© 2014 LivePerson, Inc. 2
CUSTOMER SUCCESS Traeger Pellet Grills, LLC
Traeger Pellet Grills sought to grow e-commerce sales and make customer service more efficient and effective by launching a live chat channel. The company
deployed a LivePerson solution three years ago, with Click to Chat and proactive chat invitations for both
sales and customer service functions. Sales and customer service agents now field more than 2,400 live chat
conversations monthly, and the channel has been an important factor in a 20 percent increase in average
order values for the website. Organization OverviewFounded in the early 1990s
by the Traeger family,
Traeger Pellet Grills, LLC
markets outdoor cooking
grills from its headquarters
in Wilsonville, Oregon and
an office in Springville, Utah.
The company’s products
have been available across
the country since 2009.
The Results Business Results• 400+ live chat
conversations per month
• 20% increase in overall
AOV, partially due to
live chat
Customer Results• 2,000+ live chat
conversations per month
• Significant evidence of the
popularity of the channel
for solving problems
Since they were introduced in the early 1990s, Traeger Wood Pellet Grills have built an intensely loyal
following. “When our customers invite neighbors over for a barbeque, they inevitably say something like,
‘This is the best chicken I’ve ever had,’” says Ray Hansen, vice president of Online Marketing at Traeger. “It
instills a sense of pride in people for their Traeger grills, and it generates a lot of word of mouth referrals.”
The wood pellets provide unique flavor, and the grills have the flexibility to grill, bake, smoke, slow cook,
braise, and barbecue.
For nearly 20 years, the Traeger family marketed the grills in limited quantities—and only in the Pacific
Northwest—from their headquarters in Wilsonville, Oregon. But five years ago, the company’s new owners
began to take the products to the national market. Hansen was working for another company at the time,
and Traeger recruited his manager to launch a sales division for the company. “He brought me and a few
other people over with him,” Hansen recalls. “We started out working from our homes to try to get all of our
sales channels off the ground.”
Those channels include a much larger dealer network, branded retail stores in shopping malls across the
country, direct selling through a road show program, and an e-commerce site managed by Hansen. “When
I first started, I was the online marketing department,” Hansen remembers. “I was Web development; I was
graphic design; I was SEO; I was social media.”
© 2014 LivePerson, Inc. 3
A digital transformationAt the time, the company’s website was not doing much e-commerce. “We sold a few items directly on
the site, but most of the focus was on pointing people to our dealer network,” Hansen explains. “We love
our dealers and still want to let people know where they can buy a grill in person, or get pellets and other
supplies. But we also wanted to take a much more aggressive approach to direct selling.”
Hansen began a project to do exactly that, and it required much more than tinkering around the edges. “We
threw out the old site and started from scratch,” he says. “The new site was custom built, and the work was
done 100 percent in house. It is much more user friendly, and after we launched it in 2011, we saw traffic
increase rapidly.”
Once the new website was in place, Hansen and his team turned their attention to building other elements
of customer experience. “We added things like social media channels and recipe videos to engage with our
unique customer base,” he recalls. “And we added staff: We now have a great art director, some production
artists, a video guy, a social media manager, web developers, an email manager, and a full-time chef who
writes weekly recipes.” Enthusiastic Traeger grill owners now communicate with the company and each
other on a variety of channels.
Adding digital engagementTraeger also decided to add a personal touch to the sales and customer service experience by launching a
live chat engagement channel. “To grow our online presence, we needed more than just a phone number
on our website,” Hansen explains. “On the customer service side, we want to be there for our customers,
whether they have questions about setting up a grill, getting a grill repaired, or even how to cook
something. And for sales, we know that a live conversation at the right time will make a big difference
in conversions.”
Hansen researched several live chat providers and settled on LivePerson because of its comprehensive
view of digital engagement and leadership in the industry. “LivePerson is one of the biggest players in that
arena,” Hansen says. “Its solution was the most robust, and it offered all the features we needed.”
To grow our online presence, we needed more than just a phone number on our website.
– Ray Hansen, Vice President, Online Marketing, Traeger Pellet Grills, LLC
The Challenges • Provide an efficient and
effective channel for
customer service
• Increase e-commerce
sales with a sales
support channel
• Protect and support a
brand that has intensely
loyal followers
The Solution Engagement Model Live chat for sales and
customer service
Key Capabilities LiveEngage platform with
proactive chat and rules-
based targeting; future use
of content targeting
Customer SuccessDeployment assistance
and ongoing advice
and scorecards
CUSTOMER SUCCESS Traeger Pellet Grills, LLC
4© 2014 LivePerson, Inc.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS Traeger Pellet Grills, LLC
Rolling out a solutionAt the end of 2011, Traeger rolled out a deployment of LivePerson’s LiveEngage platform for both sales and service. “We started big,” Hansen
remembers. “We hired 8 to 10 fully dedicated live chat agents and trained them to handle both sales and customer service inquiries, with four
agents online at a time. But demand was very high, and we quickly realized that we had been a bit too ambitious. So we temporarily scaled back
our live chat operations to handle customer service issues only.”
Plans were being made at the time to open a new sales call center and devote the existing contact center to customer service only. As a result,
Traeger management decided that the best strategy for restoring live chat for sales was to build it into the charter of the team that would staff
the new location. The LiveEngage platform went live with the opening of the center in November 2013.
