HOW THALES DRIVES 61X ROI
WITH DRIFT

The Challenge

Thales’ cloud and data security division wanted a conversational solution to ensure all website visitors were supported. “We wanted to give our website visitors and anybody that’s engaging with us digitally another way of connecting with us in a meaningful way,” said Andrew Gertz, Thales’ Senior Manager of Web and Digital Marketing. “At the same time, we wanted to make sure that we could qualify those that were talking to us and make sure that we understood their needs so that we could get them to the right person.”

But this wasn’t Thales’ first foray into chat solutions.

The team was well-versed with live chat (via Olark) but knew they needed a scalable solution that provided better analytics, personalization, superior routing, and a seamless fit with their strategy.

The Thales team has a robust strategy when it comes to their Drift deployment. They have chat playbooks tailored to product, use case, industry, and landing pages, and a way to skip the form on their Contact Us page. For users who want to speak directly with a human, Thales has a team of SDRs standing by across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC who have chats within their region routed to them. And with SDRs ready to engage leads more quickly than traditional form fills, Andrew sees this as a way to get a leg up on the competition and keep Thales front and center for prospective customers.

DIGITALLY TRANSFORMING THE BUYER EXPERIENCE

With a solution like Drift, Andrew’s team can meet buyers precisely where they are on their journey — whether it’s aiding buyers in the information-gathering stage or converting highly-engaged leads into opportunities.

“Because of how we use the platform across our lines on the website, one of the things that we see is that they’re highly engaged leads,” Andrew explained. “They want to jump right into asking qualifying questions about the technology.” But for leads that perhaps aren’t ready for a demo, the team can help educate them and provide a forum for gathering information.

For Andrew, this has transformed the buyer experience.

“In terms of our digital transformation, Drift is a huge piece of that,” he said. “Now we have a better way of letting people dictate the way that they want to talk to us and we’re available for them when they’re ready for us. And I think that’s key for us for where we want to go digitally.”

DEVELOPING BUYER INSIGHTS

In addition to supporting Thales’ buyer journey, Drift also gives the Thales team insight into what’s top-of-mind for website visitors and how their website can support that timely, important information. “I will audit the conversation logs within Drift and we’ll see that people are showing an interest in a certain feature,” Andrew explained. “And what that allows me to do is then bring that back in and talk with our product marketing folks about ideas that we might have for how to improve the page on the website. It might be even designing a new playbook to a specific feature set,” he said.

The very same insights are helping Thales deflect traffic away from their support team and provide a better level of service to customers. “What we’ve been able to do is identify support use cases and then develop smaller self-service Drift playbooks internally,” Andrew said. “We can address that right there within the chat rather than the person needing to open up a support ticket.”

With results like these, it’s no wonder Andrew is feeling great about Drift as a solution for him. “It’s not just manning chat for the sake of manning chat. It’s business impact on our website.”