The Results of Intelligent Online Engagement

Online engagement requires a third-generation platform to deliver the results enterprises need to ensure success of their Web channel. Enterprises using the LivePerson third-generation engagement platform consistently realise:

• A 20 percent increase in online sales
• Customer satisfaction scores above any other human-assisted channe
• Improved first contact resolution

The Importance of Domain Expertise

Implementing intelligent online engagement is more than simply adding a chat button to your website or adding a chat channel to an existing customer service platform. To tap into the true potential of chat. The return must be measured by incremental increases in revenue, orders and customer satisfaction. Any chat solution that doesn’t provide a strategy for delivering incremental contribution should be approached with concern.

Moreover, sales and service deployments require significantly different approaches. For instance, a service solution requires secure data integration with the enterprise CRM, inventory, billing and other supporting systems. Such systems contain data variables that enable the enterprise to identify and proactively target visitors in need of personalised assistance in real time. And because service deployments seek to assist at-risk customers and to eliminate frustration, it is essential that the targeting of visitors be tied to the availability of agents who have the right skill sets to address the visitors’ concerns.

From assessment of specific behaviours that typically result in a poor customer experience, to the development of a rules-based methodology that assures important customers receive the assistance they need, service deployments are distinct from sales engagements. For this reason, contact centres must ensure that their online engagement provider has extensive domain expertise, earned through multiple implementations in service deployments, as well as a proven strategy for driving incremental cost savings, first contact resolution (FCR), customer satisfaction (CSAT) and retention

Focus on Incremental Contribution

Customer Aquisition

Why the focus on incremental contribution? As every ecommerce executive knows, online sales happen with the average conversion rate ranging between two and five percent. Self-servers are visitors who arrive on site with the intent to make a purchase. It is all too easy for first and second-generation chat implementations to inadvertently interfere with self-servers. This occurs because most chat implementations use business rules to identify hot leads. Self-servers clearly have similar attributes as hot leads, which results in them being targeted for an engagement by first and second generation platforms. Targeting self-servers is a costly mistake, as agent resources are applied to visitors who will purchase on their own, thereby driving up the cost of sales unnecessarily.

Clearly, using business rules to identify hot leads is not enough to deliver on the true potential of chat. Rather, the engagement platform needs a comprehensive rules engine that can distinguish between self-servers and visitors who require the assistance of an agent, and direct agent resources exclusively on the latter. It also needs to recognise the behaviour patterns that indicate a customer is about to abandon a shopping cart and present an engagement opportunity best suited for the individual visitor experience. Such interactions will deliver incremental lifts in orders and revenue above what occurs organically on sites.

Customer Service

While incremental contribution for sales is measured by what happens on the site, service contribution is measured by what doesn’t happen in the call centre. A third-generation engagement deployment for service is focused on detecting costly calls and emails to the contact centre, and should be considered successful only if it demonstrates a signifcant decrease in contact volumes by problem type.

To achieve success, sophisticated business rules are deployed to target behaviour that typically results in calls or emails to the contact centre,and proactively invites the visitor to chat or speak with a customer care representative. For instance, business rules may be leveraged to proactively invite visitors to chat if they’re unable to log in to an account, e.g., passcode reset call type. Likewise, visitors who search on ‘cancel service’ can be targeted for a chat or voice engagement with a customer care specialist, who can answer questions, explain products or offer alternatives to the visitor. This paper reviews the three generations of online engagement solutions, and explores the criteria essential for achieving sizeable and sustainable incremental lift while optimising agent productivity and ongoing costs.

Three Generations of Engagement Technology

There are three generations of engagement technology, each of which enables sites to engage visitors online in real time. The commonalities, however, stop there. This section examines the technology behind each generation, along with their benefits, opportunities and limitations.

Each generation engagement via chat provides a progressive level of benefits for the enterprise. On the lower levels, emphasis is on reactive service engagements. Higher levels support sales-oriented deployments, with proactive engagement and effective targeting offering the best opportunities for incremental contribution.

Determining Whom To Engage for Incremental Lift

Customer Acquisition

In order to target incremental opportunities, it is essential to segment visitors into cold leads, hot leads and self-servers. To accomplish this, LivePerson tracks conversion rates of all visitors who exhibit similar behaviour patterns, regardless of whether or not they’re invited to chat and are engaged by an agent. Doing so allows LivePerson to determine the visitor profiles that will have higher conversion rates if engaged by an agent. LivePerson then applies active rules to monitor and target visitors who fit those profiles.

It’s important to note that high-potential visitors may not exhibit hot-lead behaviour patterns initially. Knowing if and when to segment visitors into the hot-lead category requires continuous monitoring throughout the visitor session. LivePerson’s active, server-based rules track visitors through their entire session, not just at the start, as second-generation platforms do, which greatly increases the number of qualified leads delivered to the agent pool. With Active Analytics, LivePerson delivers the online experience most likely to satisfy each unique visitor, thereby driving incremental orders, revenue and customer satisfaction. How? With each action or inaction, website visitors provide clues about their true goals. Active Analytics tracks these clues, and applies a score to each behaviour based on observed historical patterns.

