SUCCESS STORY Cvent Engaging Top-of-the-Funnel Visitors for a Compelling Customer Experience 2014
Company Profile Founded in 1999, Cvent is a leading cloudbased enterprise event management platform, with more than 1,450 employees and 12,600 customers worldwide. Cvent offers software solutions to event planners for online event registration, venue selection, event management, mobile apps for events, e-mail marketing and web surveys. Cvent wanted to reduce bounce rates on its website and provide a compelling customer experience for its diverse website visitors. After trying another live chat product and finding it wanting, the company deployed a LivePerson solution with proactive chat, rules-based targeting, and extensive use of the platform s enrichment analytics capabilities. Since then, Cvent upgraded to the LiveEngage platform, added content targeting, and is in the process of deploying Click to Call for mobile users. Results have included a greatly reduced bounce rate, a higher-than-expected proactive chat acceptance rate, and significant incremental leads for the sales team. The term cloud computing did not even exist when Reggie Aggarwal founded Cvent in 1999. Despite that, the company s event management platform has been hosted entirely online from the beginning. Today, the company offers just about everything an event planner needs, from online registration to event marketing, from venue arrangements to mobile apps for participants. The Results Business Results Significant reduction in bounce rate Higher than expected proactive chat acceptance rate Numerous incremental leads without cannibalizing other channels Planning an event is very different from making an e-commerce purchase. Every event is completely different, and there are a lot of moving parts, explains Dave Phillips, Cvent s senior manager of digital marketing. As a result, we can t put any pricing on our website, and pricing is one of the main things on visitors minds. And because our site covers hundreds of types of events, visitors sometimes have trouble finding the information they need. 2014 LivePerson, Inc. 2
The Challenges Reduce website bounce rates by engaging with visitors dealing with complex events Provide sales team leads for nurture through a long sales cycle The Solution Engagement Model Live chat for sales prospects visiting Cvent s websites Key Capabilities LiveEngage platform with proactive chat, content targeting, and Click to Call Customer Success Assistance with deployment and development of targeting rules; ongoing advice and scorecards It is important for our business to engage people in a conversation before we lose them. Dave Phillips, Sr. Manager, Digital Marketing, Cvent Building a digital marketing program Phillips was recruited by Cvent four years ago as its first full-time digital marketing professional, with a charter of generating more leads for sales representatives by increasing traffic to the company s Web properties. I started with paid search, and then started doing search engine optimization, he recalls. We subsequently moved into display marketing and social media marketing. The transition from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0 took place in a matter of a couple years. And the team grew as the program grew. I started mostly working alone, and now have six peers and dotted-line reports around the company who help me at least part of the time. The company s reach also grew, from a single product to eight products, and from a U.S. emphasis to a global one. We are going after the global market with a lot of intensity right now, Phillips notes. We ve opened up international offices, and we re translating our site into other languages. It is something I have always wanted to do, as my SEO efforts have shown me how much untapped potential is out there. Another sign of untapped potential four years ago was the website s bounce rate. The team was investigating ways to get people to stay on our site, and saw that many successful sites had live chat tools, Phillips explains. We wanted an engagement strategy that encompassed lead gen, conversion optimization, and remarketing to our existing customer base. And for folks at the top of the funnel, we wanted to position Cvent as the de facto player in the event space. Finding an effective live chat solution When Phillips arrived at Cvent, the company was in the process of deploying its first live chat solution, but the team quickly found it wanting for a number of reasons. The wrong proactive chat invitations were firing, the rules didn t seem to be working properly, and it was hard to get the right kind of support when we needed it, Phillips remembers. The second time around, we did a lot more due diligence before making a decision on a provider. Specifically, Cvent needed a solution that was cloud-based and scalable, with robust reporting capabilities and the ability to integrate with its existing and planned digital marketing infrastructure. We are very data driven, so it was important that the solution played well with Adobe Analytics and Salesforce.com, Phillips explains. Robust customer support was also a requisite, given the team s experience with the prior solution. And security was another consideration. We are PCI compliant, level 1, the highest you can get, Phillips notes. Our tech team and security team review every solution we bring in. After examining a number of solutions, LivePerson was the obvious choice for Phillips and the team. LivePerson was really the only vendor that met all of our requirements, Phillips asserts. It passed muster with our security team, it integrates well with Adobe Analytics and Salesforce.com, and it has robust reporting capabilities. As a result, we can track whether people have clicked on a PPC ad, or signed up for an online demo, or chatted with us and how many of each group are actually turning into new booked business for us. 2014 LivePerson, Inc. 3
Bounce rates have improved dramatically, and most of the credit goes to digital engagement through LivePerson. Dave Phillips, Sr. Manager, Digital Marketing, Cvent Deploying a comprehensive engagement channel The Cvent team deployed the LivePerson solution in 2011, with assistance from their LivePerson Customer Success value manager. Our value manager assisted us in establishing our initial targeting rules, and the team has been helpful in every way since then, Phillips recalls. Phillips has also been very pleased with the team s technical support. It is not often that you are communicating with a support rep using the same platform you re contacting them about, he remarks. The fact that LivePerson support agents use LivePerson to deliver the service gives them intimate familiarity with our agents experience. Proactive chat has been a part of the deployment from the beginning, with invitations to chat going out to select visitors using behavior-based rules. It is important for our business to engage people in a conversation before we lose them, Phillips