Have you ever visited a website and during your visit, you’ve searched for help, wanted to send a complaint or needed advice from the company you’re browsing? Enter, the chat box. That helpful pop up in the corner of the screen, offering a friendly hand in a passive manner allows for visitors to have questions answered on the fly, establish rapport, confidence and ultimately create a conversion from a prospect to a customer…. That’s LivePerson, and it uses Drupal Commerce.
LivePerson's services and tools have skyrocketed in growth in the marketspace and a code-base was needed to support the pace and stretched needs of this business model; LivePerson turned to Drupal and Drupal Commerce to provide this subscription based implementation to allow their customers to add on to their sites. The brand-to-customer support platform had to stay on pace with labels using the chat-ware such as Microsoft, Adobe and IBM; an open source code base was the only answer.
When your company is providing customer service support for global brands on this scale, ensuring your product stays secure, adaptive and at the bleeding edge of technology becomes your competitive advantage in selling in the marketspace, we were up for the challenge.
LivePerson had built V1 using Drupal 7 to sell and manage the client’s accounts and needed to level up their code and speed to market to keep their Tier One clients secure and coming back for more. They engaged Commerce Guys, the team of young men that were the inventors of Drupal Commerce, going straight to the product source. Commerce Guys, the service side of Drupal Commerce, and Acro Media’s delivery partnership team, got to work evaluating the meat and potatoes of what was in place, what customers were using, and what customers were asking for that was missing from the release roadmap. The objectives of the new joint-team were three-pronged: 1) instate development and production processes to sprint through efficient and quality code, and 2) LivePerson had recently acquired Contact at Once!, and this new branch needed to be integrated along with a slew of new account options to quickly pump out ROI, and 3) The whole system needed an upgrade to Drupal 8 / Commerce 2 in order to make use of the fastest, cleanest code and most modern and secure modules to sell and manage the chat bot options. Easy, right?
Tackling the first objective of a proper system was straight-forward. Acro Media employs vets versed in agile methodology and management, and after teaching the new team these reliable ways, adding in a strict QA cycle, and pairing up an automated testing plan going forward riddled with custom tests and environments, we were working like a well oiled machine. The importance of speaking the same language as your clients should not go unnoted. But on to the real tasks at hand… building a useful and profitable eCommerce tool in Drupal 8, considering the newly acquired product suite, and providing the end customers with a way to buy and manage the chat platform they couldn’t live without.
The real work started when we realized we needed to skip over what LivePerson needed Drupal to do and think of what solution the end customers needed. The end customers were two-fold in this case. 1) The mega brands using the chat platform to handle customer care cycles, and 2) the end customer using LivePerson to message the brand with inquiries, issues and requests. A way to easily buy, sell and manage these fundamentals were key.
The necessary solution was clear: develop clean and secure code, allow for in-market advancements, be performant and release new features on a reliable cycle to keep customers coming back and engaged with the monthly dealings of the tool. Drupal Commerce could do this, quickly. We talked to the providers, the customers and the customer’s customers. We discovered, planned, architected, broke it down to sprints and got to work. We continue to sprint at a high rate month over month, employing a devoted development team at Acro Media that works on LivePerson full-time. Standing at the front of the pack for LivePerson is paramount to their continued success, and a proper commitment to their technology stack will keep them there. At the end of each day, it’s about how many new customers are signing up for their subscription based service, how many current customers are renewing and upgrading existing installs, and how often the end user is hitting that chat box to get what they need. So how are we doing?
What outcomes were delivered to the end customers through the adaptive use of Drupal Commerce for the end-brands? The ultimate goal with LivePerson is to best serve their customer's needs; the eventual form of this application of Drupal Commerce is to solve a problem a company is experiencing and LivePerson's use of this open source tool allows for just that. The company's which have the chat platform installed wanted to take voice calls and convert them to mobile messaging inquiries to earn more while working less. Drupal Commerce enables these custom recurring purchase and selling cycles, the ongoing changes and needs of monthly management and the portal for both LivePerson and their customers to connect to grow each install.
• Drupal Commerce gives LivePerson’s customers a constant connection to brands via their smart phones through subscription based sales.
• Streamlining of company operations allows for "digital first" inquiries, and taking the customer service cost down by up to 48% in this area of business. Like the intended use of a chat platform, the subscription based tool can be hands off if desired.
• Drupal allows for the selling of a resolution tool via "first contact" with a customer for these brands instead of getting stuck in an on-hold complaint department cycle. The care curve flattens right away, leading to quick resolve and a happy customer, without ever speaking to a rep.
• The power of real time interactions through LivePerson is provided and extracted for companies who have subscribed to LivePerson’s services; Understanding sentiment for 100% of consumer interactions in real time and not after the fact with surveys for a fraction of interactions is invaluable. This tool empowers agents, managers and owners to guide the customer service experience instead of being painted into a reactive corner.
A virtual service like LivePerson allows for hard data in return on how their product is performing. Drupal Commerce's ROI for LivePerson is proven by lines and lines of recorded messaging around the globe, serving as a universal connection of growing and satisfied customer; much like the connection the open source community it is born from.
For more information, visit www.acromedia.com or email us at solutions@acromedia.com