2014

CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Extra Space StorageCreating a Personalized Engagement Experience for All Customers

1© 2014 LivePerson, Inc.

Extra Space Storage sought 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. Originally available to only selected website visitors, live chat from LivePerson is now

available to everyone on the site, and proactive live chat invitations are targeted at high-value customers.

With refining and optimization still in progress, live chat has a 100 percent better conversion rate than when it was

first implemented, 40 percent of that total resulting from proactive live chat. Recent quarterly improvements include

a 95 percent increase in chats with qualified high-value visitors and a 153 percent increase in total sales.

The self-storage industry is one of the fastest-growing sectors of

the United States’ commercial real estate market.1 With 7.3 square

feet of rentable space per capita, every man, woman, and child

could stand concurrently within the country’s storage units—

and still have a lot of elbow room.2 Extra Space Storage, Inc. is one

of the big players in the 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.”

Answering these questions is the responsibility of Burdon’s team,

which manages the online customer experience from the initial touch

point through the time when a unit is occupied. The group’s broad

charter prompts them to view their work through the lens of the

overall customer experience. “Visitors to our website are at various

stages of the buying cycle,” Burdon’s notes. “It’s important that we

have a variety of engagement channels available depending on

where customers are.”

153%

QUARTERLY INCREASE IN TOTAL SALES

CUSTOMER SUCCESS Extra Space Storage

Finding a Live Chat SolutionIn 2012, the team saw live chat as a channel with great potential for the company. They decided to start testing of the channel, but wanted to

move deliberately. “Initially, we were concerned that live chat might just cannibalize business from our other channels, which could negatively

affect commissioned salespeople without improving the bottom line,” says Emily Emmer, an optimization marketing manager on Burdon’s team.

“We wanted to find out whether we could actually get incremental conversions from live chat.”

2© 2014 LivePerson, Inc.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS Extra Space Storage

Extra Space StorageFounded: 1977

Headquarters: Salt Lake City, Utah

Industry: Real Estate

Properties: 667,000 units at 1,039 self-storage properties in 35 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico

Total Rentable Space: More than 74 million square feet

The Challenge• Enable live chat without

cannibalizing other channels

• Provide a customized live chat

experience for each customer

• Optimize digital engagement

for increased conversions

The SolutionEngagement Model: Proactive and static live chat

for sales

Under the Hood: Rules-based targeting,

enrichment analytics; future

deployment of mobile chat

LivePerson Customer Success: Deep ongoing involvement in

testing, optimization, and strategy

As 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.”

Testing, Deploying, and RefiningEmmer purchased a single agent license of the LivePerson platform and started a limited test. “We rolled

it out very slowly, so that we could have a good understanding of how live chat stood on its own, and

how it interacted with both the website and the call center,” she recalls. 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. The button was labeled “Need help? Click here to chat with an online

representative or call us now,” and appeared as a footer band pop-up.

The initial test showed enough promise that the team decided to fully deploy the solution when Emmer

and Burdon purchased four additional concurrent agent seats to bring their total to five. At the same time,

they made plans to expand their testing so that they could refine and optimize the solution for their unique

needs. “We started to aggressively put our own resources into strategy and deployment of the solution,”

Emmer explains.

“I’ve done at least a half dozen tests on live chat already, and I have another dozen tests planned for the

coming year,” Emmer continues. “We’ve experimented with different placements of the Click-to-Chat button,

different hours of live chat availability, and different ways of extending live chat invitations. We sat next to

agents while they had live chat conversations, to get a better understanding of what stumbling blocks they

were encountering.” The team is using an A/B Testing methodology that provides one experience to half our

visitors, and another experience to the other half.

Customer Success: Tactical to Strategic SupportThe LivePerson Customer Success manager assigned to Extra Space Storage has played a big role in the testing

and refining of the solution. “I’m a squeaky wheel,” Emmer admits. “I talk with him every week. He has been

able to help me with everything from troubleshooting technical problems to overall implementation and

even some strategy. And when Adobe Test&Target was unable to help me with some testing scenarios, he

helped me to configure the LivePerson platform so that I could continue my testing. If there’s any amount

of data I want, no matter how granular, he’ll help me to get it.”

Targeting High-Value CustomersAt this writing, all visitors to the Extra Space Storage website have a static “Chat Live” button available, and

those who click are routed to one of two live chat experiences. The team is also using rules-based targeting

to extend proactive live chat invitations to select customers. “We have tested a variety of dynamic rules,”

© 2014 LivePerson, Inc. 3

CUSTOMER SUCCESS Extra Space Storage

“”

We’re really neither a product nor a service, so people have trouble understanding how our business works.

