Marketers Look to Improve Customer Support With Real-Time Chat
Demandbase has enhanced the capability of the Real-Time ID service it introduced last month by integrating it with LivePerson's live chat platform. The combination of the Demandbase Business Identification application with LivePerson is designed to give sales agents and support personnel a leg up on identifying customers' needs before they engage them.
The Demandbase Business ID app includes such information as a website visitor's company, industry, size, location and customer status. LivePerson provides a rules engine designed to automatically prioritize and connect visitors to the most appropriate live agent or support person.
The combination of the two can, for example, route a chat session to the right agent for a particular industry or to someone who handles either existing or new customers. The “data resolution” to make the right connection happens in milliseconds and does not involve the use of cookies. Demandbase said its Real-Time ID service accurately identifies more than 200 million Web visits each month, using the company's proprietary data cleansing and correlation engine that covers over 2,000 B2B websites.
“It's a very unique data set we built that is three times more accurate than a reverse IP lookup from a public registry, which is not a business directory,” Greg Ott, chief marketing officer at Demandbase, told InternetNews.com.
LivePerson said the integration with Demandbase can be a boon to customer acquisition. “The actionable intelligence provided by Demandbase's application gives our clients the ability to further improve upon their online marketing efforts to make engagements with site visitors even more meaningful and impactful,” Kelly Ford, who heads marketing at LivePerson, said in a statement.
The system also got positive comments from one early user, software publisher Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE).
“Adobe's website is a critical link to our customers,” Blaire Hansen, director of Web strategy at Adobe, said in a statement. “Chat capabilities have offered an additional channel of communication that is often preferred. Our pilot of the Demandbase Business Identification Application for LivePerson is exciting because it will allow us to more effectively serve customers in all segments of our business.”
Demandbase CEO Chris Golec said the combination of his firm's unique data and real-time delivery can help marketing and salespeople get better results from the various CRM, analytics and other marketing and support tools they are already using.
Converting customers
Ott said the system responds so quickly that site visitors won't necessarily realize they're having a customized experience that flows more naturally than the one-size-fits-all systems most Web sites employ.
“The way a lot of systems work today, your first interaction with a chat agent typically involves having to answer questions that identify you, like ‘How big is your company?' and ‘How many employees do you have?'” Ott said. “By taking all that out of the process, the system can automatically route you to the most qualified agent so you're immediately talking to right person — for, say, enterprise products or financial services — and that leads to higher conversion rates.”
The Demandbase Real-Time ID service costs $2,500 for unlimited use.
David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
David Needle is an experienced technology reporter, based in Silicon Valley. He covers big data, mobile, customer experience, social media, and other topics. He was previously the news editor for Enterprise Apps Today, TabTimes editor, and West Coast bureau chief of Internet.com.
