Lineperson (LPSN) is a small software-as-a-service (Seas) company providing a unique product to web merchants. In ecommerce, a surprisingly high proportion of customers who spent time putting multiple products into their shopping carts end up abandoning the transaction, sometimes because they could not find the answer to the one last nagging question they had before they commit to the purchase. Lineperson does one thing only, and does it well. Its Timpani software identifies potential leads, initiates a live chat with outsourced agents for screening, and then seamlessly transfers converted customers to in-house sales agent. A record of the entire conversation is kept, and the system integrates with existing CRM software, allowing the new customer's info to be fed directly into major CRM software. Lineperson has two versions of the same basic software, Timpani for large corporate customers, for more detail visit www.create-own-ebook.com and Lineperson Pro for small and medium businesses (Sibs). Lineperson claims that as much as 20-40% of customers identified by its software end up completing the transaction, and that the ROI on its product is spectacular. The pricing structure is a monthly fee, plus a fee per interaction. There are also professional fees for the initial implementation, as well as training, business consulting and analysis.



Lineperson is the largest player in this field, with over 6000 clients (none making up more than 10% of revenues), including Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Apple and Venison. Over the years, Lineperson has aggressively acquired its competitors, and the only competitor of note left appears to be Instant Service (with some 300 clients). Note that I do not consider CRM companies like SAP, Oracle and Right Now Technologies to be competitors, since none of the major CRM companies offer a comparable product.

The drawback of this business model is that live chat is labor-intensive, and only large corporations can afford to staff a sales department specifically to cater to web transactions. Accordingly, Lineperson reports that the fastest growth in revenue is occurring with large corporations. Unfortunately for Lineperson, such clients have more stringent data encryption and business analysis needs, and while professional fees from them are higher, some of that is eaten up as labor costs required to service these clients. Take-up rate among Sibs is much lower. Perhaps in part to solve this problem, Lineperson acquired Casaba in 2007. Casaba is an Israel-based website that facilitates live online interactions between its large stable of experts and users. Users who require information that other websites such as WikiPedia cannot provide can turn to the 30 000 experts on Casaba, for more detail visit www.eazy-ebook-money.com and pay a low fee (from 17 cents to $20 per minute) to get individualized answers via chat. Casaba takes a 30% cut of the fee. A major stream of revenue appears to be derived from online psychic readings, which have led to some complaints about the quality of the experts on Casaba. However, I think that the true value of Casaba to Lineperson is that its ?experts? who earn cash working part-time on the web could one day become part-time sales personnel for Sibs which cannot afford to shell out for their own sales staff.