2014

CUSTOMER SUCCESS

CostumeBoxScaling to Global E-commerce with the Help of LivePerson Digital Engagement

2014 LivePerson, Inc.© 1

As Australian e-commerce retailer CostumeBox launched an expansion into the global market,

it wanted to scale its customer service operations and engage with customers who might be wary of doing business

internationally. The company deployed a digital engagement solution from LivePerson that proactively reaches out

via live chat to international customers and other key targets. Results include a five percent increase in average order

values, a 2.1 percent improvement in conversion rates, and a 95 percent satisfaction score for the live chat channel.

Since its founding in 2007, CostumeBox has quickly grown to be

the largest online costume retailer in the southern hemisphere. The

number of employees at its headquarters near Sydney’s northern

beaches has grown from six to more than 50, and the geographic

reach of the site has also burgeoned—to New Zealand in 2012, and

then globally in late 2013. “We now have postage rates published

for over 100 different countries,” declares Brian Naylor, the

company’s marketing manager. “After just a month, we’re sending

an average of 20 international orders every day—and as many as

200 on some days.”

Naylor’s charter is to optimize the online customer experience, and that

job got a lot more complicated with the global launch. “Our website has

an ‘.au’ domain extension, so it’s clear we’re in Australia,” he notes. “People

in other countries won’t order from us if they’re unsure whether a costume

will fit, for example. So we have to answer such questions quickly.”

For this reason, Naylor knew that a digital engagement solution was a

necessary addition. “People like to know they’ll get a quick response,

and they expect that email will take a long time,” Naylor explains. “And

not everyone is in a place where they can speak aloud by phone when

they’re online with us.”

SATISFACTION SCOREFOR THE LIVE CHAT

CUSTOMER SUCCESS CostumeBox

An easy deploymentNaylor liked what he saw when he researched LivePerson solutions, and activated a trial of the LiveEngage platform. “We jumped into it

at a busy time of our season, and we didn’t think we could get much out of it until things slowed down,” he recalls. “But I had a live chat

with a LivePerson agent, who connected me with my Customer Success manager. He walked our team through some of the capabilities

of the LiveEngage platform. I went back to my computer and logged in, and within an hour I had set up Click-to-Chat buttons and two

campaigns. It was quite easy.

2014 LivePerson, Inc.© 2

CUSTOMER SUCCESS CostumeBox

CostumeBoxFounded: 2007

Headquarters: Brookvale, New South Wales, Australia

Industry: Retail

Employees: 50+

Global Growth: Expanded from Australia/New Zealand market to global delivery in October, 2013

The Challenge• Roll out comfortable sales

support channel for new

global e-commerce effort

• Scale support operations

with minimal addition of

new staff

• Integrate digital engagement

into all aspects of the

customer experience

“We set up a couple of segments for using the content targeting features of the LiveEngage platform,”

Naylor continues. “First, we segmented anyone that was outside of Australia, and we created a peeling

corner banner that says, ‘Yes, we ship to…,’ and inserts the country. The bug clicks through to shipping

rates for that country.”

The other segment Naylor set up was in the shopping cart. “We usually have a promotion that gives

customers a percentage discount when they reach a certain order amount,” he explains. “We were able to

set up a rule that if a shopper is within $10 of that target, a pop-up will say, ‘You’re this close to getting 20

percent off your order,’ encouraging people to go back and add something to their cart. It’s good for the

customer and helps us increase our average order value.”

Optimizing customer serviceAnother reason that the LiveEngage deployment was easy for CostumeBox is its delivery and pricing model.

The digital engagement platform is based in the cloud, eliminating the need to invest in infrastructure; and

the price of the subscription is based on the number of interactions, rather than a license fee per agent

seat. “This gives us maximum flexibility to scale our services during busy times,” Naylor notes. “We have a

core value that ‘we are all in customer service,’ and in the days leading up to our busiest holiday, Halloween,

all our staff handle inquiries. It’s nice that an unlimited number of employees can log into LivePerson from

their desks and have conversations with customers as needed.”

Making the Click-to-Chat button accessible is a key factor in customer service, and Naylor’s team went

through a bit of trial and error on this. “We had it on the top of the page, and that worked fine, but the

real estate was too valuable,” he recalls. “We ended up adding floating tabs on the right hand side of our

website, and those go with you no matter what page you’re on. It’s important for help to be available

immediately no matter where you are.”

Naylor has configured the LiveEngage platform so that agents can manage up to three concurrent

conversations. The LiveEngage console gives a wealth of information about the customers they’re chatting

with, including what country they’re in and what page they’re visiting. “We have a lot of products that

are similar,” he says. “For example, we have more than 90 Batman items. As a result, seeing what page the

customer is looking at greatly increases the efficiency of staff and speeds the time to resolution.”

