How Employment Hero Raises the Bar on Customer Experiences With Drift
About Employment Hero
Employment Hero, a fast-growing startup headquartered in Sydney, Australia, empowers over 80,000 businesses across the world with a suite of powerful employment tools. The company helps businesses manage HR, payroll, performance, learning, recognition, and benefits easily with an integrated platform.
The Challenge
From the beginning, the team at Employment Hero knew that they wanted to provide an exceptional customer experience — and that meant engaging buyers on their terms.
The team employs digital marketing tactics to bring prospects onto the website, including thought leadership content; webinars; resources and tools for HR managers and business owners; and search and social advertising. Once prospects are on the website, they want to give them various ways to interact with the sales team — which is where Drift comes in.
Scott Wilson, CRM Manager at Employment Hero, explains: “When your customers are there and they’re trying to engage with you, you want to make sure that you are 100% aware of where they are, what they’re doing, what buying stage they’re in, and have the opportunity to engage with a customer in the channel and the capacity that they want to be engaged with.”
Scott Wilson
The Solution
Real-Time Sales Engagement
The Employment Hero team relies on Drift to alert reps in real time that their buyers are live on the website. This enables them to start a conversation at exactly the right time and capitalize on the buyer’s intent.
“We have Marketo for our email nurture and website tracking and Drift forms another part of that piece — which is being able to alert sales readily when customers are engaging on the site, tracking and monitoring their behavior on the site, and then providing that channel to communicate and make the sales cycle more efficient and bring people through the funnel as quickly as possible,” Scott said.
With Drift, the team can also personalize their messages based on the buyer’s behavior on the website or connect with them in other ways if they’re not available to chat right away.
Scott Wilson
A Unique Bot for Every Visitor
But let’s be clear; it’s a far from one-size-fits-all approach. With dozens of different Drift playbooks, Scott can target just about any website visitor with a unique message.
“With Drift, we have somewhere between 40 to 50 different playbooks running across the different parts of our site. Being a software platform, there’s a lot of existing customers and business who come back to the website looking for information about the product, tools and templates, and how they can get the most out of their subscription, so we need to provide a multifaceted Drift bot for the different roles that are actually coming back to the website.”
Scott explained that the team has a range of playbooks, from customer-centric bots that drive customers to support resources or account managers to buyer-oriented bots that support their demand generation efforts. For example, “if somebody’s on a specific solutions page, we’ll target them with a specific bot that runs through a few different key facts about that solution, a few features and benefits, and then tries to drive that interaction into either booking a meeting or talking to a sales rep directly,” he shares.
No matter the scenario, the goal of each playbook is to make it easier for website visitors to find additional information or get in contact with the team. And the best part is that Employment Hero can adjust the messaging based on the person’s interests and how they have interacted with the bot to create a truly unique experience every time.
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A Flexible Strategy That Adapts to Business Needs
The team isn’t just shooting in the dark and hoping they hit something — a data-oriented approach is key to building an ROI-generating Drift machine. Scott explained that they review Google Analytics regularly to see which pages customers are visiting and then ensure they have bot coverage on those pages.
And the team is always looking for opportunities to add new bots, too, especially as the content team develops new resources. “We use Drift landing pages to host that content and give people an opportunity to interact with the chatbot and ask questions based on what they’re reading,” Scott shared.
“It’s remarkable how quickly that engagement can go from interacting with a bot to, ‘Oh, I do actually want more information about this,’” Scott said. “Then it’s automatically an opportunity for sales to engage with that person and kick off a conversation.”
Scott Wilson
The Results
With Drift in their arsenal, Employment Hero has been able to create an incredible buyer experience that results in higher metrics and better results for their sales and marketing teams. “Having another avenue for people to be able to interact with us, get more information, and potentially book a meeting — it’s certainly seen our volume of meetings booked and contact requests go through the roof,” Scott said.
And Employment Hero has the metrics to prove it:
Enabling a Better Buyer Experience and Shorter Sales Cycle
Having the information or resources buyers need at their fingertips doesn’t just mean that the sales team enjoys a shorter sales cycle — it means that buyers have a better experience.
“In terms of shortening the sales cycle for us, it’s fantastic,” Scott explained. “But for the [buyer], they can find exactly what they need without having to navigate around the website for 20 minutes to find out whether or not we support a particular piece of software that they’re using. Previously, if they submitted a request, they might get an SLA follow up within seven days. Now they can actually interact with somebody straight away on the website.”
And this improved website experience doesn’t just apply to prospects, but customers, as well. Instead of waiting a few days, customers can now get the help they need in a matter of minutes. That’s because Drift helps Employment Hero improve their customer service efficiency while delivering meaningful experiences. The team can quickly serve up support articles to answer simple questions or send customers to a support team member for more challenging issues. Either way, customers are able to get back to work right away.
Scott Wilson
Unlocking Key Website and Behavioral Insights
Not only does the Drift bot help improve the customer experience by providing a simplified, quicker avenue for engagement, but key insights from Drift data enabled Employment Hero to reapproach their website configuration.
“We completely redesigned our website in July of last year and Drift absolutely had an impact on understanding which pages were confusing for customers. Where we’d see a lot of traffic come through on the bot with people asking questions enabled us to redesign the website, reposition how our pricing models worked, and simplify that so people really had a better idea of what was inclusive and what was not inclusive of pricing,” Scott explained.
And while these updates weren’t chat related, they definitely impacted the team’s conversations. With clearer messaging, buyers feel more empowered in their buying decisions instead of reaching out before they’re ready to get basic information.
Scott Wilson
Arming Sales With the Data They Need
Beyond marketing, Drift data supports the sales team’s approach to prospecting and engaging as well. Employment Hero is able to use Drift to see who is engaging with their website, what they’re engaging with, and how often they’re visiting the website. All of these insights give the sales team a better idea of not only only who to approach, but how to start the conversation.
And the integration between Drift and additional tools in Employment Hero’s tech stack like Marketo and Salesforce means that reps can get a clear end-to-end picture of the engagement cycle. “Providing that end-to-end picture of how effective Drift is as a chatbot in those other platforms is super beneficial,” Scott said.
Delivering a Differentiated Experience
Part of creating an accelerated buyer experience is creating a differentiated one, and with Drift Video, the team does just that.
Drift Video gives the Employment Hero sales team the ability to send personalized greetings and see when prospects engage with their video. It also gives them an opportunity to continue the conversation right in a chat window, so the sales rep doesn’t miss a beat. “It’s a lot more personalized, it’s a lot more one-to-one, and we’ve seen a lot higher engagement and conversion rates through using that tool,” Scott said.
