We’ve all heard the horror stories of someone trying to leave AOL and some of the other online services. Now Earthlink is trying to “make good” and put an emphasis on customer service. Earthlink has now gone with LivePerson to try to increase customer satisfaction.

Here’s some info from their press release today:
LivePerson, Inc. (NASDAQ:LPSN) , a provider of online conversion solutions, today announced that EarthLink (NASDAQ:ELNK) has launched the industry’s first proactive live chat capability developed exclusively for customer service on the company’s web site.

Powered by LivePerson’s Timpani(TM) platform, EarthLink can now identify and engage site visitors most likely to abandon self-help or call for assistance and proactively offer an immediate, live, text-based chat with a customer support expert. By proactively offering live chat assistance to customers, EarthLink increased agent productivity by 14 percent during the initial implementation and realized customer satisfaction levels seven percent higher than similar service channels.

Tangible Results
Initial results from EarthLink’s first eight weeks in production have shown significant benefits in operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and agent productivity:

— Overall weekly chat volume increased by 4,500 contacts while phone volume decreased by 10,000 calls. Nearly half of this decrease in phone volume was credited to customers engaging in live chat — a key indicator of success in EarthLink’s efforts to make live chat the “channel of choice” for online interactions.

— The LivePerson platform allows EarthLink’s customer support experts to handle up to three chat interactions at once compared to just one phone call.

— The LivePerson platform’s ability to proactively engage visitors during periods when customer-initiated contacts are lower allowed EarthLink to more effectively manage and utilize their customer support agents. EarthLink realized a 14 percent increase in agent productivity during the initial implementation period, allowing thecompany to interact with 40,000 more customers with the same number of agents.

EarthLink partnered with LivePerson to leverage the following features of the Timpani platform for this new solution:

— A sophisticated Business Rules Engine that identifies visitors most likely to call for assistance based on online behavior.

— A Predictive Dialer that assesses current agent capacity to determine if a visitor identified as a “hot lead” should receive a live chat invitation. This feature can be adjusted to accommodate agent capacity and maximum wait time, ensuring that visitors only receive invitations if a representative is available.

— A Routing Capability that automatically assigns an accepted chat invitee to the next available agent with appropriate skill sets.

— Reporting Capabilities that enable EarthLink to review the impact of the channel, while providing visibility to key metrics such as invitation rate, acceptance rate, customer satisfaction and first contact resolution rate.

— Operational and Transcript Reporting that allows EarthLink to conduct detailed analysis of operational metrics and review chat transcripts for ongoing program optimization.

— Full visibility to the visitor’s current web page and the ability to guide their experience through tools including co-browse, page-push and joint form-fill.

A LivePerson customer since 1999, EarthLink currently uses Timpani(TM) Sales and Marketing to manage an estimated 2 million online customer interactions per year.