About Live Group

Live Group is an event services company that specialises in organising conferences, summits - virtual and hybrid, that inspire and engage communities across the world. The company provides services to government, corporates, industry groups and associations. 

The entire team at Live Group is really passionate about sustainability. The company’s got a focus group that helps the team in finding ways to reduce the carbon footprint and ideally become carbon neutral. Moreover, Live Group is well aware of how bad events can be for the environment. Hence, the team is striving to be the leaders in making this situation better in the way people are running events.

The Need

Since the company is focused on sustainability and working toward reducing carbon footprint, it’s aware that in-person events can be a huge drain on the environment with all the travel, waste, etc. This is why even prior to the 2020 pandemic, the team was well ahead of the virtual events space, and events of 2020 accelerated growth in this direction. 

Laura Whittington, Head of Digital Product at Live Group said, “Prior to the pandemic, we wanted to start running more sustainable events and then COVID-19 hit, which accelerated it quickly.”

While the company already had a 1-on-1 chat implemented in its live events, they wanted to scale their digital and user engagement capabilities. Users wanted to video call, face chat, and collaborate on different documents.

“We wanted to make sure we had the flexibility to manage it ourselves and develop it into our systems so people weren’t walking away from our platform,” said Laura.

This is when Live Group started looking for a chat solution — like CometChat — that could align with their business goals.

The Challenge

Scalability was the biggest challenge that the team at Live Group faced. Live Group is continually looking for solutions and features that enhance the delegate experience, and while a chat function was already in place, Live Group wanted to evolve this to include phone calls and group chats, and an ability to collaborate on different documents.

This is where Live Group decided to shift to a better and more advanced provider — one that could offer the same flexibility that could be easily managed and developed into the system. So people didn't feel like they were walking away from the platform and also they could have some control over how users engaged.

During the hunt, Live Group struggled to find a partner that had the commercial model that fitted events and would have the flexibility their clientele required considering the events ranged from 100 users to 40,000 Most chat features by providers were positioned for sales and support solutions. However, the company needed flexibility and hierarchy for different events. 

The Solution

To maximise on efficiencies, they decided to go with the CometChat chat API. 

The Result

The chat solution is now a significant part of Live Group’s platform, live events, and the overall customer experience. The company has run multiple events using CometChat functionality and is planning to leverage it more in their future live events. In all, they have exchanged thousands of messages in their virtual events.

“The implementation was quite straightforward. Our technical director quickly created a prototype which was used as our proof of concept. And the best part is that, in less than a week, the testing was completed,” Laura mentioned. 

The team at Live Group discussed the few challenges they experienced with CometChat’s development team, which was easily resolved on Slack channels. With CometChat, Live Group was easily able to integrate a chat feature that is an ideal fit for their use case.

What’s Next for Live Group

With new in-app chat functionality, Live Group is uniquely positioned for continued growth. The company’s integration with CometChat is still recent (28th April 2021, to be precise) and Laura looks forward to evaluating how the chat solution impacts Live Group’s live events experience.

Moreover, Live Group says that the team wants to explore sentiment analysis and integrate the technology into their solution. The company wants to eventually make use of CometChat’s more advanced functionality, such as the Sentiment Analysis extension, that helps understand the sentiment of a message (e.g. positive, neutral, negative, mixed, etc.).

With so much going around, the company is amidst a moment of change where they want to redefine their business goals, and the steps they need to implement to accomplish them. Besides, one of the key areas that stand out for the entire team is their focus on sustainability, overall engagement, and data as a whole.

The entire team at Live Group plans to methodically add in features to continue to enhance the chat experience in the future, starting with sentiment analysis. And embracing digital for the events industry is the first step in accelerating the transition to a sustainable future. 

Connect with a member of CometChat’s sales team today to see how we can help get your virtual event up and running!

About the Author

Swahani is a marketing specialist at CometChat, joining in May of 2021. She's interested in all things tech, with previous experience writing about the blockchain, data science, and analytics domains. Swahani received a B.Tech degree in Information Technology and Engineering from Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Technological University (Dr. BATU).