By paying close attention to those clues and tallying the scores of visitors on a continuous basis, Active Analytics is able to rank order available visitors based on the propensity of an engagement to result in a desired outcome. In technical terms, Active Analytics uses predictive modeling of historic data to generate a model and applies it to score visitors in real time. The significance lies in the self-learning modeling process, and hence, requires no manual supervision. As visitor trends evolve, so do the models that target visitors for an engagement.

By inviting the visitors with the highest score first, the enterprise can maximise the number of conversions with the lowest human resource investment.

Customer Service

As stated earlier, success in a service deployment is measured by the number of telephone calls and emails to the contact centre that are deflected. Cost per interaction is a key metric in service deployments.

A third-generation platform measures total cost savings by comparing key contact centre metrics ‘before deployment’ and ‘after deployment.’ For instance, it compares the phone and email volumes that are targeted in proactive chat to measure how much of that volume is deflected to the chat programme. At the same time, it compares costs by contact type in all channels, and defines savings as the difference between costs by contact times the number of customers deflected to chat. By reviewing both costs and contact channel volumes before and after programme launch, LivePerson is able to validate a more economically efficient contact channel.

Comprehensive Agent Availability Engine

While the goal of all online engagement initiatives is to target as many hot leads and contact types as possible, the number of engagements offered must be tied to the number of qualified agents available to assist those visitors. To achieve this goal, LivePerson’s third-generation platform provides an engine that evaluates agent availability and sends invitations to hot leads only when agents are immediately available to engage with them. In the event that there are more hot leads or priority contact types than there are agents, the predictive dialer limits invitations. As more agents become available, more invitations are sent. This approach enables sites to enhance visitor experience by eliminating unacceptable long wait times. Equally important, it maximises agent utilisation (which represents the bulk of the ongoing costs of the chat channel).

Such maximisation is a significant differentiator between the generations of chat platforms. Only the third-generation platform enables site owners to keep agents fully utilised and manage the visitor experience simultaneously. These attributes increase agent productivity and lower the cost of acquisition.

Multi-Channel Engagement

Offering multiple channels for communication enables enterprises to engage with visitors using the channel most appropriate for the issue at hand. For example, visitors whose online behaviour indicates their intent to cancel service are best handled by voice interactions, and should be presented with a click-to-talk invitation. Visitors who search an FAQ knowledgebase are clearly comfortable with the Web channel, and should be presented with a click-to-chat invitation if their behaviour indicates they’re not finding the answers they need. LivePerson’s rules engine ensures that each visitor receives an invitation to engage with an agent using the appropriate channel.

LivePerson’s third-generation platform delivers all visitor interaction details to the agent prior to the start of the chat or call, giving the agent instant insight into the visitor’s issues. As a result, the agent is positioned to address the visitor scenario immediately, and visitors are spared the burden of ‘starting over from the beginning.’

Sophisticated Rules Engine

A centrepiece of the LivePerson third-generation platform is its sophisticated rules engine, which uses “if-then-else” logic and infinite variables to target complex visitor behaviours. Business rules are essential for delivering the incremental sales and service contribution, as they enable the solution to differentiate hot leads from self-servers, as well as track visitors who convert to hot leads during their session. The rules engine enables contact centres to optimise resources by deflecting a greater number of email and phone contacts. Rules can be used to identify and target customers who are likely to abandon a self-help tool or bypass it altogether.

Business rules focus on delivering incremental orders and revenue. For instance, this rule demonstrates how a financial institution leverages proactive invitations to target visitors who log in to their bank accounts to pay bills, and then click on a credit card page.

Using LivePerson Enterprise, EarthLink identifies and engages visitors most likely to abandon self-help or call for assistance and proactively offers an immediate, text-based live chat with a customer support expert.

Conclusion

The online channel continues to experience impressive growth, both as a sales engine and as a method for delivering customer care. Forrester Research reports that, within the United States alone, the channel brought in over $175 billion in revenue, and is expected to add roughly $30 billion in revenue every year over the next five years. At the same time, the Web is quickly becoming the consumer’s channel of choice for receiving customer care. Whether they need to check bank balances, manage phone service, upgrade a cable package or enquire about frequent flyer miles accumulation, people expect to find the information they need upon visiting their provider’s website.

While live chat technologies clearly help enterprises increase sales and deliver superior customer service, it is equally apparent that a vast number of sales and self-help events will happen as a result of the channel’s rising popularity. When implementing an online engagement solution, therefore, enterprises must ensure that the initiative steers clear of visitors who are self-servers. In short, the conversion solution must focus entirely on incremental sales, average order value, first contact resolution and customer satisfaction.

Ensuring incremental contribution requires a solution that is able to leverage sophisticated rules to identify the right visitor to engage at the right time in order to drive the desired outcome. Equally important, it must deliver the tools to ensure agent time, effort and resources are fully maximised. If these objectives are met, the organisation will lower its total cost of ownership for the online engagement solution. LivePerson has built its third-generation solution from the ground up with these principles in mind, and as a result, delivers four to five times more incremental orders and incremental revenue over any first or second-generation solution. When factoring in the total investment of the programme, including agent headcount, the technology, and ongoing optimisation, LivePerson is two to four times less expensive than any of these solutions when comparing cost per incremental acquisition and incremental revenue per dollar invested. In service scenarios, a third-generation platform offers a 20 percent improvement in agent utilisation, along with a 25 percent decrease in customer support costs for the specific contact types targeted by the deployment.