LINE Official Account Membership Strategy: 3 Steps to Build VIP Loyalty Through One-on-One Customer Service Chats

When a brand understands the behavioral profiles of its LINE friends on its LINE Official Account, it can personalize messages, respond to questions in real time, and run precisely segmented broadcasts. On that foundation, it can turn LINE friends into loyal VIP fans and start building deeper member relationships.

Why member relationships matter to brands

According to Invesp, acquiring a new customer costs five times as much as retaining an existing one. On the customer side, product information is more transparent than ever, giving shoppers far more choice. On the brand side, digital marketing has changed dramatically: as customer touchpoints grow more complex, third-party cookies are no longer an effective way to reach customers. Put the two together, and retaining existing customers has become far more important for brands.

Why does customer acquisition cost keep rising, and how can brands stay profitable?Imagine your company added nearly a hundred new customers this month, a jump of more than 60% over the average of previous months. Everyone, from sales and marketing to product and engineering, is thrilled: the service is clearly resonating with users and is more likely to attract investors. But do you know your current customer acquisition cost? In other words, how much did you spend on marketing to win those hundred or so customers?https://oakmega.com/blog/why-cac-is-important-for-business

Why LINE Official Accounts have become a key channel for member relationships

Brands are building member relationships on LINE because it lets them interact with friends directly. With LINE's many message formats, such as rich messages and card messages, brands can nurture those relationships. Take member management: a brand can add a real-name member registration form to its rich menu, collect updated member data, and then use the form responses to send follow-up broadcasts that deepen the relationship.

LINE How-To, Use Case Edition | Run real-name registration surveys on LINE while managing membersBack in May 2021, COVID-19 surged again and all of Taiwan went into a Level 3 alert. The government quickly issued real-name registration rules to control crowd flow and slow the spread of the virus. Before the “1922 SMS contact tracing” system arrived, businesses used all kinds of registration forms: handwritten sheets, Google Forms, custom fields in their own apps, and more.https://oakmega.com/blog/crm-through-line-conduct-name-registration

3 steps to handle customer service on LINE

Resolving member questions quickly and providing solid customer service is a core part of member management. In a one-on-one chat window, your team can use tags to understand each friend's status and draw on past data to solve problems on the spot. Here's how the customer service flow works in the OakMega Social CRM dashboard.

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Step 1: Read the friend's question

When a friend sends a question to your Official Account, your customer service team first reads it to get a basic understanding of what they're asking.

Step 2: Use member information to understand the question

Once the team has the gist, they can check “Member info” and “Member history” to see the friend's tags and review their behavior: which channel they came through to add the Official Account, which product categories they usually follow, and whether this is their first interaction. With that context, the team understands the background of the question and can give a fitting reply.

Step 3: Reply and mark the handling status

After replying, the team can mark the chat window with a handling status. There are typically three:

• Pending: When a friend sends a question, the system automatically marks the chat as “Pending.”
• In progress: Some questions need back-and-forth and can't be resolved right away. Once the team replies, the system changes the status to “In progress.” Agents can also set it to “In progress” manually.
• Completed: When the question has been answered, an agent manually marks the chat as “Completed,” closing out one full customer service interaction.

Is LINE a good fit for member management?LINE is probably the messaging app Taiwanese people know best. Beyond chatting, some see it as an advertising app, but is LINE really suited to member management? With 21 million users in Taiwan, it's one of the best communication channels a brand can have, much like Facebook. Yet for many brands running a LINE OA, followers are just a list, which is why most LINE OAs end up with high block rates. A LINE OA connects a brand with its customers and lets it talk to them on LINE, but many brands hit a wall: LINE only offers basic messaging, often just broadcasts to everyone, with no way to know each user's preferences or what they clicked.https://oakmega.com/blog/line-crm-solution

More ways to nurture VIP customers on LINE

A LINE Official Account lets brands handle customer service with friends in real time. OakMega Social CRM helps brands efficiently keep track of questions from every type of friend, using “member info tags” and “three handling statuses” to manage the customer service side of member management.

Some brands have recently explored video customer service, like the one offered by LINE Bank, to give friends a more authentic experience. Whether or not it proves workable, the goal is the same: to make fuller use of LINE's direct connection with friends and create more genuine interactions.