CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Commonwealth BankPredictive Returns for Commonwealth Bank with Live Chat and Predictive Targeting

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CUSTOMER SUCCESS Commonwealth Bank

Commonwealth Bank opened its doors more than a 100 years ago

shortly after the passage of the Commonwealth Bank Act in 1911. Its

objective was to be the bank of the people, and this has remained

an unwavering focus of Commonwealth Bank to the present. This

is reflected, as an example, in Commonwealth Bank’s new brand

campaign called “When you believe you can, you can”— the assertion

that the bank’s technologies and know-how will help its customers get

where they want to go.

The adoption of and preference for digital channels by a

growing number of customers—both B2C and B2B—prompted

Commonwealth Bank to initiate a live chat pilot in 2009. “We

wanted to be an early adopter in our region and differentiate our

brand,” recalls Aris Kinnas, the executive manager of Digital Sales at

Commonwealth Bank. “Making it as easy as possible to support our

customers to complete mortgage and then other banking applications

online was also a factor.”

Getting startedThe Commonwealth Bank team, which includes Nirali Amin, the webchat optimization manager at Commonwealth Bank, looked at several

different solutions and ultimately determined that the LivePerson platform met their needs best. “LivePerson is a leader in the space,” Amin says.

“The LivePerson solution also had the scale and security we needed.”

The initial pilot took 10 months to complete, with the Commonwealth Bank team expanding across all retail banking products and settling

on t10 concurrent live chat agents. “Our original concurrency rates and chat volumes were lower than we projected, but we gained valuable

feedback and insights from thousands of customers,” Kinnas says. “In addition, this enabled us to deliver a better customer experience through

incremental changes to our website as well as live chat itself.” In particular, the data aggregate the Commonwealth Bank team accumulated

from LivePerson served as an invaluable repository of customer insights and intelligence as they built out a next-generation website that was

launched this past June.

Australian banking leader Commonwealth Bank elected to become an early adopter in its market by embracing digital engagement using LivePerson in 2009. The initial deployment delivered

promising results, and Commonwealth Bank elected to add several strategic elements to its digital engagement

strategy. The results around conversion rates and customer satisfaction were impressive. The recent migration to

Predictive Targeting added even further business value: conversion rates shot to 21 percent, agent productivity

improved, and live chat acceptance rates went up.

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CUSTOMER SUCCESS Commonwealth Bank

Digital engagement gets strategicWith solid results and more than two and a half of years experience underneath their belts, Kinnas elected

to evolve the digital engagement strategy further. “We wanted to add our live chat program into our secure

Internet banking site to better support customers deeper within the application funnel,” Kinnas comments.

Soon after wards, the Commonwealth Bank team increased the number of concurrent agents to 30 while

expanding live chat engagement threefold to fourfold.

The LivePerson Customer Success organization was engaged as part of this evolution. “Our LivePerson

Customer Success Manager continued delivering a weekly scorecard with insights for all of our programs

and met with us to review performance every week,” Kinnas observes. The Commonwealth Bank team also

has LivePerson Customer Success conduct frequent engagement strategy analyses, staffing optimization,

agent performance analysis, benchmarking against global performance, and ROI analysis.

Amin also began analyzing insights from the live chat program. “We implemented business processes to

aggregate scorecard data and transcription and text analytics from the LiveEngage platform supplemented

with other areas of data such as website behavior using Omniture,” Amin says. “We also ramped up the

number of business rules used for engagement.”

Dating back to the initial deployment in 2010, customer experience has been a key performance indicator

(KPI) metric. “Our efforts around digital engagement were intended to serve as an important catalyst to

improve the customer experience,” Kinnas notes. Customer satisfaction scores for the live chat program

initially hovered between 60 and 70 percent in 2010. Within a year, customer satisfaction scores had

improved to over 80 percent consistently.

A contributing factor to the improvement of customer satisfaction was an increase in the number

of chats that answered and met the customer’s need. Another area was a decrease in chat response

times—going from a high of 31 seconds to an average of 26 seconds. What’s especially impressive is

that the Commonwealth Bank team drove operational efficiency from 20 percent away time to three

percent or less.

Commonwealth Bank also began to see improvements with conversion rates when live chat was introduced

into the secure site—from 10 to 17 percent. “This was a substantial uplift that translated into a substantial

revenue increase,” Amin points out.

From retail to business bankingIn 2013, Kinnas and Amin opted to extend live chat beyond retail banking to business banking and

increased the number of concurrent agent seats to 32. “With the business banking side of the house, we

had an opportunity to gain much better insight into what is happening with our customers around cart

abandonment and conversion rates because our business assets are not as developed,” Kinnas observes.

The rollout included support from LivePerson Customer Success.

