Data center technology and services provider Equinix, Inc. is building on the success it has had in using live to chat to engage prospective customers in the United Kingdom and Netherlands. It recently added live chat to four more of its 14 global web sites—in France, Germany, Switzerland and United Arab Emirates—as a way to generate customer leads across new markets in Europe and Africa, personalize buyer interactions and give its business-to-business sites a more “business-to-consumer feel,” says John Wroath, the company’s marketing manager for the Europe, Mideast and Africa region.
So far, he says, live chat is helping to drive up customer leads by 16%.
Based in Redwood City, Calif., Equinix enables some 4,000 client companies to store and transmit data with their employees, customers and trading partners through the Equinix network of 100 data centers located in 15 markets worldwide.
Launched in 2008—at a time when “the Internet was a messy place, and individual companies potentially hosted their own servers in a cellar,” Wroath says—today Equinix is growing at a steady rate of 14% year over year, and the company’s total revenue reached $2.4 billion in 2014.
Wroath credits much of Equinix’s growth to the more than 500 providers of cloud-based software that use its data centers to provide software applications to their clients. That software can drive web content like videos that otherwise would take longer to appear when clicked by a site visitor. The global locations of its data storage systems—which appeal to companies with international customer bases—is also helping to drive up Equinix’s growth, Wroath says. The company declines to name specific clients.
In Germany half of Equinix clients call in their orders to Equinix sales representatives, while the other half fill out a lead form online. In the U.K., 80% of Equinix customers fill out a form online, and the other 20% call their order in. How customers contact Equinix varies by market, but the company figures the web, with the help of live chat, could account for an even higher share of customer leads, Wroath says. He notes that every hour of live chat between a customer and sales representative usually equates to two enterprise sales leads.
Last April, Wroath deployed TouchCommerce, Inc.’s TouchChat product on Equinix’s U.K. and Netherlands-based sites as “a kind of hypothesis to see if speeding up the sales funnel would help us reach some of our targets,” he says. The objective was to give Equinix web site visitors—primarily tech savvy, infrastructure engineers tasked with finding data services for their own company—a means to use live chat to ask questions, with the goal of getting more customers to fill out the company’s online lead form.
Because deploying Equinix can cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars, Equinix customers generally take about a year to 18 months to commit to a purchase, Wroath says. The live chat function has shortened that process by about a month because sales representatives can directly answer prospective customer’s questions, and buyers can find out right away if Equinix has the right data storage and location capabilities for their company, he adds.
“It’s a feature that allows a customer to receive information more effectively and efficiently, and speeds up the sale process,” Wroath says.
Last week, Equinix expanded its live chat services to its German, French, Swiss and United Arab Emirates web sites as a way to generate more leads, but also as a way to personalize customer engagement.
“It allows us to personalize sales interactions; I think that’s actually one of the real benefits to live chat for Equinix,” Wroath says. “A lot of countries have a lot of variants towards providing data on a website. In Germany, people typically don’t like to leave their information online. Live chat allows them to do that with a person.”
Wroath declines to comment on what the cost was to deploy TouchChat, but says that it was a flat fee, with separate activation costs and licensing fees per site. Recently, Equinix followed a lead generated through live chat that has a potential contract value of $1 million, he says. If that deal alone is finalized, Equinix’s return on investment for TouchCommerce will be 10 to one, he says.
Going forward, Equinix plans to integrate TouchCommerce with the company’s customer relationship management software from Salesforce.com Inc.
Currently, when a potential buyer engages with a sales person via live chat, Wroath says the buyer’s information and interest have to be manually added to the Salesforce.com software. Then, when the client meets in-person with the sales representative, many questions regarding the buyer’s use and need of Equinix are often repeated. By automating the live chat reporting process, Wroath says he hopes to save time for both Equinix sales reps and customers. He plans to have the integration complete by June 2015.
The ultimate goal is to streamline Equinix’s buying process and make Equinix.com as easy as possible to use for its B2B customers.
“I had a belief that B2B sites should be more B2C,” Wroath says. “I think a lot of the functionality within the site has a B2C feel to it, like the Twitter feeds, a lot of video, infographics, and other types of features that trace their roots back to a B2C environment. Live chat was one of the functionalities you can do relatively easily, and it was also in-line with our objectives for that year of driving marketing qualified leads.”
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