Over several months, members of the team have informally created canned answers to frequently-asked

questions and shared them among themselves. “As with most service teams, we get pretty much the same

inquiries from most people throughout the day,” Naylor says. “The flexibility of the LiveEngage platform to

push out those answers, or modify them, is very important.”

Impressive resultsIn just a few months, live chat through the LiveEngage platform has helped Naylor and his team navigate

the transition to global e-commerce. “During peak weeks, our customer service team of eight people

handles more than 4,000 inquiries,” Naylor reports. “Live chat usage has stayed steady at 8 to 12 percent

of those inquiries, but our team’s efficiency is greatly enhanced even at those levels. Agents can perform

multiple live chat conversations while they return emails, and this kept us from having to add staff during

our peak weeks this year, when we had as many as 30 inquiries per labor hour.”

2014 LivePerson, Inc.© 3

CUSTOMER SUCCESS CostumeBox

“”

We want to be wherever the customer is—mobile phones, tablets, social media—and we want them to have a really standout

customer experience. – Brian Naylor, Marketing Manager, CostumeBox

The SolutionEngagement Model: Proactive chat for e-commerce

sales engagement

Under the Hood: LiveEngage platform with live

chat and content targeting;

future deployment of mobile chat

and integration of LiveEngage

platform into CRM system

Customer Success: Help with setup and configuration

and ongoing optimization

support from LivePerson’s

Customer Success team

The Results• Nearly 5% increase in

average order value

• 2.1% increase in

conversion rate

• 95% satisfaction score

for live chat channel

• Ability to field up to

30 inquiries per labor

hour without adding staff

• 8% to 12% of customer

service inquiries fielded

by live chat

Overall average order values have increased for CostumeBox over the past year, and Naylor believes that

live chat has been a major factor “Customers are spending $5 more with us on average than a year ago—a

5 percent increase,” Naylor says. “And our content targeting rule for international customers increased the

conversion rate outside of Australia and New Zealand by 2.5 percent.”

Perhaps most importantly for Naylor’s long-term goals, customer response to live chat has been

overwhelmingly positive. “We send out a post-interaction survey with a scoring system, and the live chat

channel gets a score of more than 95 percent,” he reports. “That’s about the same satisfaction score that our

phone and email services get, but live chat is more likely to result in a resolution with the first interaction.”

The Comments section of the post-interaction surveys reveals another nuance of customer satisfaction.

“Customers often mention the name of the live chat agent and talk about how happy they were with the

service,” Naylor comments. “Customers who remember the name of the person who helped them are more

likely to come back, and to encourage their friends to visit our site.”

Going to the next levelNaylor’s team is about to launch a mobile-optimized website, and plans to deploy mobile live chat for the

site through the LiveEngage platform in early 2014. “We can see from our analytics that more and more

people are coming to our site from mobile devices,” he notes. “We want them to have a great experience

and decide to make a purchase. Mobile chat will be easy and affordable to deploy with LivePerson’s cloud-

based delivery and per-interaction pricing.”

Naylor’s team also plans to integrate the LiveEngage platform into CostumeBox’s new customer

relationship management (CRM) system, which will go live in early 2014. “One goal for this project is to

address cart abandonment more aggressively,” Naylor explains. “When customers get to the final stage but

still have a question hanging over their purchase, LiveEngage will enable us to invite them to a proactive

live chat with an agent. We really want to start personalizing how we touch each of our customers.”

Another initiative on the horizon for CostumeBox is to use its customer data to facilitate the growth of

the company. “We’re going to really focus on mining all the rich information we have on customers—

not in an intrusive way, but in a way that enables a better customer experience,” Naylor says. One

source of information is live chat conversations, which the team can analyze using tools built into the

LiveEngage platform.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS CostumeBox

42014 LivePerson, Inc.©

Being where the customer isFor Naylor, digital engagement isn’t just a customer service tool; it is a vehicle for enacting

CostumeBox’s overall strategy. “You can spend all the money you want on advertising, but if the word

of mouth isn’t great, and people aren’t happy and coming back to you, you’re dead in the water,” he

relates. “We want to be wherever the customer is—mobile phones, tablets, social media—and we want

them to have a really standout customer experience. We’ve found that live chat from LivePerson is an

indispensable piece to that puzzle.”

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 Atlanta, San Francisco,

Santa Monica, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Tel Aviv,

Tokyo, and Melbourne.

ContactLivePerson, Inc. T: 212.991.1794

475 Tenth Ave F: 212.609.4233

5th Floor info@liveperson.com

New York, NY 10018 www.liveperson.com

“

”

Agents can perform multiple live chat

conversations while they return emails,

and this kept us from having to add staff

during our peak weeks this year.

– Brian Naylor, Marketing Manager, CostumeBox