Wilsonhalligan Recruitment is a luxury yacht and superyacht recruitment agency, who work in providing candidates with a huge range of both on-shore and at-sea job opportunities. Renowned for their reputation for candidates of the highest quality, they needed a way to filter visitors coming to their site to provide them with the services they needed more quickly, as well as to increase the volume of converted leads. We sat down with Jessica Mountford, Marketing & Operations Manager at Wilsonhalligan, and Abbie Baisden, Customer Success Team Lead at Leadoo, to find out how Leadoo has helped them achieve this, and more.
Problems Identified 🔎
Jessica starts by explaining how Wilsonhalligan began their exploratory process, and what made them seek out a new solution in the first place:
“The first thing we realised was that we were spending a lot of time responding to messages and manually filtering our leads, which took up our time and slowed down our overall sales process,” explains Jessica, “We also knew that we had a large volume of customers coming through our site, and so we wanted to ensure we provided a much more consistent experience for every visitor. We knew we needed something to address these issues, and so we started searching for a platform that could meet our needs.”
“Previously, we had used Drift for conversational marketing, but we found that it wasn’t very user friendly and the customer support was poor. It wasn’t helping us to handle leads or save much time, as it took so much time to edit the solutions they provided,” Jessica explains.
“Then we found Leadoo. The onboarding team took a good look at what we needed and took time to get to know our company and clients really well so that the solutions presented were pretty much ready to implement right from the get go. Abbie, our CSM, then works with us on an ongoing basis to optimise our solutions – and they’ve only gotten better since then!”
When Leadoo and Wilsonhalligan sat down for the first time, they set out some objectives that Wilsonhalligan wanted to achieve through using the platform. We’ll take a look at those below:
Objectives 🎯
- To generate more recruitment client leads
“Before Leadoo, we received approximately 350 candidate registrations a month, but very few client leads. Each client lead we get is of high value to us, so we weren’t looking for huge increases in the number of these received – we wanted a steady flow of these month to month” explains Jessica.
- To be able to field FAQs automatically and better qualify candidates
“Answering repetitive questions, and taking time to filter through candidates manually, took up a lot of our time. We set out to reduce the time taken by our team to do this, so they could focus on more important parts of their roles – like filling vacancies for clients,” Jessica continues.
- To make it easier for clients and candidates to get in touch
“We realised that our previous offer to people wishing to get in touch wasn’t smooth or easy for customers or clients. We needed to provide an easier way for customers to contact us, as well as knowing what they need by using qualifying questions so we can get them to the right team, and quickly,” she explains.
- To gain an overview of which visitors and companies are visiting our site, and deeper insights into our website conversion
“Previously, we had very little knowledge of our visitors – for example, what percentage of visitors were clients, versus candidates, nor who those visitors were. We wanted to be able to understand our audience to allow us to make better informed marketing decisions,” Jessica finishes.
Solutions 💙
Once our team had been given the objectives, they set about creating a robust set of solutions to implement on the Wilsonhalligan site that will help them achieve those. Abbie, Wilsonhalligan’s dedicated CSM, discusses this in more detail:
“Wilsonhalligan’s site is quite big, meaning there were plenty of opportunities for conversion across the site. The first thing we implemented was a button bot – where potential candidates can download a CV template. We use this bot to collect email addresses of potential clients, allowing us to build data-base of quality candidates for Wilsonhalligan, in a format that works for them,” smiles Abbie, “The ButtonBot doubled the number of leads received, in a fairly simple action – we call this Call to Action Hijacking. It just means we take a button they already have, and turn it into a data capture opportunity.”
“We also added in a bottom right hand corner homepage chatbot. This helps navigate and qualify candidates before application – Wilsonhalligan really wanted to make sure candidate CVs were in the right format and that they contain the right information before they apply. It’s been pretty successful – so far, there’s been 250 visitors directed to registrations from the chatbot alone.” Abbie continues, “This makes it much easier to tell which visitors are candidates or clients and can forward these to the relevant teams, for example to the sales team if it’s a potential client partner.”
“We implemented a VisualBot on their contact us page, which allows for immediate qualification, registration, and contact collection. If a candidate wants to register, they get directed from the bot, straight to the registration page. In the first month, we saw 65 leads that were directed there from the contact VisualBot.”
“On their Recruitment page, we installed a contact bot in the form of a VisualBot, and a chatbot. We used different Calls to Action than on the normal Contact Us page, and used similar conversation pathways but designed them to be tailored to different candidates. We noted that the visitors coming in via the Chatbot tended to have an issue they needed resolving, or a query they needed answering. Those who contacted via the VisualBot were normally more committed, and therefore further down the conversion funnel – a warmer lead. We made sure that they look different, so they don’t distract from one another.”
“The last two we implemented were Inpagebots – designed to look seamless, and part of the content – for their Shoreside Jobs & Private Households, and their FAQs page. For the Shoreside and Private page, the jobs advertised here are very specific roles with specific application requirements and so we needed to be able to deeply qualify candidates. For the FAQs page, we created a bot that asked if the visitor found what they were looking for within the FAQs, and if not, then they could submit questions for response. This works really well as it’s a quick and easy conversion to gain,” Abbie finishes.
Results 📈
Wilsonhalligan’s results were immediately impressive:
- They doubled the number of converted leads received from month 1 to month 3
- They then doubled the converted leads again from month 3 to month 6.
- Increased the overall candidate leads in 6 months by 418%.
- Tripled the number of client leads received in the same time frame
“One thing that really stood out from our results is how many client leads we’re now getting. Previously, it was difficult to see how many leads were clients vs candidates because sorting had to be done manually. Now, the bots do the legwork and qualify each visitor, creates a personalised conversation with them based on who they are, and then collects their details so our team can get in touch with them,” Jessica begins, “And the leads coming through are of a much higher quality, as they’ve already had their questions answered and been qualified by the bots, making our job much easier.”
Abbie weighs in on the results:
“Not only have they seen an incredible 418% increase in candidate leads, but they have tripled the number of client leads they received, which for them is fantastic as client leads to Wilsonhalligan are generally very valuable indeed.”
Anything else you’d like to share?
“I have nothing but love for Leadoo – I hate robots, but if you can convince me, then it must be doing a good job. This has to be down to the depth of the platform, the sheer level of detail that you can go into, the fact that it can be totally branded, and of course the incredible support provided by their in-house experts. The copy, tone, and bot itself is always on point when handed over initially and then especially so once Abbie has optimised them,” Jessica smiles.
“I love the fact that we receive monthly reports, as this is great for the times when we’re super busy and don’t get the chance to delve into the analytics. Between the reports and the optimisation meetings, we’re always kept in the loop on conversions across our site.”
“The Leadoo team makes such a difference to our experience, it’s like a network of friends and makes the service incomparable to any other platform out there,” Jessica finishes, as she rushes off to help her team find clients and get candidates their dream sea-based roles.
You can follow Wilsonhalligan on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep up with their Leadoo journey.
