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Contact Center Solutions Analysis Featured Article
January 20, 2009
Q&A With LiveOps' President Wes Hayden
By Brendan B. Read, Senior Contributing EditorLiveOps is a leading supplier of hosted on-demand contact center applications and home-based teleservices through its network of over 20,000 independent agents. It also offers agent management best practices tools, including agent selection and onboarding, learning and certification, scheduling, and workforce management, proven through its experience applying them.
Wes Hayden (News - Alert) is President of LiveOps. He has extensive contact center experience having been President and CEO of Genesys Telecommunications Labs and as president of the Enterprise Division at Nuance (News - Alert) Communications. We recently posed to him several questions covering hosted contact center technologies, home agents, and where LiveOps is going.
What trends is LiveOps (News - Alert) seeing in the hosted applications and in the home agent marketplaces and what are their drivers? Are you for example seeing clients bring their contact center programs from offshore to home agents? Please discus
I see three interesting trends in the contact center market as we head into 2009:
In the hosted application arena, enterprises are seriously evaluating Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms to address some or all of their contact center infrastructure requirements. Until recently, the best these companies could hope for was to minimize their IT costs by finding a service provider who would offer a managed service for their contact center operations. Today, LiveOps delivers a true, mission-critical SaaS contact center platform, enabling our customers to reap the added benefits of “baked-in” security, reliability approaching five 9’s uptime. In addition, we offer a pay-per-use model that matches their utilization needs. Customers tell us that they no longer have to worry about capacity contingency planning, technology upgrades or scheduling maintenance windows.
2. Leveraging a Remote Agent Model for the Contact Center
Many customers are exploring the possibility of sending some (or all) of their existing contact center agents home. This trend is driven by the desire to reduce the capital expenditures (CAPEX) associated with operating a brick and mortar contact center and retention of top talent through better accommodation of their employee’s needs. So far, efforts to implement home or remote (think branch offices) agents have been limited in scope, primarily due to concerns about management control and a lack of proper reporting capabilities as well as general reluctance to change the call center paradigm that has been in place for many years now.
Some business segments have already become early adopters of the remote agent model because of improved visibility and control over the agents’ success. For example, marketing companies that sell their products through TV ads and infomercials operate on very tight margins and the flexibility, costs benefits and utilization rates that this business model provides has led to acceptance of home agents. We expect to see the same thing occur in other market segments as financial pressure, particularly on CAPEX increases.
3. “Geo-flexible” Sourcing
Enterprises are beginning to realize that the risks associated with offshoring call centers are often greater than the benefits. The fundamental problem with offshoring contact center agents is companies are initially solving for cost but in the end many of them compromise quality to the detriment of their brand and customer relationship – devaluing two of the most important assets. Customers generally cite fewer positive experiences with offshore customer service agents and some have even learned to “game” the call center process by immediately “zeroing out” of IVR menus or abandoning calls when they get an agent with a strong accent—redialing as many as 5-10 times in an effort to be connected to an on-shore call center or at least reaching someone whom they can better understand.
Enterprises are beginning to recognize that many of these offshore call centers don’t truly lower their cost in the long run. As a result, many are looking for geographic flexibility to match resources and costs and align them with the complexity and value of their customer interactions. When a contact center agent can be deployed simply with a high speed Internet connection, a PC and a telephone, you minimize the geographic restrictions of cost-effectively sourcing high quality agents.
What are the key challenges with hosted platforms and home agents, where are firms at in managing them, and how can these be overcome?
I believe SaaS and the home agent model will have a transformational effect on the contact center market. However, today, there are preconceived notions about the limitations and challenges of both that need to be addressed.
First, there is a perception that hosted platforms both traditional hosting and multi-tenant SaaS solutions are less secure, lack the breadth of reporting tools and scalability of on-premise solutions. Speaking for the SaaS players, demonstrating the robust and feature-rich nature of the platforms is key. At LiveOps, we eat our own dog food. LiveOps leverages our On-Demand Call Center Platform to operate our own large virtual call center, comprised of 20,000 independent home-based agents. We understand first-hand how important it is for this platform to handle mission-critical operations, and have built a world-class platform that can scale to meet enterprise workload demands. We have taken an architectural approach that allows the system to scale and has the highest availability in the industry. Also, LiveOps has validated compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), meeting the highest requirements achievable by a service provider for securing its customer account data.
Second, the home agent paradigm presents challenges for many companies used to a management style designed for physical office environments. It requires new processes for agent training and certification, reporting and real-time performance monitoring. While the benefits of home agents (e.g., better service, lower attrition and cost savings) are understood, for many companies it is unclear what offerings are optimized for this model and how to actually deploy and manage home agents.
