Mr. LoCascio: The company was started about 15 years ago, but we launched our customer service solution in early 1999. What we do now is provide a platform that enables companies to chat with their customers in real time in a sales or support environment. So if you visit, let's say, Home Depot's Web site, you're looking at a product and you need a question answered, you can click, chat and speak to a customer service rep. We provide the technology and the company provides the people behind the chat.
TWST: Explain your different product and service offerings.
Mr. LoCascio: There are three basic products. One product is for customer service and support. Once a customer is a customer and you want to support them, we have a product that offers chat, e-mail management, a self-service knowledge base and voice. Our service solutions allow companies to reduce issue-handling costs, as well as have a full view of the customer and how they interact. So that was our original product. About four years ago, we launched a product for online sales, enabling marketers, who are running Web sites, driving traffic and converting that traffic, to analyze visitor traffic in real time and then proactively invite a visitor to chat to convert the sale. So if we see someone in the shopping cart and they are showing signs they may leave the shopping cart, our system detects such behavior and proactively sends a chat invitation - the conversion rate is about 25% of chatters to buyers. Big companies, like Bank of America, The Home Depot and Verizon, are all using this product today. Our third product, which we acquired two years ago, is a way for independent experts - people who are very small businesses with expertise in something - to feature their expertise online and chat with consumers who want advice. Categories range from homework help to medical or legal advice. Consumers have access to a community of 30,000 experts and pay by the minute through our chat service at the liveperson.com Web site.
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