Unlike other regions of the outdoor sporting world, skiers and snowboarders love to engage in friendly, constructive chats at Backcountry.com.

The online seller of high-end outdoor gear and apparel may not have healed the cultural rift between twin-plankers and knuckle-draggers, but its live chat capabilities have given its customer satisfaction and revenues a shot in the arm.

The Park City, Utah-based company installed a live on-line chat application from LivePerson Inc. in 2005. Today, 6 percent of the company's total revenues come from customers who have accepted invitations to engage in online chats with the 32 customer service reps the company calls "Gear Heads." Each gear head specializes in either snowboarding or skiing products and apparel, and chats are routed to them based on the site visitor's interest.

Eighty-seven percent of customers who chat with gear heads say they are satisfied with the experience; what's more, 85 percent of the same customer group reports that the chat helped them decide to make a purchase. Plus, the average purchase among the same group is near twice as much than the average purchase made by customers who did not engage in any form of online chat.

"If you use online chat correctly, it can transform most call centers from a cost center to a profit center," notes Sam Bruni, Backcountry.com director of customer experience. Bruni ought to know. The call center veteran learned valuable lessons from a negative experience with proactive chat technology at a previous company. His proactive chat approach includes the following tactics:

• Know Your Demographic: When Bruni first tested live chat at a previous company in 2001, the technology was immature and the company's average customer age (55) was a poor match for the application. Backcountry.com's demographic is broader and, more important, its customers tend to be fairly tech-savvy and open to the chat invitations.
• Customize Look and Feel: Part of that receptivity stems from the fact that Bruni and his team customized the look and feel of the LivePerson application. "Originally it looked a bit too much like a marketing pop-up and too many people clicked it off," Bruni recalls." After the design was pared down, acceptance rates doubled.
• Enhance Employee Experience: Bruni views employee experience as a crucial enabler of customer experience. The commitment to employee experience starts with hiring and extends to training, mobility and support. Gear heads are tethered to office-based "gear gurus" via instant message. The gear gurus can walk into the warehouse to inspect products and apparel and also facilitate responses to billing and payment questions.
  Detail Your Rules: Live chats pop up as options to visitors based on rules that Bruni and his team continually monitor, review and revise. "We create rules that essentially say, "We think this is a customer touch point, let's engage them in a live chat that they can accept or decline," he explains. "The rules can be created from a sales perspective or a service perspective… For example, we can say that we want to engage a customer who wants to use our returns guarantee. You can define these parameters in great detail."
• Monitor Volume: Backcountry.com gear heads conduct live chats with up to three customers at one time. "Some companies have their reps do up to five chats at once," Bruni notes, "but we feel that doing more than three at once starts to negatively affect customer experience."
Balance Your Measures: A metrics maven, Bruni can instantly call up the latest figures on average cart size, live chat acceptance, post-chat customer satisfaction and numerous other measures. However, he is extremely sensitive about which metrics he uses to manage his gear heads. "We do not have a policy about chat length," he emphasizes.
Doing so would likely motivate gear heads to wrap up their conversations sooner. And that, Bruni notes, might drag down much more important measures and qualities, like post-chat customer satisfaction, average shopping cart size and employee engagement.