Company ProfileFounded in 1911 and with more than 52,000 employees, Commonwealth Bank is the leading provider of integrated financial services in Australia.

The self-learning algorithms

within Predictive Targeting allow the solution to

evolve and scale to support behavioral changes in virtual

real time.– Aris Kinnas,

Executive Manager, Digital Sales, Commonwealth Bank

The value proposition is there, and building a business case for Predictive Targeting is a very easy one to prove.”

– Aris Kinnas, Executive Manager, Digital Sales, Commonwealth Bank

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CUSTOMER SUCCESS Commonwealth Bank

Changing the rules: Predictive TargetingRecognizing the effectiveness of behavioral rules and how they drive better customer experiences, Amin

continued to evolve and expand upon the rules that Kinnas and Amin initially developed. However, as she

continued to create and implement rules, the aggregate became almost overwhelming to manage.

“By the time 2013 rolled around, we had reached more than 300 individual rules and had tagged over

350 web pages,” Amin notes. “I was spending 15 to 20 hours per week running reports, mapping the

rules against the customer journey, and designing even more rules. As a result, our focus was becoming

increasingly tactical and work was regularly spilling over into the weekend.” To truly evolve their program to

the next level, Amin needed to refocus her time to more strategic activities.

And while Commonwealth Bank had increased conversion rates, the bank wanted to improve them even

further. “We had reached a point of diminishing returns with PHL rules, and much of what we were doing

had become highly complex,” Kinnas says. “We needed to rethink how we were targeting customers.”

Sales conversion and acceptance rate were two other areas that Commonwealth Bank hoped to see

incremental improvement. “As a result of the changes we made in 2011 and 2012, we were able to make

very good strides around these areas,” reports Kinnas. “But we still had room for improvement. ”

As a result, Commonwealth Bank determined that Predictive Targeting within the LiveEngage platform

would enable them to achieve the aforementioned objectives. “Rather than focusing our energies on

manually creating and managing rule sets, we sought to become much more strategic in our approach,”

Kinnas says. “The self-learning algorithms within Predictive Targeting allow the solution to evolve and scale

to support behavioral changes in virtual real time. We’re also able to identify high-value customers earlier

in the buying cycle or pinpoint them before they disengage or don’t complete the purchase.”

With the help of LivePerson Customer Success, Commonwealth Bank moved over to Predictive Targeting.

“Working with our LivePerson Customer Success manager, it was a seamless process,” Amin says. “We were

up and running within a week or two.”

Predictive resultsPredictive Targeting is producing very promising results for Commonwealth Bank in a number of areas.

Conversion rates increased from 17 percent to 21 percent. Acceptance rates also increased from 11 percent

to 12 percent. “One percent may not seem like much, but when the volume of our total live chat sessions is

considered, the impact in terms of revenue is substantial,” Kinnas explains.

Commonwealth Bank also saw agent efficiency improve. What’s particularly interesting is the number of

chats per labor hour expanded from 8.9 to 10, while the length of live chats per hour increased from 11.5

to 12.5 minutes. “The quality of our chats improved as we are receiving hotter leads,” Amin says. “Previously,

we had some service requests sneak into our sales chat sessions that would not generate any revenue but

rather expended valuable labor time. These are now being reduced by Predictive Targeting, freeing our

agents to focus on sales-generating activities.”

When everything is boiled down at the end of the day, Kinnas cites the importance of building a business

case around agent utilization and efficiency in conjunction with conversion rates as the tipping point. “The

value proposition is there, and building a business case for Predictive Targeting is a very easy one to prove.”

The SolutionChallenges• Improve customer experience and support

• Increase conversion rates

• Improve operational efficiency

LiveEngage SolutionEngagement Model: Live chat for sales functions

Under the Hood: LiveEngage platform with Predictive Targeting and transcription analysis

Customer Success: Training, implementation, performance management, and expert services

Business ResultsCustomer Satisfaction• Improved from 60% to 70% to 82% to 86%

Sales• Conversion rates increased from 10% to 17% with use of insights from transcription analysis and institution of rules (2011-12)

• Conversion rates increased from 17% to 21% with Predictive Targeting (2013)

• Acceptance rates improved from 11% to 12%

Operational Efficiency• Handling times cut as much as in half, depending on the banking application

• Chat response times shaved from 31 seconds to 26 seconds

• Away time reduced from 20% to 3%

• Saving as much as 80 staff hours per month with Predictive Targeting

• Chats per labor hour increased from 8.9 to 10, while chats per hour increased from 11.5 to 12.5 minutes

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CUSTOMER SUCCESS Commonwealth Bank

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 San Francisco, Atlanta, Tel Aviv, London, 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