says, “Wowza Streaming Engine’s capacity to accept Java plugins and expose its internals for customization makes it a prime candidate for building a flexible and novel solution. There are few things you can think of in terms of streaming and stream manipulation that Wowza Streaming Engine cannot accommodate.”  

 

Developing Innovative B2B Solutions to Empower B2C Deals 

Some of LIVID’s customers had attempted to use other streaming solutions that lacked quality and sufficient load-bearing capabilities, but Wowza Streaming Engine’s flexibility and ease-of-use gives LIVID a leg up over its competitors.  

LIVID beats other sales solutions in terms of speed and scale. They needed the ability to facilitate both one-to-one conversations (which are more akin to meeting with a sales representative in-person) and scaling presentations to thousands of viewers at a time. Luckily, Wowza Streaming Engine’s WebRTC capabilities reduce latency to under a second while still allowing the brand to scale its audience when necessary.  

Consumers turn to LIVID when they want to purchase high-value products without needing to visit a physical sales floor. Sales representatives can use live streams to guide them through vehicle features, answer questions, queue prerecorded demonstrations, monitor stream health, personalize experiences, and show off other product aspects with advanced augmented reality that makes the process of buying an expensive product reassuring despite distance.  

Sorin Vasilescu also mentions, “Beyond Wowza Streaming Engine’s features themselves, we cannot stress enough how much the documentation, code samples, and support mechanisms have allowed us to be rapid and effective with developing the functionalities for our product. We would recommend Wowza thanks to its flexible offering, building-block approach, developer friendliness, and community of like-minded people.” With Wowza Streaming Engine under the hood and its own state-of-the-art sales technology, LIVID empowers its customers to make the deals they strive for.