White Papers      Webinars  Search

Register for our newsletter:

By proactively offering live chat assistance to customers, EarthLink increased agent productivity by 14 percent during the initial implementation and realized customer satisfaction levels seven percent higher than similar service channels

“EarthLink is always looking for ways to raise the bar in customer service,” said David Flammia, EarthLink’s director of call center strategy. “We’re taking online customer service to the next level by identifying the customers most likely to need help and enabling them to resolve their issues before they pick up the phone or send an email.”

“More and more companies are realizing the benefits of leveraging real-time customer service as a strategic differentiator, particularly within the telecommunications industry,” said LivePerson CEO Robert LoCascio. “Proactive chat will make EarthLink’s already best-in-class customer service more accessible than ever before and position them well for increased customer loyalty and growth.”

Tangible Results
Initial results from EarthLink’s first eight weeks in production have shown significant benefits in operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and agent productivity:

Overall weekly chat volume increased by 4,500 contacts while phone volume decreased by 10,000 calls. Nearly half of this decrease in phone volume was credited to customers engaging in live chat — a key indicator of success in EarthLink’s efforts to make live chat the “channel of choice” for online interactions.

The LivePerson platform allows EarthLink’s customer support experts to handle up to three chat interactions at once compared to just one phone call.

The LivePerson platform’s ability to proactively engage visitors during periods when customer-initiated contacts are lower allowed EarthLink to more effectively manage and utilize their customer support agents. EarthLink realized a 14 percent increase in agent productivity during the initial implementation period, allowing the company to interact with 40,000 more customers with the same number of agents.

Key Features
EarthLink partnered with LivePerson to leverage the following features of the Timpani platform for this new solution:

• A sophisticated Business Rules Engine that identifies visitors most likely to call for assistance based on online behavior.
• A Predictive Dialer that assesses current agent capacity to determine if a visitor identified as a “hot lead” should receive a live chat invitation. This feature can be adjusted to accommodate agent capacity and maximum wait time, ensuring that visitors only receive invitations if a representative is available.
• A Routing Capability that automatically assigns an accepted chat invitee to the next available agent with appropriate skill sets.
• Reporting Capabilities that enable EarthLink to review the impact of the channel, while providing visibility to key metrics such as invitation rate, acceptance rate, customer satisfaction and first contact resolution rate.
• Operational and Transcript Reporting that allows EarthLink to conduct detailed analysis of operational metrics and review chat transcripts for ongoing program optimization.
• Full visibility to the visitor’s current web page and the ability to guide their experience through tools including co-browse, page-push and joint form-fill.
  A LivePerson customer since 1999, EarthLink currently uses Timpani™ Sales and Marketing to manage an estimated 2 million online customer interactions per year.

The Timpani™ Platform
LivePerson's comprehensive software platform, Timpani™, is a fully integrated multi-channel communication solution that facilitates real-time sales, customer service and marketing. Timpani™ delivers tools that support and manage all online customer interactions: chat, email and self-service/knowledgebase. By supplying a single agent desktop and unified customer history, Timpani™ enables companies to deliver a personalized and seamless service experience.