Meaningful customer connections. Online. Real time.

CASE STUDY

Leading online payroll service leverages live chat to enhance its online customer care program and to affordably expand its hours of operation

PayCycle is America’s #1 online payroll service, serving more than 75,000 small businesses. PayCycle provides an easy-to-use, innovative, efficient online payroll service for small businesses, backed by outstanding customer support.

PayCycle also powers payroll services for leading financial institutions including Capital One and PNC Bank, and provides client payroll services through many of the nation’s accounting professionals. The PayCycle® service integrates with leading accounting programs such as QuickBooks®, Quicken®, Peachtree® and Microsoft® Money. PayCycle’s unique "Do-It-With-You" (DIWY SM) technology platform guides customers through the entire payroll process from paycheck to W-2 forms. PayCycle also holds PC Magazine’s highest editorial honor for small business payroll, the PC Magazine Editors’ Choice Award.

The Challenge

Customer care is a top priority for PayCycle. To ensure quality care is always provided, the company presents a survey at the end of customer interactions that asks "How’d we do?" From those customers calling in via the toll free number the response was always terrific. However, from those customers using the company’s online support, the results could have been better. Prior to chat, online customer care meant email; customers sent a message to the company’s customer care department and waited for a response. For time-pressed clients in the middle of processing payroll, email wasn’t a satisfying option.

Improving online customer support became a top priority at PayCycle. PayCycle customers are small business owners who often work seven days a week, and frequently wait until evenings and weekends to tackle administrative tasks, when the demands of running a business slow down. PayCycle realized that in order to achieve their goals for delivering the highest quality online customer care, they had to provide answers to customer questions quickly and in real time.

LivePerson Solution

PayCycle decided to ask their client base how they’d prefer to receive customer care. A full 40 percent responded that text-based chat was their hands-down favorite. The company then researched live chat providers, and opted to deploy LivePerson’s award-winning live chat solution on their site.

Today, when clients request customer support, they are presented with a choice for receiving it: live chat, phone, or email. Some 30 percent select live chat, and of those who do, 80 percent go on to say that the experience was so satisfactory that it is now their preferred method for receiving customer care.

Why the preference? "Live chat works in a way that ultimately benefits our customers," explains Kathleen E. Echeverria, Director of Support, Training & Development at PayCycle. "We deployed the technology on the Web pages where we know our customers tend to have questions. Our chat agents see the exact pages the visitors are on and the issues they’re encountering. That means visitors don’t need to explain where they are in the process. This insight speeds the time to resolution, a huge benefit for our time-strapped customers."

When chat sessions end customers can opt to email the transcripts to themsleves. "Our clients have a written record of the procedure they’ve just been walked through. Those transcripts become their personalized user documentation," Ms. Echeverria said.

Results

LivePerson has helped PayCycle meet all of its goals for online customer care, including:

  • High Satisfaction Rates for Online Customer Care. Customers who use live chat are highly satisfied with the experience. Exit chat surveys reveal that the thousands of customers using chat are, on average, rating PayCycle’s online support a "9” (out of 10 possible) for their satisfaction with the support they’ve received. "Live chat is a natural way of communicating for small business owners, who use text messaging throughout the day. LivePerson lets us work the way our customers do,” said Ms. Echeverria.
  • Enhancing Agent Productivity. LivePerson also provides a host of agent productivity tools, including canned answers, the ability to push the URL of relevant pages directly into the visitors’ browsers, and co-browsing technology. These tools, combined with the instant insight into the customer’s scenario, enable chat agents to support two to three customers at the same time. The concurrency fostered by LivePerson and live chat has enhanced the productivity of PayCycle agents.
  • Fostering a Collaborative Environment. Another benefit is that LivePerson enables PayCycle’s newer customer care specialists to tap into the expertise of the more experienced ones. "If a newer agent is asked a question that is slightly out of his or her league, a more experienced representative can monitor the chat and provide coaching tips,” said Ms. Echeverria. "LivePerson provides a naturally collaborative environment that supports ongoing training for our representatives.” In a pinch, agents can opt to transfer a chat to a senior specialist. All details of the visitor’s session and chat transcript are transferred automatically.