Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

LiveOps Spearheading the Proactive Customer Service Movement

February 20, 2014

If you’ve been following the contact center space closely over the past few months, you’ve undoubtedly heard the name LiveOps mentioned.  The start of 2014 has certainly been eventful for the cloud contact center and customer service solutions provider, which recently announced that it had raised $30 million in funding to accelerate global expansion and acquired an innovative contact center software company.  ContactCenterSolutions recently caught up with Marty Beard, LiveOps’ chairman and CEO, to discuss these developments in more detail, and to take look ahead at company’s future.


 “In the span of two years, LiveOps has undergone a significant business transformation that has capitalized on our core agent services business while capturing significant market share in the cloud contact center market segment,” Beard explained in a recent statement.

Indeed, the company has seen an average revenue growth rate of 55-percent over this time period, which is three times the industry projection as defined by Gartner.  This is coupled with a 240-percent growth in bookings and a 112-percent growth in new customer acquisitions over the past year alone.

“We know that we’re quietly disrupting the contact center world by coming out with our cloud and multichannel product, and that’s bearing out in the numbers,” Beard told ContactCenterSolutions.


Image via Shutterstock

It comes as no surprise, then, that LiveOps successfully closed a $30 million round of debt funding from Comerica Bank – its largest round of financing to date.  This cash influx should be most apparent in the company’s sales and marketing efforts, as it looks to gain a deeper foothold in the space.   This is likely to come in the form of global expansion or a doubling-down on its sales force here in the U.S.

In any case, Beard pointed out that the company is extremely confident in its technology portfolio, no doubt in part due to its recent acquisition of Canada-based UserEvents, Inc. and its flagship product CxEngage. 

Beard explained that as customers and contact centers move toward and become accustomed to a multichannel environment, a new type of real-time, almost predictive, customer service paradigm is starting to emerge.  LiveOps thus integrated this projection into its technology roadmap, setting its sights on developing more proactive contact center solutions.

“Building and maintaining customer loyalty and retention is a huge concern for brands of all sizes,” said Jeff Thompson, president and CEO, UserEvents, in a statement. “Understanding your customers goes beyond awareness of interaction history and past preferences. We believe that brands must have visibility into present needs and act proactively and immediately on that information based on patterns of events.”

CXEngage is contextual routing engine that can aggregate and process events on any social, Web, mobile or voice channel in real time.  In other words, as opposed to traditional historical analysis where a system tracks and presents information regarding past interactions to an agent (which certainly leaves the customer feeling valued, understood, and satisfied), CxEngage proactively engages customers based on real-time activities across all channels.

For example, Beard described a scenario wherein a customer is surfing an e-commerce site, visiting a number of pages, stalling on some, adding a few items to their cart, and then abandoning it at the last minute.  CxEngage is able to analyze the customer’s behavior on the site and identify when he or she is getting frustrated, offering the option of live help at just the right moment, thus saving a sale.  Combined with historical analysis, this system can even select your preferred channel of communication to further enhance the interaction, offering up a Web chat window or a click-to-call button.

With CxEngage, business can provide prioritized treatment based on measurable customer behavior, removing the guessing game from customer engagement.  “Of course,” Beard pointed out, “one can only imagine the amount of data that needs to be crunched in real time to make such an assessment.”

It was UserEvents’ ability to efficiently analyze this active big data that first drew LiveOps’ attention.  The platform can crunch through a massive amount of data extremely fast – over 1,000 events per second – looking for patterns in behavior and connecting those patterns into actionable agent information. LiveOps recognized after meeting with the company that if it purchased this technology, it would put the company 18 months ahead on its roadmap. 

CxEngage is now being weaved into the LiveOps cloud platform (while also remaining a standalone product), giving the company even more firepower to make a dent in the contact center industry.

“We knew that we wanted to move the industry forward.  We very much see ourselves as the innovators in the contact center space,” Beard said. “We feel very good about our technology and very good about our roadmap, and coming off the acquisition, we have a lot to work with.”

The market is wide open, and LiveOps knows it isn’t the only one who notices.  So, we’ll likely being seeing the company make even more headlines in the near future as it tries to push farther into the market, spurring more innovation along the way.  




Edited by Alisen Downey



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