Background

At Second Street, we experimented with live chat using HubSpot for the first time after launching a new marketing website in 2019. In the first few months, we found most chats were started by end users of our platform looking for support and not sales leads. It was an ineffective use of time for SDRs since they were playing “operator” instead of chatting with qualified leads.

The marketing website has a chatbot that asks qualification questions before the visitor is routed to sales or service team.

The marketing website has a chatbot that asks qualification questions before the visitor is routed to sales or service team.

Objective

I served as project manager for a cross-departmental team with the objective of driving more conversations at each stage of the flywheel. We wanted to reduce friction and make it as easy as possible for prospects and customers to talk to the right person at the right time. We set the following key results:

  • Double the number of live chat conversations completed quarter over quarter

  • Every rep in sales, support, and success have at least one conversation on live chat

  • Increase qualified leads from inbound activities on the marketing site by 20% 

Execution

We increased our live chat availability hours and added it to all our domains – not just our marketing site. We added chat to our knowledge base, blog website, and even embedded chat within our SaaS product. Each site had its own chatbot that asked personalized questions and had branching logic in place to route the conversations to the right team. Using an integration with Slack, the incoming chats appeared in the same easy-to-use tool reps were already used to using for internal comms. 

Second Street customers can chat with our support team directly within our product.

Second Street customers can chat with our support team directly within our product.

We also launched individual chat pages for all Account Executives and Success Managers that we linked in their email signatures. This made for a new direct line of communication for customers and prospects with their assigned Second Streeter.

Each Account Executive and Success Manager has their own chat page that also links to their HubSpot meeting link.

Each Account Executive and Success Manager has their own chat page that also links to their HubSpot meeting link.

Results

In the year we launched this initiative, we increased the number of conversations completed from hundreds of chats to thousands of chats – an increase of over 500%. Plus, we drove over $100K in new sales revenue from opportunities started on chat. And finally, chat became a new favorite support channel for many customers as they raved about it in our quarterly NPS surveys.