CASE STUDY

Seamless integration of live chat and Salesforce enables Voices.com to provide a superior customer care experience

Voices.com is the online marketplace where businesses connect with voice actors and professional voice-over talents. Radio and television stations, advertising agencies, marketing professionals, casting directors and voice talent agencies rely on Voices.com to easily search for and hire narrators and professional voice-over talents by using Voices.com award-winning web service.

The Challenge

In a market where customers have a lot of choices, Voices.com opted to differentiate its talent service by offering premier customer care and an easy-to-use service. The company deployed Salesforce to streamline its customer relationship management and to boost customer satisfaction. Whenever a customer emails Voices.com, a case is automatically opened in Salesforce. The CRM system tracks the correspondence through to resolution, and stores a record of it in the customers' files.

But email wasn't providing the kind of superior service Voices.com wanted for its customers. For starters, the company noticed that once a customer received a response back to an email inquiry, more questions would soon follow. "I think our customers were so surprised to actually get a response that they just wanted to keep asking questions,” explained David Ciccarelli, President and Chief Executive Officer of Voices.com. "But with each question a new case was opened, creating an administrative burden for us.”

More problematic was the time delay in answering questions via email. "We get two kinds of questions from prospects. The first is about the industry; small business owners want to know if it's expensive to hire a professional to record their radio spot, that kind of thing. The second is about using our website. Prospects who ask industry questions invariably ask about our website. That kind of conversation is best handled in real time,” Mr. Ciccarelli said.

LivePerson Solution

Real-Time Answers via Live Chat

Voices.co implemented LivePerson Pro, LivePerson's award-winning live chat solution. Today, live chat agents respond to inquiries from leads and customers in real time, speeding time-to-resolution, streamlining the number of new cases that are opened in Salesforce, and increasing saleOur agents love having the ability to use canned responses!” raves Lin Parkin, Manager of Voices.com Customer Care. "Canned responses allow us to speed up the session, but still deliver all of the information needed to fully answer commonly asked questions. I also like being able to view what page a visitor is on because it provides immediate insight into the problem or comment, even before they type ‘hello.'”

Seamless CRM Integration

Because the company's customer service agents work primarily in Salesforce and LivePerson throughout the day, integrating the two systems was a top priority. Fortunately for Voices.com, LivePerson offers an application that enables companies to complete the integration quickly and easily. "Finding this application was a gem,” Mr. Ciccarelli wrote in a review he posted to the Salesforce site.

Now the company's customer service agents have access to a Salesforce mini-app from within LivePerson Agent console. Prior to the start of a chat, visitors are presented with a pre-chat survey. Responses to the pre-chat survey are used to locate the customer's record within Salesforce. If the visitor is a new prospect to Voices.com, a Salesforce lead is automatically created using the information the visitor typed into the pre-chat survey. "This app has made our day, and saved us countless hours of searching, copying, pasting and logging communication records,” Mr. Ciccarelli said.

Results

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Live chat has provided enormous benefits to both Voices.com and their customers and prospects. "Customers tell us all the time that they LOVE our live chat service. It's ten times faster and more efficient than emailing or trying to get through to a customer service rep on a phone system,” said Ms. Parkin. "Overseas customers may not be able to call our 1-800 line and may need a faster response than email can provide, so it makes perfect sense to have a Web support center where our customers can find fast, friendly service from a real person, no matter where in the world they live.”

In addition to answering questions, live chat agents are able to guide customers to the pages they need using LivePerson's push-page and co-browsing technology. Providing this level of hands-on support ensures that Voices.com customers succeed in securing the talent they need for their projects.

Faster Case Resolution

Thanks to live chat, Voices.com has seen a significant reduction in incoming email messages. And by discussing a support issue with a customer in real time, agents can get the detail they need to resolve cases. In fact, 85 percent of cases are now closed within the first 24 hours.

Shortened Learning Curve for New Team Members

Live chat also speeds the learning curve for new Voices.com team members by allowing them ask for advice from senior team members without the visitor knowing it. Because the service is text-based, ccustomers can't hear when an agent asks a colleague for assistance in handling a complex situation. To the visitor, the interaction feels like one seamless session.