As SynapsePay grows, its use of Olark live chat has grown with it. This case study shows how...
In late 2014, Memphis-based SynapsePay launched its platform that allows anyone with a bank account and Internet connection to transfer money and issue payments. It also gives merchants a secure portal for accepting payments, either in-store or online.
As it was getting started, SynapsePay only used Olark as an email collection tool on its landing pages. When users had a query, they submitted a question and the team of six at SynapsePay responded to it in a timely manner. However, when the company launched and started quickly adding users, Sankaet Pathak, founder and CEO, says they saw email and call volume skyrocket."Before we launched we'd get maybe 10-15 emails each week, and a few phone calls here and there," said Pathak. "But the latency of email is so high, we were getting more emails than we could respond to in a normal work week. That's when we started actually logging into Olark more frequently to chat with customers on our site. In two days we went well over the 20 chats allotted on the free forever plan, so we upgraded to Bronze."
On the Bronze plan, SyapsePay operators use Olark's co-browsing feature to view a visitor's screen and guide them to the transactions page. Once they see the customer is on the right page, they highlight the transaction button, the text field to label transaction types, and finally the 'submit' button. Pathak says the ability to co-browse and show people how to complete basic tasks makes the onboarding process more user-friendly and increases the likelihood of a user sticking around.
Use feedback to sell more effectively
While co-browsing helps the customer experience, Pathak says the customer feedback from chat helped his company scale and close more sales.
As the CEO of SynapsePay, and a developer, Pathak found himself in a tough spot working to scale the company while staying close to customers. "Growing our business has meant selling to larger enterprises, which means I take a lot of meetings," said Pathak. "This became concerning as I realized I was spending all of my time in meetings and wasn't talking to customers as much. I felt out of touch with what customers who were already on the platform were saying - what we could be doing to make the platform better."
The solution, he says, was simply making time to chat. Now Pathak sets aside time to login and talk to customers browsing the site, which eliminates feedback loops. "It's essential that customer feedback gets to the top. My making time to chat means I can almost always get at least a glimpse of what our customers are saying," said Pathak.
That customer feedback helps Pathak in his sales meetings. "Now we've collected so much information from our customers, when I talk to bigger companies, they say, 'X has been our biggest problem' and I say, 'Great, we've got that problem solved already.' Feedback from Olark is helping us anticipate and assuage their concerns, and close more sales as a result."
Pathak says SynapsePay will continue to focus on improving feedback latency for customer service as it grows. The company plans to continue scaling in 2015, but has shown in a very short time how live chat can grow with a company, from lead generation, to improving customer service response time and reducing email volume, to high-level sales insight.
What tips have you learned in scaling live chat alongside your company's growth?
