LivePerson Acquires Kasamba
Kasamba’s 30,000 Experts Now Available on LivePerson.com
In October of 2007, LivePerson acquired Kasamba, a company offering sessions with a wide range of online experts via live chat. LivePerson’s goal for the acquisition is to enable any person who has a question to find an online expert who can answer it, live and in real time. To promote that goal, Kasamba’s 30,000 experts are now available on LivePerson’s homepage www.liveperson.com.
Since the acquisition, the two companies have been working hard to blend the two platforms into a single online destination for people seeking help. And they’ve been adding new features that help the experts extend their reach. For instance, experts can add a widget that launches the Expert Messenger software and begin taking chats right from their own blog or website.
LivePerson is also in the midst of a major recruitment effort to build out their expert community.
Kasamba’s Expert Community Combines with LivePerson’s
How does one define experts? Who are LivePerson’s experts? Traditionally, the experts are employees of LivePerson’s business customers who use chat to answer questions about their employer’s product line, and resolve customer service issues.
With their new expert community, the definition of expert expands to include people who don’t work for the company but have substantial experience and knowledge about a company’s products or services. For instance, experts can be Microsoft Partners who offer advanced customer service to power users of Microsoft Project. Without a doubt, certified Microsoft Partners have substantial practical knowledge, and wouldn’t mind earning money by sharing it with others.
One of LivePerson’s goals with its expert community is to allow its business customers to leverage their known experts to provide advanced support to their customers. All these companies need to do is invite the experts to join LivePerson (i.e. register to become an expert and take advantage of the suite of tools available through the Expert Messenger). Then, the company can place the expert’s profile on their site in strategic locations, such as their “Contact Us” page.
Naturally, the experts themselves will be more than pleased to earn extra income for providing one-on-one personalized support. LivePerson provides the experts with tools to market themselves, and handles all the business arrangements (including collecting the fees from customers prior to the start of a chat).
LivePerson is aggressively seeking experts from all walks of life, including medical experts, professional decorators, accountants and more. Essentially any person who has considerable expertise in a topic is free to join LivePerson and hang their shingle on the Web. Of course, the expert will need to withstand the vigor of consumer ratings and reviews (any customer who hires an expert is encouraged to rate him or her, and is free to leave their impressions for all to see).