SUCCESS STORY. GenoLogics Closing Big Sales and Pleasing the CEO With a New Live Chat Channel

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1 SUCCESS STORY GenoLogics Closing Big Sales and Pleasing the CEO With a New Live Chat Channel 2014

2 Company Profile Founded in 2002, GenoLogics is a laboratory information management system (LIMS) provider that offers specialized, cloud-based software for proteomics and genomics laboratories. GenoLogics, a Canadian laboratory information management systems vendor, wanted to provide a channel where prospects could quickly get answers to questions about the company s highly technical product offerings. Convinced live chat was the answer, the company s CEO charged his team to execute on his vision. Three months ago, they deployed a LivePerson digital engagement solution that includes proactive chat invitations extended to visitors who spend significant time on particular Web pages. The results have been astounding: live chat conversations have resulted in seven percent of closed sales deals and five percent of GenoLogics total sales revenue for the period. The company has reason to believe that they would not have closed some of that business at all without the channel. That success is expected to continue, with five percent of current pipeline revenue assisted with live chat. The Results Business Results 7% of closed deals and 5% of total sales revenue assisted by live chat in first 3 months 5% of current pipeline revenue assisted by live chat 4 weeks reduction in sales cycle for live chat-assisted leads Significant incremental sales that would not have occurred without live chat Scientists who do cutting-edge research are experts in their fields, but their expertise rarely extends to building the complex information systems their laboratories depend on to manage the data generated by their experiments. As a result, many labs opt to purchase laboratory information management system (LIMS) software from a vendor rather than developing it in house. As research in the fields of proteomics and genomics began to explode a dozen years ago, GenoLogics was founded to provide cloud-based LIMS software tailored to these specialties. It s very important in a regulated environment to track every little thing that s done so that you can provide a detailed report at the end or track the history of a particular sample, explains Aubree Hoover, senior manager of product management and marketing at GenoLogics. This is exactly what our system provides for proteomics and genomics laboratories LivePerson, Inc. 2

3 The Challenges Provide a channel to answer questions about highly technical product offerings Increase sales by engaging with website visitors early in the sales process The Solution Engagement Model: Proactive chat to answer questions from sales prospects Key Capabilities New LiveEngage platform with rules-based targeting I must admit that I was skeptical. I thought, Scientists aren t going to want to chat. Speaking to two audiences Lead generation is one of the responsibilities of Hoover s team, and they have identified two distinct buyer personas. We work with the IT professionals at the labs, and with the scientists themselves, she explains. The problem is that these two groups speak very different languages, and our team often must translate between the two. Hoover is well suited to balance these two perspectives: a former research scientist, she moved out of the lab in 2004 to focus on product management for scientific software. The GenoLogics website contains extensive technical documentation of the company s complex product offerings. While website visitors find the detailed information very helpful, they often want to avoid spending hours wading through many pages of material to find the answer to a single question. We felt that if we had a button on our website that said, Ask for More Information, we could engage the visitors by answering their questions and thereby keep them on the website longer, Hoover explains. Trial and error with live chat Before Hoover arrived at GenoLogics in 2012, the company conducted a brief trial of a rudimentary live chat solution, but found it wanting. We just weren t able to get any engagement from website visitors, Hoover relates. Despite this setback, GenoLogics CEO Michael Ball believed that live chat could still bring value to the company. He regularly uses live chat to get answers to questions on other websites in the life sciences industry, she says. Nonetheless, I must admit that I was skeptical based on the earlier live chat deployment. I thought, Scientists aren t going to want to chat. But he pushed me to give the channel another try. Finding a better solution Hoover began to do research in early I spoke with several of our partners about what platforms they were using, she recalls. Then, I met with my team figure out what features would be the most beneficial for them. The team narrowed the list to three vendors and evaluated them according to several criteria. We looked at what kind of information we could get about our visitors before starting a chat, Hoover remembers. We also looked at how much flexibility we would have for managing how the chat looks. And we looked at price. The team s review confirmed that LivePerson was the best solution in each of these areas. It is cloud-based, which makes it easy to deploy, very flexible, and easy to customize, Hoover says. And the fact that we pay according to usage rather than owing a large licensing fee up front was ideal for our small company LivePerson, Inc. 3

