Live customer engagement technology allows consumers to chat live with brand representatives on e-commerce websites, but outdoor gear supplier Backcountry Inc. has taken the concept a step further by turning their reps into a different kind of sales force—“Gearheads,” outdoor specialists who consumers are excited to engage with and learn from.
Backcountry ceo Jill Layfield recognized that one-to-one human connections online between her company’s agents and customers was key, so she and her team decided to focus on Backcountry 
reps’ specialties and turned them into expert Gearheads—mini-celebrities on the site who specialize in areas such as skiing, rock climbing, hiking and camping.
Customers can learn more about the rep they engage with before clicking to chat with them via detailed profiles on the site. People with questions about ski equipment are paired with a ski expert, while climbers chat with rock climbing specialists. Having these experts on the other end of the line is helping Backcountry with conversions.
“Our Gearheads are living the dream that our customers want to live, and we really focus on amplifying their expertise and knowledge. We see that as customers interact with our Gearheads, the purchase rate is 45 percent higher than self-serve,” Layfield said at LivePerson’s Aspire event in Brooklyn last week.
When customers visit the Backcountry.com site, the brand actively tries to create connections with them early in the experience, and customers have been responding.
“It’s unnatural to expect that our customers wouldn’t want to interact with an expert. The natural behavior in our industry is to ask people for advice about gear and how to use it,” Layfield says. The amplification of the representatives’ personalities includes the ability to follow the Gearheads updates via a widget on the site. These expert Gearheads are incentivized and compensated in correspondence with the business they generate and the followers they build up.
Backcountry began leveraging LivePerson’s platform to power its live chat earlier this year, and the ability to host chats on mobile devices was a big draw for the solution.
“The mobile chat really fits with the idea that our Gearheads are available to chat with customers at any time. It’s cool to share the idea of Gearheads in your pocket and connect mobile with this idea of our service,” Layfield says.
The ability to customize the chat window allows Backcountry to share the agent’s real identity with the consumer (as most agent/consumer exchanges are anonymous), and show the Gearheads’ profile in the chat box.
“The tools are there for us, and we’re just now catching up to what these tools can do to help us realize our vision,” Layfield says.
Looking forward, Layfield and her team are excited to dig into results as the data on the program becomes more concrete.
“We are very data-driven and we want to prove it out with data. I think we will learn some things that we didn’t anticipate and our customers will behave in ways that will guide our strategy. I think a year from now we’ll have a lot more information and a lot more of our reps in the expert Gearhead program and it will be a more meaningful pillar of what we stand for at Backcountry,” Layfield says.
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