SUCCESS STORY GenoLogics - LivePerson · Scientists who do cutting-edge research are ... Key Capabilities New ... it was really nice to be able to conduct a test without expending

2014

SUCCESS STORY

GenoLogicsClosing Big Sales—and Pleasing the CEO—With a New Live Chat Channel

© 2014 LivePerson, Inc. 2

CUSTOMER SUCCESS GenoLogics

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.

Company ProfileFounded in 2002,

GenoLogics is a laboratory

information management

system (LIMS) provider that

offers specialized,

cloud-based software

for proteomics and

genomics laboratories.

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.”

© 2014 LivePerson, Inc. 3

Speaking to two audiencesLead 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 chatBefore 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 solutionHoover began to do research in early 2014. “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.”

I must admit that I was skeptical. I thought, ‘Scientists aren’t going to want to chat.’

– Aubree Hoover, Sr. Manager, Product Management and Marketing, GenoLogics

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


4© 2014 LivePerson, Inc.


A user-friendly platformHoover 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 teamGenoLogics’ 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.”

It was really nice to be able to conduct a test without expending significant setup or training time.




Impressive early resultsAfter 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 futureNow 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.”

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.




Follow the conversation on Twitter: #LiveEngage

About LivePersonLivePerson, 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.

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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.”

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SUCCESS STORY GenoLogics - LivePerson · Scientists who do cutting-edge research are ... Key Capabilities New ... it was really nice to be able to conduct a test without expending