Surviving The Dotcom Crash And Building A Sustainable Business: LivePerson CEO Rob LoCascio (Part 7)

Sramana: In terms of product roadmap, there are a lot of trends playing in your marketplace. In which direction is your sweet spot?

Rob LoCascio: Bringing real time intelligence to customer interaction. That is what we are very good at. When you engage a consumer on a website today, most sites treat every consumer equally. That is not correct, at least I don’t feel that it is. If I spend a lot of money on travel every year then when I show up on a travel website they should be able to identify me and provide a different level of service for me to make that experience on their website better.

Today there is nothing personal about visiting a website. I am treated like everyone else. We aim to make the Web a much more personalized, individualized experience. Conversion rates have been stuck to 1% to 2% for websites for years. That will only change through personalization.

Sramana: It is not easy to do that. Personalization is a topic of interest to me, and so far only the surface has been scratched.

Rob LoCascio: We have found that because of the intelligence that we are able to collect on consumers that we are able to identify customers who have been to the site before. We know how much they spent on their last site and we proactively engage the consumer in chat. We find that we are increasing conversion rates when we do that. We create great engines to indentify consumers and give them the right channels at the right time.

Sramana: How do you identify consumers? Are you talking about established customers? How can you do personalization on a new prospect?

Rob LoCascio: It turns out that we all exhibit behavior while we are on a website. Our engine looks at that behavior. We determine when there is someone who looks like they are going to buy something and are having an issue making the purchase and we intervene. Websites and products change and our engine looks for that. There is behavior that real buyers show that others do not.

Sramana: What kind of signals do real buyers show?

Rob LoCascio: We find that the pattern is different on each website. If you are on a banking website and you are filling out a mortgage application, you will have a different pattern than if you are on a consumer electronics website. Discovering those patterns is what our company does well. Chat is a commodity behavior, but that does not lead our customers to pay us 10 million dollars a year. Top quality analytics is very hard to build, and it took us many years to perfect it. As a result, we have a great engine and our customers are now asking us for other things like mobile interaction and coupons.

Sramana: How do you compare to Baynote?

Rob LoCascio: Yes. The predictive and real time nature of our engine, especially when driven down to the individual consumer, is where we really shine.

Sramana: Very good. Thank you for sharing your story, and I look forward to keeping in touch.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Surviving The Dotcom Crash And Building A Sustainable Business: LivePerson CEO Rob LoCascio
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