Live Support: Enabling Ribbon to “Drink Our Own Champagne"

It was the spring of 2016, just after a major tradeshow during which our Kandy cloud team had just announced the release of some ready-made customer engagement tools using Kandy APIs. They called the solutions Kandy Wrappers to describe their new ready-made, out-of-the-box capabilities. It has been four years since, and we are now at 20%. Let me explain…

It wasn’t long after the show that I got a call from our Kandy Product Manager, Jeff Singman and he said, "let's add Kandy to our website”. What he meant was let's add Kandy Live Support with its built-in chat, voice, video and screen sharing to our website so our customers could connect with us from the web, in real time. He gave me an admin account and I logged in, within 30 minutes, I had Live Support setup and had the HTML code generated so I could add a Live Support “Contact Us” button to our website. When I clicked it and then my phone rang, it was an aha moment. See for yourself, it’s simple to build a button.

Of course, we needed someone to answer the queries, so I worked with our inside sales team to add members of the sales team as Live Support agents. Initially, we limited the inquiries to chat, but it wasn’t long before we gave the agents the ability to seamlessly escalate to voice and video. Soon, we also extended the offer to include an option to chat with technical support agents on our Technical Support webpages. After a year or so of experience, we removed Live Support from the home page and put it on the Product and Solution pages. This dramatically improved the quality of the inquiries and virtually eliminated non-product related inquiries such as investors or job seekers.

Today, Ribbon’s website offers several ways for customers and prospects to connect including e-mail forms, request a quote forms, toll free numbers and even the option to dial a local sales office. Now an amazingly twenty percent of all of our qualified inquires come via Live Support (as of Q1 2020). Here is a short demo of how it works…

For nearly four years we’ve been “drinking our own champagne” here at Ribbon and it has been a pretty nice experience; not once have we woken up the following morning with a headache…