Switching from LivePerson – a 1 Step Plan
In certain marketing circles it’s considered sacrilege to use your competitor’s name in your own communications. “Why use your money to promote their brand” – or so the thinking goes. While I admit it’s not terrible advice, it’s not always the right advice either. There are certain situations when explicit mentions of direct competitors are not only appropriate, but encouraged.
When the industry in which you compete has not yet ‘gone mainstream’, a decent portion of your marketing effort is needed for education. This is true, in fact, for all the players in the space. In burgeoning markets then, a chunk of the collective marketing executed by all the competitors is being used for ‘category building.’ While marketing-types would like to use 100% of their budgets for brand building, it’s simply not possible until there is a robust market from which competitors can carve out a lasting position.
If you believe the industry gurus over at Gartner, live chat technology is still pre-mainstream. As such, any competitive bustling in the market can only serve to raise awareness of the category at large – and that’s good for everyone.
With that in mind, here’s the one step plan that many current BoldChat customers have used to switch away from LivePerson. It’s pretty simple, really; Give us a try.
We think trial behavior is good for the market. Taking test drives of other live chat software deepens understanding of the technology and encourages discussions about its proper place in the organization’s communication strategy, time to benefit, ROI, and other useful metrics. We want folks using other products to try our software not only because we believe its greater power to impact their business will be readily apparent, but also because it generates conversations inside the firm that will help our category at large. We think trials are a great place to start – especially if you already understand the basics of live chat.
Does all of this talk about category building and overall market goodness mean that we are encouraging our customers trialing competitors? Heck no – we come to work everyday focused on how to increase the value that our customers get from our offerings.
We will say this, however. We’d much rather have a customer leave us and become a LivePerson customer than to abandon chat altogether. If they stick with the technology, we’ll get ‘em back someday.