4 It was really nice to be able to conduct a test without expending significant setup or training time. A user-friendly platform Hoover completed the LivePerson purchase in March 2014, and deployed the newly-released version of the LiveEngage platform on the company s website less than a week later. It is really user friendly, Hoover contends. Since I was not yet convinced that live chat would work for us, it was really nice to be able to conduct a test without expending significant setup or training time. In fact, training and the initial deployment took only took a few minutes each. I just gave each agent a login, demonstrated how to answer a chat request, and showed them where to find the visitor s browsing history and a few of the other features, Hoover recalls. And there was a preset campaign in the platform that required only minor tweaking. That campaign extended proactive chat invitations to visitors who spent a certain amount of time on certain Web pages. We felt that this was a better approach than a static Click-to-Chat button, Hoover explains. The first instinct of most scientists and IT people is to find the information themselves, but if an offer to help pops up at an opportune time, they might respond. Once the live chat channel was launched, Hoover did some quick testing on the best placement of proactive chat invitations. We tried the slideout first, but we didn t get much response, she recalls. Then, I had it pop up right in the middle of the screen after a visitor spends 15 seconds on a page. Five minutes later, we started getting chats. Good coverage by a small team GenoLogics inside sales team fields live chat requests in between their other duties. They are busy with a lot of tasks, Hoover observes. They are speaking with people on the phone. They are helping our field sales team people get ready for product demonstrations. They re keeping the CRM system up to date. Live chat is a relatively small but very important part of what they do. The team s shifts are spread out so that coverage is available for most of the business day in North America, Europe, and Asia. Among the agents favorite LiveEngage features are push pages and the ability to see a visitor s navigation history. The ability to push out links in response to questions about individual instruments saves a lot of time for both us and the customer, Hoover notes. And knowing the pages the visitor has already visited gives our agents valuable information that helps them provide better, more timely service. Since there is no limit to the number of people who log into the LiveEngage platform, Hoover occasionally logs in to monitor traffic and live chat conversations in real time. I get reports on Web traffic from our marketing automation system, but looking at it in real time is very interesting to me, she says. And our inside sales people love that view of who is on the website and what they are looking at. CEO Michael Ball has remained involved in the project, and occasionally engages one of the inside sales team members anonymously in a live chat conversation. It keeps them on their toes, Hoover admits. He likes to see how they are answering his questions, and his feedback is always positive and helpful LivePerson, Inc. 4

5 I just gave them a login and showed them a few of the features. And there was a preset campaign that required only minor tweaking. Impressive early results After three months of testing, GenoLogics is already seeing tangible results from its LivePerson deployment. The inside sales team fields an average of three to five live chat conversations per week. We are low volume in terms of the number of individuals we interact with, so this is actually good, Hoover notes. I was really surprised that we could get scientists and IT professionals to chat with us. Even more impressive is that a number of those conversations resulted in sales, and those sales account for seven percent of closed deals and five percent of total sales revenue for the small company during those three months. Our inside sales team typically does lead generation rather than closing sales, so they are ecstatic, Hoover says. And five percent of our current pipeline revenue has been assisted by live chat, so we know that the channel will continue to bring revenue for us. Live chat is also shortening the sales cycle by answering prospects early questions quickly. The time from lead acquisition to qualified opportunity is four weeks shorter when we are able to connect via live chat, Hoover reports. We have a long sales cycle, so any decrease is a massive improvement for us, and no campaign has ever brought us a month s decrease before. On top of that, Hoover is convinced that live chat is bringing incremental revenue that GenoLogics would not otherwise have earned. I know that we would not have closed all of those sales without live chat in any amount of time, she contends. An exciting future Now that live chat has proven itself, Hoover is excited to devote resources to fleshing out the deployment over the next several months. One of her first priorities is to customize the proactive chat invitations with brand-consistent text and graphics and the engagement windows with personalized photos of each agent. Our Web designer is very particular about the look and feel of the website and is anxious to get this going, she relates. Hoover also plans to begin using the enrichment analytics features in the LiveEngage platform to report on visitor behavior, lead generation, and other metrics. I am a very data-driven marketer, and really want to make the most of the information we are generating, she asserts. The live chat conversations themselves will also be a useful resource for Hoover s team. I know that reviewing the transcripts will help me immensely with agent coaching, she says. But understanding the customer feedback contained in those conversations will help me in my other role product management. It will help us bring better products to market. Visitor segmentation and content targeting are other areas of interest for Hoover and her team. I want to customize the proactive chat invitations according to buyer persona which is pretty easy to determine by which pages they visit, she explains. And once I identify the segmentation, I would like to push content that would be relevant to each group, but they might not organically find on their own LivePerson, Inc. 5

6 We have a long sales cycle, and no campaign has ever brought us a month s decrease before. The boss was right! Hoover is now convinced of the potential of the live chat channel for GenoLogics, and is very excited to move the deployment to the next level. Our CEO is very happy with himself for suggesting it, she says with a smile. I ll have to say that I am very happy as well. Our prospects are more satisfied when they can find answers to their questions, and live chat seems to be the perfect way to offer that assistance. About LivePerson LivePerson, 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 San Francisco, Atlanta, Tel Aviv, London, Amsterdam, and Melbourne. Contact LivePerson, Inc. T: Tenth Ave F: th Floor info@liveperson.com New York, NY Follow the conversation on Twitter: #LiveEngage 2014 LivePerson, Inc. 6