HostAdvice Generates 19% of All Sales Through LiveChat

The challenge

Making sense out of hosting

HostAdvice wants to reduce web hosting costs for developers by creating an honest, transparent comparison platform. Ariel Hochstadt, co-founder at HostAdvice, mentioned that comparison tables and text could only do so much in terms of providing the necessary hosting information to potential customers. Users with more complex questions want to talk with someone and explain their pains.

Before choosing LiveChat, the company tried a couple of different providers, including Zopim. They decided to try LiveChat after someone told them it was effortless to use. Hochstadt said:

We tried it and asked the agents what they thought worked best, and they chose LiveChat. You need to give your agents a tool they love using. They know best, and it shows in sales.

Ariel Hochstadt, HostAdvice

The solution

24/7 LiveChat implementation

HostAdvice offers 24/7 live chat help for their customers. Two customer service agents are available around the clock. Usually, one agent can handle between 80 and 90 chats during their shift.

The agents use mostly web and desktop versions of LiveChat. They use the mobile app when they receive particularly difficult questions. Whenever an agent gets a difficult question, they send a text message to more experienced colleagues, and they can take over the chat and continue it from where the agent got stuck.

Improving customer experience and sales

To check how the chat would affect an average user’s experience, HostAdvice looked closely at their website’s key performance indicators (KPIs), including time on site, pages per user, and bounce rate. Even though they were worried that the popup would annoy their customers, the metrics all improved.

Around 15% of all users need help with the comparison results they get, and instead of just banging their heads against the (fire)wall, they can ask questions and get instant replies.

Another area where chat proved to work better than expected is handling international customers. Hochstadt said that they initially were a bit skeptical about the whole idea:

To be honest, we weren’t sure LiveChat would work for us at first. Why? We have users from all over the world, yet we can only chat in English.

Ariel Hochstadt, HostAdvice

A dedicated 24/7 live chat channel for each language (HostAdvice offers help for customers from 31 countries) wouldn’t be feasible because of the low traffic from those sources. However, it turned out it wasn’t necessary. They quickly realized that most users had no issue with the English-only chats, so they implemented it across their sites in all languages.

LiveChat proved to be a good source of customer feedback too. The changes that resulted from feedback allowed the company to improve its detraction ratio from 85% to 96%, which allowed them to move up in Google search results because it just gave a better answer. They wouldn’t be able to do this without the chat, Hochstadt added.

Live chat is now a part of around 35% of all sales generated by HostAdvice, and 19% of sales happen directly because of chat.

The result

Plans for the future

HostAdvice customers love the fact that they can get instant help via chat. They feel that a recommendation from a human on chat is much stronger than the simple text a user sees on the page.

The 19% of sales exclusively via chat indicate how that extra help translates into sales. Hochstadt concluded:

The first hour of each day covers the expenses of the chat agent. The remaining 23 hours are pure profit.

Ariel Hochstadt, HostAdvice

In the future, HostAdvice plans to expand its use of LiveChat even further by integrating Google Analytics with LiveChat to better understand its customers’ browsing and chatting patterns.

Kuba Rogalski

LiveChat