CASE STUDY

Online provider of outdoor products, equipment and gear leverages sister company’s chat implementation to add value to its own customers, quickly and easily

OutdoorPros.com, sister site to PlumberSurplus.com, launched in early 2008 as a pure play Internet retailer of a tremendous assortment of outdoor products, supplies, equipment and gear for the adventure enthusiast. Their wide variety of products range from Gerber knives and camping equipment to duty gear and skateboard decks.

PlumberSurplus.com has enjoyed remarkable success using LivePerson’s live chat solution. Some 95% of their visitors who use live chat to receive personalized assistance say they’re highly satisfied with the experience. Perhaps more compelling is the fact that visitors who chat convert at higher rates, and place orders that are 15% higher than the average order value of non-chatting visitors.

Challenge

PlumberSurplus.com’s success with live chat was a strong incentive to make the technology available on OutdoorPros.com. Much of the gear offered on OutdoorPros.com is highly specialized, and hands-on assistance from a knowledgeable agent would provide significant benefits to their visitors. But how much work would be required to scale Contact Center to OutdoorPros.com

Content aside, launching OurdoorPros.com had been much more of an effort in some cases than Gordian Project, the parent company of both sites, had originally anticipated. Although Gordian Project had existing relationships with Web vendors, not all implementations proved to be easier the second time around. From negotiating additional licenses to installing and testing software, the entire process had to start from the beginning in some cases, requiring enormous investments and energy from numerous staff members.

LivePerson Solution

Gordian Project established an additional LivePerson Contact Center account for the new OutdoorPros.com site, a task that couldn't have been more straight-forward.

Then to their astonishment, scaling the LivePerson solution to OutdoorPros.com took less than an hour. "LivePerson makes it easy for merchants to scale to additional domains," says Timothy Jackson, Managing Partner of PlumberSurplus.com and OutdoorPros.com. "All aspects of the transition were seamless and very elegant. Negotiating the additional licenses took no time at all. And the rest was just a matter of copying and pasting code from one site to the other. It was incredibly easy."

Copy and Paste Features

With PlumberSurplus.com, the company had carefully considered the places on the site where visitors are most likely to be in need of real-time online assistance. And through the years the customer service and sales teams optimized their chat implementation to accommodate visitor trends and preferences they had observed. They were thrilled that all of the work, experience and insight that went into the PlumberSurplus.com account could easily be leveraged for OutdoorPros.com.

"All of the proactive chat scenarios that we'd set-up, such as sending an invitation to a visitor who abandons a shopping cart with high value items in it, could be copied from one domain and pasted to another. And that included architectural features too, such as placing the click-to-chat button above the fold and on our Contact Us page," explained Joshua Mauldin, Customer Service Manager. "There was no coding, installations, no new passwords, no anything to slow us down."

Added Mr. Jackson, "The streamlined approach to scaling made the whole chat program more cost-effective, particularly when you consider how little resources we had to apply to the process. Adding a second domain lowered the total-cost-of-ownership, and as a merchant, one constantly has to consider the cost of growth."

Two Lines of Business: One Set of Chat Agents

Gordian Project uses one pool of agents to service visitors on both sites, sparing them the burden of hiring additional call center representatives and training them on using the LivePerson Operator Console.

Both PlumberSurplus.com and OutdoorPros.com offer general support for product questions and customer service issues. "Our reps can take chats from both domains. LivePerson let's us assign individual reps to multiple skill groups, such as service or billing, which apply across both domains," said Mr. Mauldin. "Our reps can access all of the time-saving tools that we've created, such as canned answers with our billing and returns procedures. We had no need to recreate them."

The company has also designated product-specific experts. "The LivePerson software is profile driven, and that means we can set-up a profile for product pages with complex or high-value items. The profile will automatically route chat requests to our designated experts," explains Mr. Mauldin.

"The LivePerson solution doesn't mandate us to dedicate LivePerson seats to a particular site. This flexibility is critical, because at launch we couldn't predict how the chats would fall. Will Plumbersurplus.com get more chats? Outdoorpros.com? We didn't know, but we didn't have to know," said Mr. Jackson.

Results

OutdoorPros.com now averages about 60 chats per day and handles more than 100 a day on busy days. That's good news for Mr. Jackson, who sees the volume of chats as evidence that his business is growing. High-quality customer care is a top priority for him and everyone at his company, and he knows from the customer surveys that his reps are able to deliver on it.

And the company appreciates the greater return on investment it obtained by scaling live chat to multiple lines of business. It means that merchants save resources as they grow their business and this, in turn, adds a lot of trust to the vendor-relationship. "I am very happy with how easy LivePerson made it for us to scale," said Mr. Jackson.