Digital River Improves Sales and Reduces Costs with Linktivity's WebDemo Online Conferencing and Collaboration Software

The Situation:

Digital River, a leading global e-commerce outsource provider, supplies small to mid-sized business and large enterprises with complete e-commerce systems and services. Founded in 1994, the Minneapolis-based company delivers strategy, e-commerce site development and hosting, order and transaction management, system integration, product fulfillment and returns, e-marketing and customer service to more than 32,000 companies. Digital River's client base includes industry-leading companies such Motorola, Fujitsu, 3M, Siemens, Major League Baseball, Symantec and Novell.

Central to Digital River's success in growing its business has been the company's ability to demonstrate the ease-of-use and deep level of functionality of its e-commerce system. Because of the large number of extensive product demonstrations that Digital River regularly performs for prospective and existing clients, it's important that the company uses a cost-effective and efficient process. To accomplish this, Digital River decided to explore new ways to demonstrate its products that would help maximize sales opportunities while minimizing travel expenses.

To meet its goals, Digital River set out on a search for an online solution that would enable inexpensive yet comprehensive interactive demonstrations of its e-commerce capabilities. "Since all of our technology is client-facing, we needed a way to show prospective clients how our product worked and then to let them try it themselves," says Brant Pallazza, vice president of direct marketing for Digital River. "That required a solution with a remote-control function that would allow our salespeople to transfer control of the personal computer back and forth between themselves and prospects."

In addition, Digital River was looking for a solution that would let its sales force control the pace of a presentation. For example, if a presenter simply forwards a Power Point presentation and reviews it over the phone, the audience may be on slide 10 when the presenter is still explaining slide 2. The remote-control function allows the presenter to better manage the audience and keep its attention throughout the presentation.

The Solution:

Before making a final decision, Digital River reviewed a number of competitive applications and was concerned about high cost being driven by pricing structure and functionality. "Some products were simply too expensive to deploy on a large scale and, for us, became cost-prohibitive," explains Pallazza.

In its search for a solution, Digital River turned to one of it's existing clients, Converging, which uses Digital River to manage and support its own e-commerce initiatives. When a Converging customer purchases the company's Linktivity WebDemo or WebInteractive software online, Digital River provides the back-end e-commerce functionality for that transaction. After reviewing the features of Linktivity's Web-conferencing software, Digital River decided to purchase WebDemo. For a one-time fee, WebDemo was installed easily on Digital River's server, enabling the company to begin conducting product demonstrations in real-time over the Internet.

"With Linktivity, we were able to purchase the WebDemo product outright, install it on our server and enjoy unlimited use," Pallazza says. "WebDemo is a natural fit for us since our strategy involves giving as many presentations and demonstrations online as possible."

By implementing WebInteractive, ATX technicians have had significantly less situations that stump them to the point where they can't go further to help the customer. This has saved a tremendous amount of time and frustration for their staff as well as for their customers.

The Results:

Digital River started using Web Demo in October 2001 and the results were immediate. The company's ability to deliver top-quality remote presentations has improved its sales cycle and significantly reduced costs. When the average plane ticket alone can be as much as $500, Digital River estimates that WebDemo paid for itself within the first thirty days of use. WebDemo will never replace the need to visit a new prospect or be on site to close a sale, but it certainly contributed to reducing the expenses associated with interim sales calls.

Digital River has already begun to expand the use of WebDemo throughout the company, including use by its call-center personnel and account management teams.

"We envision a broad range of applications for Linktivity within our organization," says Pallazza.

About Linktivity
Linktivity, a 20 year-old Tucson, Arizona-based division of Converging Technologies Inc., provides server-based communications and control products that enable person-to-person interactions through a browser window. Linktivity products include WebDemo, a Web-based, real-time conferencing and collaboration software tool, and WebInteractive, a real-time software tool that gives support professionals an efficient way to manage and resolve online support requirements for personal computers. For more information, please visit www.linktivity.com.