Hoovers improves chat sales conversion rate with Etech

Overview

Hoover's, a D&B company, gives its customers a competitive edge with insightful information about industries, companies, and key decision makers. Hoovers.com provides up-to-date information on U.S. and global companies, industries, and the people who lead them, along with powerful tools to search, sort, download and integrate the content.

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, visitors interested in a subscription entered their information into a series of online forms and an outsourced call center agent followed up by phone within 15 minutes. The agents pre-qualified the prospects and transferred qualified "hot leads" to skilled in-house sales representatives.

To improve conversion rates, Hoover's wanted a faster way for outsourced agents to contact and pre-qualify leads. The company partnered with LivePerson and Etech to test proactive chat.

Solution

Hoover's conducted a three-month pilot with LivePerson's Timpani Sales and Marketing solution and Etech's Agents 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 and Etech's domain expertise, methodologies and Timpani 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 at Etech's Call Center.

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% 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%.

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 and Etech's people is 500% - 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% of subscription sales within 8 days and 50% of those are completed in 1 day or less, a significant reduction from the previous 25-30 day average sales cycle.