“Now that two different teams are chatting, we use the LiveEngage platform to intelligently segment the traffic and route it to the correct agent
team—sales or customer service,” Hansen explains. “We’re still in the process of turning everything that is sales-related over to them, but they’re
already seeing great results.” Around four fully dedicated live chat agents are on duty for sales support during peak times.
The LivePerson Customer Success manager assigned to the Traeger account provided advice and assistance for both deployments, and
maintains a cadence of regular touch points with Hansen and his team. “Our Customer Success manager came out and spent two days with the
sales team when that contact center opened,” Hansen relates. “He gave them a tour of the platform, helped them set targeting rules, created
avatars for the agents, and got everything configured for the launch. Since then, he has contacted us regularly, providing regular scorecards and
advice on how to optimize the deployment.”
Engaging through proactive chatProactive chat invitations are used with both the sales and service deployments. “From a service perspective, we have a couple of simple rules,”
explains Andrew Koster, Traeger’s customer service manager. “For example, visitors who spend a certain amount of time on the Frequently Asked
Questions page get an invitation, but only if an agent is available. The LiveEngage platform provides us with the flexibility to fine tune who sees
an invitation and when.”
For sales, several rules target people who are in danger of dropping out of the buying process. “The biggest one we have identified is when
visitors add items to a cart, begin the checkout procedure, then break out to go look at something else,” Hansen explains. “Obviously they’ve
got a question about something, so we want to jump in and help them out. And when people spend a longer-than-average amount of time on
certain pages, we’ll prompt them in that case as well.”
It is easier to join a conversation in progress, as I have the text of the prior conversation right on my screen.
– Andrew Koster, Customer Service Manager, Traeger Pellet Grills, LLC
5© 2014 LivePerson, Inc.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS Traeger Pellet Grills, LLC
Maintaining a superior customer experienceAgent training is critical for both the sales and customer service deployments. “Our agents go through a two-week training period that covers
both phone and live chat, as our agents provide both services,” Koster relates. “After the training, agents go live on the phone lines first. Once our
department supervisors are confident in their product knowledge and communication skills with customers, we allow them to begin using the
LiveEngage platform. Most agents start chatting a month or so after completing the training.”
To ensure quality interactions and provide growth opportunities for agents, Koster and the manager of the sales contact center make use of the
LiveEngage platform to monitor live conversations and review transcripts of past conversations. “It is a great coaching tool,” Koster asserts. “Our
agents are very good, but sometimes a seemingly insignificant change in an agent’s behavior can really improve the quality of the interaction.”
Another advantage of managers being logged into the system is that they can take over conversations when a customer has a problem
that is not easily solved. “It is much easier to join a conversation in progress with live chat than over the phone, as I have the text of the prior
conversation right on my screen,” Koster says. “And when customers have issues that need to be escalated, they are usually not in the mood to
tell their whole story again. It saves time for the customer and for us.”
Impressive resultsAfter almost three years of with the LiveEngage platform, Traeger’s Customer Service team now conducts an average of just over 2,000 live chat
conversations per month. While the company does not collect customer satisfaction data for the channel, Koster believes that live chat brings
the highest level of approval. “People love the ability to send a quick message via live chat, rather than dialing into a phone queue,”
Koster notes.
On the sales side, live chat volume stands at around 400 conversations per month, and the channel has contributed to an overall 20 percent
increase in average order value (AOV) for the company. Once customers purchase grills with the assistance of live chat, they tend to come back
to the channel. “The more customers we engage with through live chat, the more that come back to us just to get recipes or further information,”
Hansen explains. “They should go to the customer service department, but our link is the one they know. It is an illustration of how important
live chat is to increasing digital adoption.”
Exciting future plansThe sales team is making plans to begin using the content targeting features of the LiveEngage platform to extend special offers and other
marketing content to visitors based on their behavior. “We’re in the process of writing the targeting rules now and thinking about what
campaigns we might run,” Hansen reports. “It will be interesting to see whether a special offer that is good for a limited time might help people
make the final decision to buy.”
Another potential enhancement on the horizon is a mobile Click-to-Chat experience through the LiveEngage platform. “Our mobile traffic has
skyrocketed over the past year, so we are developing a more responsive design for our website,” Hansen explains. “And I’m in the process of
researching the best configuration for optimizing the LivePerson live chat to the mobile experience.”
Our Customer Success manager spent two days with the sales team when that contact center opened.
– Ray Hansen, Vice President, Online Marketing, Traeger Pellet Grills, LLC
6© 2014 LivePerson, Inc.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS Traeger Pellet Grills, LLC
Follow the conversation on Twitter: #LiveEngage
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, Amsterdam, and Melbourne.
Contact LivePerson, Inc. T: 212.991.1794
475 Tenth Ave F: 212.609.4233
5th Floor [email protected]
New York, NY 10018 www.liveperson.com
Words of adviceWhen asked what guidance he would give to his peers who are looking at deploying a digital engagement solution, Hansen does not hesitate.
“My biggest word of advice is to avoid biting off more than you can chew,” he relates. “We had so many things that we wanted to accomplish—
and still do—but we have learned to take one step at a time. A smaller team cannot do everything at once, so identify what is most important
and build from there.”
But for the loyal fans of Traeger Wood Pellet Grills, recent improvements in the customer experience are a welcome addition to the remarkable
product experience they have had all along. “The social media channels are great for connecting with customers, but I am convinced that they
would be incomplete without a real-time engagement channel like live chat from LivePerson,” Hansen concludes. “It is a critical part of how we
connect with customers.”
And with sales continuing to grow, you can be sure that Traeger customers will be swapping recipes for years to come.