explains. The team has also made extensive use of LivePerson s enrichment analytics capabilities to understand visitor behavior and which visitors are most likely to convert. Sales managers also use chat conversation data manually to determine which types of responses get the best response from website visitors, and coach their agents on these best practices. Optimizing the solution Once LivePerson was deployed, Phillips quickly embarked on an extensive program of refining the solution for the best outcomes. To accomplish this, he has conducted testing on just about every aspect of the live chat experience over the past three years. We started with basic verbiage tests on live chat invitations, Phillips remembers. Should we say Looking for event management software? or should we say online event management instead? And we tried a lot of different sizes, colors, and images on our live chat invitations to see which worked best. Phillips also did testing on the targeting rules for proactive chat, delving into which behaviors are most likely to result in positive results when proactive chat is introduced. Concurrency has also proved to be an important issue, he notes. We ve determined the ideal number of simultaneous conversations agents should be having under different circumstances and adjusted the proactive chat algorithms accordingly. Another series of tests involved the placement of the Click-to-Chat button, which follows visitors to every page they visit on Cvent s website. We ran experiments to see if acceptance rates and click rates go up if we dock the button to the right side of a browser or to the bottom, Phillips explains. So far, we are finding that the right side is working better for us at least for the one product we have tested. One tweak to the live chat process helps minimize wasted time with ghost chats initiated by bots. We just went public last year, and that seemed to unleash the bots to bombard our servers, Phillips relates. So we added a question to each pre-chat survey to weed out those requests In what city are you planning an event? or How many events do you host each year?. When our agents were maxed out fielding ghost chats, legitimate visitors stop receiving chat invitations. Now we are chatting with real prospects versus bots. 2014 LivePerson, Inc. 4
Digital engagement has helped us to reach visitors who would have left the site in frustration. Dave Phillips, Sr. Manager, Digital Marketing, Cvent Pushing out targeted content In 2012, Cvent upgraded to the LiveEngage platform and deployed its content targeting features. Content targeting helps us in a number of ways, Phillips observes. A key example is when people come to our site looking for pricing. We don t get into pricing over live chat; visitors need to talk to a sales rep about the specifics. So we pop up a content box saying that our pricing is dynamic and that visitors should schedule an appointment with a rep. Other campaigns target content such as white papers and ebooks to visitors who exhibit behavior such as filling out forms or watching demos. Executing effective operations Cvent s live chat agents are professionals from the Sales Development team, the group that works with prospects in the early stages of the sales cycle. It is truly a global team, with members in India, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States, Phillips explains. None of them is fully devoted to chat; they also speak with prospects by phone, send out emails, and put together proposals. In all, we have around 50 people who conduct live chat conversations globally. Agents have access to a library of canned responses to frequently asked questions to maximize agent efficiency. Again, the most common question is, What s your pricing? so we have a canned response that says, It s variable. We need to set up a call to get that conversation started, Phillips says. Beyond that, we probably have 50 to 100 canned response answers for each product line. It s a dynamic library that they re constantly adding to and modifying. Impacting the bottom line When he looks back over three years of LivePerson live chat, Phillips has seen huge growth in the program. The company is growing, we are building new websites, and our SEO is getting huge, he notes. So many more people are coming to our site now than three years ago, and we re having more live chat conversations every month as a result. Confidentiality requirements prevent Phillips from citing specific metrics, but the results he has seen are even more positive than he expected. Bounce rates have improved dramatically, and most of the credit goes to digital engagement through LivePerson, he reports. We have refined our targeting rules for both content targeting and proactive chat, and both are now even better at catching people before they leave. People are staying on our site significantly longer than before. Phillips is also very pleased with proactive chat acceptance rate, but even more important is that those conversations are bringing many incremental leads for sales teams. Live chat is not cannibalizing leads from other channels, Phillips reports. We re getting a lot of net new leads. Exciting future plans Phillips is excited about the role LiveEngage will play in Cvent s future digital marketing initiatives. One near-term project is deploying Click to Call through the LiveEngage platform. We felt that it was important to start with Click to Call, because a lot of the third-party websites we work with are not yet mobile friendly, Phillips explains. We re going to experiment with Click to Call with the idea of deploying Click to Chat for mobile devices soon. 2014 LivePerson, Inc. 5
Providing a stellar customer experience When asked for what advice he might offer his peers, Phillips suggests they do extensive research into the best practices of a live chat program. Everyone checks to see what their competitors are doing, but I recommend looking at organizations in other industries and business sizes, including the Fortune 100, he says. My other advice is to test and measure everything. So much data is available these days that every marketer should be doing that. These two best practices have helped Phillips create a positive, personalized customer experience for the diverse visitors to his websites. We work with c-level executives planning VIP customer events, receptionists planning a team retreat, and everything in between, he observes. The one thing they most of them have in common is that they are not technical, and they often need handholding. Digital engagement has helped us to reach visitors who would have left the site in frustration. This gives them a positive brand experience with Cvent, and often results in an incremental lead for our sales team. 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: 212.991.1794 475 Tenth Ave F: 212.609.4233 5th Floor info@liveperson.com New York, NY 10018 www.liveperson.com Follow the conversation on Twitter: #LiveEngage 2014 LivePerson, Inc. 6