Analyst Perspectives

Founded in 2000, LiveOps has evolved a unique two-sided business model. On one side is LiveOps Agents on Demand,  an Uber-like business in which home-based workers sign-up as LiveOps agents, and the company uses them to provide outsourced contact center services. This model enables LiveOps to provide flexible levels of service; customers can scale up and down as needed while the provider is able to manage agent numbers cost-effectively. The agents use the LiveOps Cloud Contact Center platform; in this way the company can test its system and use these agents’ experiences to improve the platform as used on the other side of the business. I have previously covered their focus on contact centers in LiveOps Improves the Agent Experience. LiveOps reports revenues growing on both sides and being able to expand its cloud contact center business globally.

The Cloud Contact Center platform provides interactions through voice, chat, email and social engagement and manages all these channels in the same way; it supports a single queue and routes all interactions according to the same rules. Companies thus handle interactions in a consistent way, swapping between channels if need be, which goes a long way toward ensuring that customers receive an omnichannel experience. LiveOps has designed the platform to require little support from IT. Being cloud-based it doesn’t require special on-site hardware, and the desktop removes the need for agents to use handsets. It is easy to configure, can be scaled to meet most companies’ needs, supports a distributed operation and is based on an open architecture that enables integration with other on-premises or cloud-based systems.

This emphasis is further strengthened by additional tools. One of the most important in my opinion is the LiveOps Engage agent desktop system. I have written recently about the importance of smart agent desktops in providing experiences that meet customers’ expectations. Such systems bring together information and technology that agents need – customer information, engagement history, access to other business systems such as CRM and access to multiple channels of engagement – but often is stored in separate systems. They enable the agent to focus on the customer and not the systems. LiveOps Engage has these capabilities and a few others. It allows agents to toggle between online, real-time channels such as voice to less urgent channels such as social interaction. Agents see when a customer has dropped from one channel but is available to continue the interaction on another. To support offline channels such as email, LiveOps provides templates of responses that allow the agent to plug in customer data and personalize a response depending on the context of the situation. Engage integrates with third-party CRM systems such as salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics for two-way transfers of data. The desktop is WebRTC-enabled so agents can control making and receiving phone calls from within the desktop. This combination of capabilities helps agents handle customer interactions efficiently while providing customers with the information and experiences they expect. In turn it helps companies meet key objectives and hold down costs while optimizing customer-related metrics such as customer satisfaction and net promoter score.

LiveOps Cloud Contact Center also provides support to help a company manage its contact center performance. LiveOps Recording goes beyond recording interactions for future analysis to capture agents’ use of their desktop, providing key information about the processes, systems and information agents use to handle interactions. This tool not only allows the company to review its agents’ performance but more crucially can identify best practices and offer advice on how to get agents to adopt them. LiveOps Insight supplements this analysis with broader analysis of contact center performance, with an emphasis on driving actions to improve.

In our benchmark research into the contact center in the  cloud, companies most often (73%) said that improving agent performance is the best way to improve handing of interactions, but from a technology perspective nearly two-thirds (63%) said that adopting cloud-based contact center systems is the way to move forward. LiveOps answers those intentions by providing both a platform in the cloud and interaction handling services using the platform. This dual approach has allowed it to move the platform forward and become one of the leading vendors of such systems. I recommend that companies looking to provide omnichannel customer experiences assess how LiveOps can support those efforts.

Regards,

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director