Creating a Personalized Engagement Experience for All Customers

• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management

• Sales & Marketing

• Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

Extra Space Storage wanted to deploy live chat for sales in a deliberate way, using extensive post-deployment testing to refine the program for maximum effectiveness and optimal customer experience. They were concerned that live chat might just cannibalize business from their other channels, which could negatively affect commissioned salespeople without improving the bottom line. They wanted to find out whether they could actually get incremental conversions from live chat. The team started by placing a nonintrusive Click-to-Chat button for potential customers who had spent 60 seconds on the site’s facility, search, or reserve and hold pages.

Extra Space Storage, Inc. is one of the big players in the self-storage industry, having grown over its 36-year history to 667,000 units at more than 1,000 properties in 35 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. While an outsider might view renting a storage unit as a straightforward process, many consumers and business owners need help in deciding what they need in terms of amount and type of space and type of contract. “We’re really neither a product nor a service, so people have trouble understanding how our business works,” says Melissa Burdon, director of marketing optimization for Extra Space Storage. “Every customer has individual needs, and many have questions even after looking at the detailed information on our website.”

The team researched live chat solutions, LivePerson quickly moved to the top of the list for several reasons. “One big reason is that we view LivePerson as a market leader in live chat,” Emmer asserts. “We consider all of our partners not just for today’s needs but for the long term. We were very confident in the current features and functionality, including the advanced reporting tools that we would need to measure the channel’s success. And we felt their vision of digital engagement would meet our needs in the future.” The ability to customize the solution is another reason that Burdon and Emmer chose LivePerson. “With our diverse customer base, we want to deliver an experience that is unique to the individual,” Burdon explains. “So the ability to provide a variety of live chat experiences, depending on the customer, was very important to our larger mission.”

• Visitors who participate in live chat with Extra Space Storage are twice as likely to convert as those who do not.
• The length of calls seems to be getting shorter. Half of Extra Space Storage's conversions overall are from return visitors, so they believe that those who call them are now later in the buying journey and are having their early questions answered in other ways.

• 100% better live chat conversion rate than initial implementation
• 153% quarterly increase in total sales for live chat
• 40% improvement in conversion rates for proactive live chat vs. static