In the case of LiveOps On-Demand Call Center Platform, our enterprise customers can take advantage of a tightly integrated, end-to-end solution for agent training, management, reporting and real-time performance monitoring. Furthermore, it is Web-based so there is no agent software or hardware that must be maintained and changes to routing and other key functions can be administered by the call center manager instead of issuing an IT change request.
When it comes to helping companies deploy a home-based agent model, LiveOps has a unique advantage over the competition – we operate one of the largest virtual call centers and, as a result, have developed best practices for deployment of this model which we are eager to share with customers.
One of the inhibiting factors on home agents is the lack of managerial control. Discuss. How can home agent programs be set up to remove this obstacle, or is it one that you see fading over time?
Fundamentally, companies need to adjust their thinking—shift from control-based environments to incentive-based environments. Historically, this has been tough to do because the tools to measure and monitor didn’t really exist in the contact center. Real-time reporting tools, agent collaboration applications and the right supervisory dashboards can facilitate the change.
The shift from hierarchical control to a results-oriented meritocracy among a community of home agents is a revolutionary concept for the contact center that I believe will have major impact on overall business and agent performance. In fact, LiveOps Virtual Call Center, comprised of a community of independent home-based agents, outperforms other contact center outsourcers by as much as 30 percent more revenue per campaign.
For LiveOps customers, managerial control of an on-demand contact center platform extends beyond real-time agent performance visibility and includes platform accessibility. Changes to routing and other key functions can be administered by the call center manager from their desktop accessing our Web-based platform so they can react quickly to shifts in call volume.
Hosted platforms have long been seen as SMB only, not for enterprises. Is this your observation, or do you think hosted is ready for prime time? Discuss.
True, the SMB market embraced hosted solutions early because these companies did not have the scalability challenges of large enterprises. Also, hosted solutions offered them access to business tools such as sales force automation and CRM that larger competitors could invest in on-premise customized software implementations.
It wasn’t until recently that solution providers have focused on building on-demand infrastructures designed from the ground up for enterprise environments. As an example, LiveOps focused on building enterprise-class security, unparalleled scalability and high-availability in our on-demand platform because those things were required for our agent business. In a sense, providing a virtual pool of home agents challenged us with requirements which were more stringent that those of many enterprises today. That has brought us to the point today, where I believe our On-Demand Contact Center Platform is absolutely ready for primetime in the enterprise market. However, I also recognize the conservative nature of people operating contact centers today. Early adopters are very excited about what SaaS players like us bring to the table, but to capture the broader market, we will have to focus on improving integration with existing customer infrastructure and build proof of five 9’s reliability. The good news is that these developments are on the horizon and should accelerate adoption in our current financial climate.
What direction has LiveOps been going in? What is your unique value proposition and market niche? Will there be any changes in this with the new executive team and if so, what are they and why?
With increasing interest in the home agent model, LiveOps is well positioned to enable companies to make the transition. As I mentioned, we not only offer the technology but we have the best practices from operating a very large virtual call center.
Our value proposition lies in both our technology and first-hand operational experience. LiveOps On-Demand Call Center Platform was built from the ground up to support a highly distributed agent community made up of independent contractors – this is a huge advantage for us over the pure play technology or outsourcer companies. We didn’t survey the market to determine product requirements but built the features we needed to successfully operate a home agent business. As a result, we can offer the enterprise market a user-friendly, feature-rich platform which addresses the scalability, security, and reporting needs like nothing else available in the market. Right now, with the pressure companies are feeling to reduce CAPEX and create a more flexible infrastructure that maps to business demand, time couldn’t be more right for us to accelerate our efforts to address the enterprise market which has been looking for these capabilities for that past several years.
At LiveOps, we will continue to improve our customer-centric approach; for example, providing closer contact and higher levels of support to large enterprise customers. Our executive team brings together the right disciplines to deliver on customer requirements and execute a customer-center approach. I am excited about the opportunities for LiveOps. CEO Maynard Webb is known for his outstanding operational management skills honed by keeping eBay’s (News - Alert) platform available to a consumer driven marketplace. Also, we have attracted many individuals from sales to engineering to product management who have extensive enterprise call center experience. I believe that LiveOps represents the future of contact center technology.
What new solutions that LiveOps has and will release down the road and what are their benefits?
We continue to focus on what is important to our customers – integration, availability and security. LiveOps also has the opportunity to examine how we can do broader customization in our implementations which we know is exciting for enterprise customers.
For our customers the benefit is an on-demand contact center platform designed for mission critical applications that delivers operational efficiencies through greater visibility and end-to-end call center control.
Brendan B. Read is TMCnet�s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan�s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Jessica Kostek