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2014
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
CostumeBoxScaling to Global E-commerce with the Help of LivePerson Digital Engagement
2014 LivePerson, Inc.© 1
As Australian e-commerce retailer CostumeBox launched an expansion into the global market,
it wanted to scale its customer service operations and engage with customers who might be wary of doing business
internationally. The company deployed a digital engagement solution from LivePerson that proactively reaches out
via live chat to international customers and other key targets. Results include a five percent increase in average order
values, a 2.1 percent improvement in conversion rates, and a 95 percent satisfaction score for the live chat channel.
Since its founding in 2007, CostumeBox has quickly grown to be
the largest online costume retailer in the southern hemisphere. The
number of employees at its headquarters near Sydney’s northern
beaches has grown from six to more than 50, and the geographic
reach of the site has also burgeoned—to New Zealand in 2012, and
then globally in late 2013. “We now have postage rates published
for over 100 different countries,” declares Brian Naylor, the
company’s marketing manager. “After just a month, we’re sending
an average of 20 international orders every day—and as many as
200 on some days.”
Naylor’s charter is to optimize the online customer experience, and that
job got a lot more complicated with the global launch. “Our website has
an ‘.au’ domain extension, so it’s clear we’re in Australia,” he notes. “People
in other countries won’t order from us if they’re unsure whether a costume
will fit, for example. So we have to answer such questions quickly.”
For this reason, Naylor knew that a digital engagement solution was a
necessary addition. “People like to know they’ll get a quick response,
and they expect that email will take a long time,” Naylor explains. “And
not everyone is in a place where they can speak aloud by phone when
they’re online with us.”
SATISFACTION SCOREFOR THE LIVE CHAT
CUSTOMER SUCCESS CostumeBox
An easy deploymentNaylor liked what he saw when he researched LivePerson solutions, and activated a trial of the LiveEngage platform. “We jumped into it
at a busy time of our season, and we didn’t think we could get much out of it until things slowed down,” he recalls. “But I had a live chat
with a LivePerson agent, who connected me with my Customer Success manager. He walked our team through some of the capabilities
of the LiveEngage platform. I went back to my computer and logged in, and within an hour I had set up Click-to-Chat buttons and two
campaigns. It was quite easy.
2014 LivePerson, Inc.© 2
CUSTOMER SUCCESS CostumeBox
CostumeBoxFounded: 2007
Headquarters: Brookvale, New South Wales, Australia
Industry: Retail
Employees: 50+
Global Growth: Expanded from Australia/New Zealand market to global delivery in October, 2013
The Challenge• Roll out comfortable sales
support channel for new
global e-commerce effort
• Scale support operations
with minimal addition of
new staff
• Integrate digital engagement
into all aspects of the
customer experience
“We set up a couple of segments for using the content targeting features of the LiveEngage platform,”
Naylor continues. “First, we segmented anyone that was outside of Australia, and we created a peeling
corner banner that says, ‘Yes, we ship to…,’ and inserts the country. The bug clicks through to shipping
rates for that country.”
The other segment Naylor set up was in the shopping cart. “We usually have a promotion that gives
customers a percentage discount when they reach a certain order amount,” he explains. “We were able to
set up a rule that if a shopper is within $10 of that target, a pop-up will say, ‘You’re this close to getting 20
percent off your order,’ encouraging people to go back and add something to their cart. It’s good for the
customer and helps us increase our average order value.”
Optimizing customer serviceAnother reason that the LiveEngage deployment was easy for CostumeBox is its delivery and pricing model.
The digital engagement platform is based in the cloud, eliminating the need to invest in infrastructure; and
the price of the subscription is based on the number of interactions, rather than a license fee per agent
seat. “This gives us maximum flexibility to scale our services during busy times,” Naylor notes. “We have a
core value that ‘we are all in customer service,’ and in the days leading up to our busiest holiday, Halloween,
all our staff handle inquiries. It’s nice that an unlimited number of employees can log into LivePerson from
their desks and have conversations with customers as needed.”
Making the Click-to-Chat button accessible is a key factor in customer service, and Naylor’s team went
through a bit of trial and error on this. “We had it on the top of the page, and that worked fine, but the
real estate was too valuable,” he recalls. “We ended up adding floating tabs on the right hand side of our
website, and those go with you no matter what page you’re on. It’s important for help to be available
immediately no matter where you are.”
Naylor has configured the LiveEngage platform so that agents can manage up to three concurrent
conversations. The LiveEngage console gives a wealth of information about the customers they’re chatting
with, including what country they’re in and what page they’re visiting. “We have a lot of products that
are similar,” he says. “For example, we have more than 90 Batman items. As a result, seeing what page the
customer is looking at greatly increases the efficiency of staff and speeds the time to resolution.”
Over several months, members of the team have informally created canned answers to frequently-asked
questions and shared them among themselves. “As with most service teams, we get pretty much the same
inquiries from most people throughout the day,” Naylor says. “The flexibility of the LiveEngage platform to
push out those answers, or modify them, is very important.”