The ResultsLive Chat Sales Improvements

• 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

Streamlined Processes

• 95% quarterly increase in

chats with qualified high-value

visitors

• 30% improvement in

conversion rate by staffing

live chat lines with the most

qualified chatters, from 16-18%

to 20-23%.

• Shorter time to resolution

for phone support, due to early

questions being answered via

live chat

Emmer reports. “Some of the rules we tested were too intrusive, or came too early in the buying process.

Other experiences had high response rates and led more often to conversions.”

Regardless of the rules, proactive live chat invitations have brought some of the most impressive results

of all the testing. “When we introduced proactive chat, we saw 40 percent lift in conversion rates alone,”

Burdon states. “Many customers won’t click a static button, but if a real person invites them into a

conversation, they’ll engage.”

Using Data to Optimize Digital EngagementThe careful testing Emmer has conducted has helped Burdon and her team better understand the big

picture of customer experience. “Testing various experiences with Click to Chat has given us tremendous

insights into what we need to be doing better,” Burdon says. “The data tells us the entire story, and the

LivePerson platform brings out that story with its detailed analysis of the data.”

For example, refinements identified through the testing have helped the team to continually improve

conversion rates—the most important metric that Burdon’s team tracks. “Moving the Click-to-Chat button

from the bottom to the top of the screen gave us a 20 percent improvement in conversion rate, but the

number of chats more than doubled,” Emmer says. “We liked the improved conversion rate, but we also

knew that better targeting was needed to reduce the number of chats.”

Another lesson learned was that being a great phone agent doesn’t necessarily guarantee that one will be

as effective on live chat. “After using many of our phone agents on live chat for awhile, we decided to limit

the live chat channel to our top performing chatters. When we reduced the number of live chat agents by

60 percent, we boosted our conversion rate to 20 to 23 percent from 16 to 18 percent,” Emmer reports.

Impressive Overall ResultsIn general, sales results at Extra Space Storage are on a trajectory of continual improvement as the testing

moves forward. “Visitors who participate in live chat with us are twice as likely to convert as those who do

not—and this is a program we’re still refining,” Emmer emphasizes. “In the last quarter we’ve had a

95 percent increase in the number of qualified chats, and a 153 percent increase in total sales for customers

that have come to us to have their questions answered—mostly because of improved targeting.”

Extra Space Storage does not have a goal of call deflection, but the call center is anecdotally seeing

a benefit. “The length of calls seems to be getting shorter,” Burdon says. “Half of our conversions overall are

from return visitors, so we believe that those who call us are now later in the buying journey and are having

their early questions answered in other ways.”

– Melissa Burdon, Director, Marketing Optimization, Extra Space Storage

CUSTOMER SUCCESS Extra Space Storage

4© 2014 LivePerson, Inc.

Looking to the FutureAs Burdon and Emmer make plans for digital engagement over the next year or two, one pressing need is mobile live chat. “Traffic has been

increasing dramatically on our dedicated mobile website,” Burdon says. “We have big plans and have mapped out a whole strategy for

integrating mobile chat through the LivePerson platform. We believe it will be an effective way to drive more revenue through our mobile site.”

They are also looking at leveraging live chat conversations to an even fuller extent through the enrichment analytics capabilities of the

LivePerson platform. “We live and die by data, and we like how LivePerson provides the data in an unedited format—from conversion rate

information to transcripts of every live chat,” Emmer says. “We want to use that information for everything from website and marketing

optimization to operational improvements.” The team also plans to upload chat conversation data into the company’s Hadoop big data platform

to be analyzed in combination with other corporate data.

More than anything, the team is excited to continue the journey toward an individualized customer experience. “Our strategy at Extra Space

Storage is focused on creating a custom experience for all customers based on their characteristics and what they’re looking for,” Burdon

emphasizes. “We see LivePerson as a key component of this effort as we move into 2014.”

1Self Storage Association, “2013-14 Self Storage Industry Fact Sheet,” accessed 12/22/13.

2Ibid.

“

”

Visitors who participate in live chat with us are twice as likely to convert as those who do not—

and this is a program we’re still refining.– Emily Emmer, Optimization Marketing Manager,

Extra Space Storage

About LivePersonLivePerson, Inc. (NASDAQ: LPSN) offers a cloud-based platform

that enables businesses to proactively connect in real-time with

their customers via chat, voice, and content delivery at the right time,

through the right channel, including websites, social media, and

mobile devices. This “intelligent engagement” is driven by

real-time behavioral analytics, producing connections based on

a true understanding of business objectives and customer needs.

LivePerson is headquartered in New York City with offices in Atlanta,

San Francisco, Santa Monica, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Tel Aviv,

Tokyo, and Melbourne.

ContactLivePerson, Inc. T: 212.991.1794

475 Tenth Ave F: 212.609.4233

5th Floor info@liveperson.com

New York, NY 10018 www.liveperson.com