EBizInsider

We have essentially outsourced several important divisions of our little company to Solid Cactus.
In turning over customer service, call center services and PPC marketing, our little company
now looks very big.

—Paul Roth, StyloFinePens.com

StyloFinePens.com is an example of how passion leads to ambition. After working with pens for years as a manager of a local pen shop, Paul Roth finally decided to take his passion to the next level and founded Stylo Fine Pens in 2006 making him owner and CEO of his own specialty writing instruments store. Seeing the obvious, nine months after opening the San Francisco-based store, StyloFinePens.com was finished. “The online component of the business really helped things sky rocket,” Roth admits. “Now we’re not dependent on any specific location.”

That expansion came with its own problems. Stylo Fine Pens, as the name suggests, sells a limited range of generally high-end writing instruments. When the calls started coming in from the website, Paul realized he was losing out. “Every time the phone would ring, there would be a customer in front of us…the calls were just dropping. Every time we would serve someone in the store we would also get this kind of a pang that we were losing a sale.” Call Center Services were an obvious option for StyloFinePens.com.

“Call Center completely changed our business and without a doubt was the very best business decision we’ve made,” says Paul. “Now if the phone rings more than three times, we hear it drop-off and we know it drops to a friendly place.” Adding Call Center Services was the first move in a triple play which Paul Roth says completely changed his business.

The second move was adding live chat. Solid Cactus partnered with LivePerson offering Managed Live Chat to Call Center clients. With Managed Live Chat, online visitors simply click an icon and a chat window appears with an agent waiting on the other end to answer any questions the customer may have.

Paul was part of the process from the beginning. Solid Cactus Managed Live Chat subscribers are encouraged to take part in the training of agents in order to ensure customers receive appropriate treatment and accurate information. Clients fill out an in-depth questionnaire depicting how they want their customers to be handled, as well as providing information on products they carry. In addition, clients are asked for text and copy that relate to products, and culture specifications for the brands they sell.

Live Chat agents find pride in selling specialty products such as Stylo’s pens. “I wondered myself, ‘how intricate could it be?’” Paul says. “But it is. People want to know why they should buy a $600 pen when they can buy one for $30. The staff really caught on to that.”

Ironically, the final move piece in the transformation of StyloFinePens.com occurred to Paul Roth while reading an issue of eBiz (we’re so proud!). “I struggled with PPC advertising like everyone else,” he recalls. “Then I read about a guy who’d turned his business over to Solid Cactus and let them handle his search engine marketing.” I decided they probably knew considerably more about pay-per-click than I did, so I let them handle it.”

This is where eBiz Insider and our parent Solid Cactus look really good. “Three big things happened,” says Paul. “First, our calls decreased. Second, our clicks decreased. Third and most important though, our sales stayed the same! That means we were able to cut our pay-per-click spending by two thirds. That’s huge!”

Bottom line, Paul Roth will be the first to tell you that Stylo Fine Pens is a 1400 square foot dot in San Francisco. “But we have a sophisticated website,” Paul says. “When customers call we have call center and we answer e-mail inquiries with live chat. We are professional from top to bottom. No one can tell how big—or small–we really are.”

Solid Cactus, Inc. has designed or redesigned more than 3,000 e-commerce sites. Solid Cactus is an Inc. 500 company and was named one of the "Best Places to Work in Pennsylvania" in 2006 and 2007.

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