CASE STUDY

Hoover's increases conversion rates and average order values with LivePerson proactive chat

LivePerson Enterprise platform shortens sales cycle by 48% and generates 500% ROI

Hoover's, a D&B company, gives its customers a competitive edge with insightful information about industries, companies, and key decision makers. Hoover's provides this up-to-date information for sales, marketing, business development, and other professionals who need intelligence on U.S. and global companies, industries, and the people who lead them. This information, along with powerful tools to search, sort, download and integrate the content, is available through Hoover's (www.hoovers. com), the company's premier online service. Hoover's business information is also available through corporate intranets and distribution agreements with licensees, as well as via Hoover's books. The company is headquartered in Austin, Texas.

The Challenge

With more than one million monthly visitors, the company's main obstacle to growing online revenue was not increasing traffic, but converting more visitors to buyers. Hoover's needed an efficient way to seamlessly identify the visitors most likely to become paid subscribers, qualify potential leads and initiate a sales dialogue. Prior to the chat implementation, a system of online Web forms funneled prospects to outsourced call center agents, who called the visitor within fifteen minutes of receiving the form, and then transferred qualified calls to skilled in-house sales representatives.

"Even within those fifteen minutes between submitting the form and getting a callback, there's a very large attrition rate. We were looking for a way to not lose that connection with the customer," said Marybeth Gavin, Sr. Marketing Manager, Hoover's.

Gavin's team wanted to implement a tool that would allow outsourced agents to contact and pre-qualify visitors quickly, before their interest waned. The agents' role in pre-qualifying visitors was vital to internal sales representatives, who needed to focus their limited resources on leads that represented the highest-value online subscriptions.

LivePerson Solution

Hoover's conducted a three-month pilot with LivePerson Enterprise to determine whether instantaneous online chats could deliver better results than phone calls.

The intelligent, rules-based platform enabled the company to identify potential subscribers based on their browsing behavior and offer an immediate, text-based chat with a live representative.

To develop and test this new sales channel, Hoover’s adopted LivePerson’s domain expertise, methodologies and engagement platform to:

  • Identify purchase intent and abandonment indicators. Leveraging the platform's business rules, specific visitor actions triggered proactive chat invitations. The rules engine offered the chat channel only to visitors who did not successfully complete the registration process on their own.
  • Engage visitors at the right time, in the right place. LivePerson's automated application tracked browsing behavior on the pages where visitors were most likely to consider purchasing a subscription. Visitors who triggered business rules were invited to chat live with a business consultant.
  • Seamlessly transfer qualified leads. Outsourced agents pre-qualified visitors through chat conversations and passed qualified leads to Hoover's sales representatives. Complete chat transcripts were included in the lead hand-off, allowing the Hoover's in-house team to continue the conversation seamlessly within the visitor's current chat window.

Results

At the conclusion of the three month pilot, Hoover's expanded LivePerson's chat functionality throughout Hoovers.com as a standard feature.

  • 11% increase in average order value. Chat has become one of Hoover's best conversion vehicles: 30 percent of visitors who chat are passed along as leads to the sales team. Closure rates nearly doubled, and subscriptions generated through chat have boosted average order value 11 percent.
  • 500% ROI. Due to the high sales value, the chat implementation paid for itself in the first month. The return on investment from LivePerson's technology is 500 percent - the highest of any previous marketing project.
  • 48% reduction in length of average sales cycle. The chat option has allowed sales representatives to close 51 percent of subscription sales within eight days and 50 percent of those are completed in 1 day or less, a significant reduction from the previous 25-30 day average sales cycle.