Impressive resultsIn just a few months, live chat through the LiveEngage platform has helped Naylor and his team navigate
the transition to global e-commerce. “During peak weeks, our customer service team of eight people
handles more than 4,000 inquiries,” Naylor reports. “Live chat usage has stayed steady at 8 to 12 percent
of those inquiries, but our team’s efficiency is greatly enhanced even at those levels. Agents can perform
multiple live chat conversations while they return emails, and this kept us from having to add staff during
our peak weeks this year, when we had as many as 30 inquiries per labor hour.”
2014 LivePerson, Inc.© 3
CUSTOMER SUCCESS CostumeBox
“”
We want to be wherever the customer is—mobile phones, tablets, social media—and we want them to have a really standout
customer experience. – Brian Naylor, Marketing Manager, CostumeBox
The SolutionEngagement Model: Proactive chat for e-commerce
sales engagement
Under the Hood: LiveEngage platform with live
chat and content targeting;
future deployment of mobile chat
and integration of LiveEngage
platform into CRM system
Customer Success: Help with setup and configuration
and ongoing optimization
support from LivePerson’s
Customer Success team
The Results• Nearly 5% increase in
average order value
• 2.1% increase in
conversion rate
• 95% satisfaction score
for live chat channel
• Ability to field up to
30 inquiries per labor
hour without adding staff
• 8% to 12% of customer
service inquiries fielded
by live chat
Overall average order values have increased for CostumeBox over the past year, and Naylor believes that
live chat has been a major factor “Customers are spending $5 more with us on average than a year ago—a
5 percent increase,” Naylor says. “And our content targeting rule for international customers increased the
conversion rate outside of Australia and New Zealand by 2.5 percent.”
Perhaps most importantly for Naylor’s long-term goals, customer response to live chat has been
overwhelmingly positive. “We send out a post-interaction survey with a scoring system, and the live chat
channel gets a score of more than 95 percent,” he reports. “That’s about the same satisfaction score that our
phone and email services get, but live chat is more likely to result in a resolution with the first interaction.”
The Comments section of the post-interaction surveys reveals another nuance of customer satisfaction.
“Customers often mention the name of the live chat agent and talk about how happy they were with the
service,” Naylor comments. “Customers who remember the name of the person who helped them are more
likely to come back, and to encourage their friends to visit our site.”
Going to the next levelNaylor’s team is about to launch a mobile-optimized website, and plans to deploy mobile live chat for the
site through the LiveEngage platform in early 2014. “We can see from our analytics that more and more
people are coming to our site from mobile devices,” he notes. “We want them to have a great experience
and decide to make a purchase. Mobile chat will be easy and affordable to deploy with LivePerson’s cloud-
based delivery and per-interaction pricing.”
Naylor’s team also plans to integrate the LiveEngage platform into CostumeBox’s new customer
relationship management (CRM) system, which will go live in early 2014. “One goal for this project is to
address cart abandonment more aggressively,” Naylor explains. “When customers get to the final stage but
still have a question hanging over their purchase, LiveEngage will enable us to invite them to a proactive
live chat with an agent. We really want to start personalizing how we touch each of our customers.”
Another initiative on the horizon for CostumeBox is to use its customer data to facilitate the growth of
the company. “We’re going to really focus on mining all the rich information we have on customers—
not in an intrusive way, but in a way that enables a better customer experience,” Naylor says. One
source of information is live chat conversations, which the team can analyze using tools built into the
LiveEngage platform.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS CostumeBox
42014 LivePerson, Inc.©
Being where the customer isFor Naylor, digital engagement isn’t just a customer service tool; it is a vehicle for enacting
CostumeBox’s overall strategy. “You can spend all the money you want on advertising, but if the word
of mouth isn’t great, and people aren’t happy and coming back to you, you’re dead in the water,” he
relates. “We want to be wherever the customer is—mobile phones, tablets, social media—and we want
them to have a really standout customer experience. We’ve found that live chat from LivePerson is an
indispensable piece to that puzzle.”
About LivePersonLivePerson, Inc. (NASDAQ: LPSN) offers a
cloud-based platform that enables businesses
to proactively connect in real-time with their
customers via chat, voice, and content delivery at
the right time, through the right channel, including
websites, social media, and mobile devices. This
“intelligent engagement” is driven by real-time
behavioral analytics, producing connections based
on a true understanding of business objectives and
customer needs. LivePerson is headquartered in
New York City with offices in Atlanta, San Francisco,
Santa Monica, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Tel Aviv,
Tokyo, and Melbourne.
ContactLivePerson, Inc. T: 212.991.1794
475 Tenth Ave F: 212.609.4233
5th Floor [email protected]
New York, NY 10018 www.liveperson.com
“
”
Agents can perform multiple live chat
conversations while they return emails,
and this kept us from having to add staff
during our peak weeks this year.
– Brian Naylor, Marketing Manager, CostumeBox