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The Interview
MARTY BEARD Chairman & CEO of
In January, LiveOps, Inc., the global leader in cloud contact centre and customer service solutions, announced that it had acquired UserEvents, Inc. and its flagship product CxEngage, a contextual routing engine that can aggregate and process activities on any social, web, mobile, email, SMS, web chat or voice channel in real time. This followed LiveOps’ announcement of $30 million in funding, as well as the formation of two separate LiveOps corporate entities. To discuss the company’s latest developments, Finance Monthly spoke to LiveOps CEO Marty Beard.
M
arty Beard serves as chairman and chief executive officer at LiveOps,
a leader in cloud
where he is responsible for operational aspects of the company.
contact centre technology and customer service solutions, all strategic and
Marty’s career has centered on challenging and changing old ways of doing business, and quietly disrupting the norm. He has pivoted two major technology brands,
from behind the scenes
participants to major players at the epicentre of megatrends. This not only changed industries, but the way that people and brands communicate, work and exchange information.
As president of Sybase 365, a mobile services platform acquired by SAP, he was focused on enabling a change in how businesses use mobile devices. He understood the power of mobile engagement for brands and retailers, and how access to data in the mobile world could help brands create an ongoing dialogue with customers.
Marty’s time at LiveOps builds on this. The contact centre is an important but often overlooked link between brands and their customers. It used to be a place where brands took orders, or did battle with
angry customers, but he saw it differently. The contact centre is evolving into a nerve centre for brands to engage with ‘hyper-connected consumers’ - prolific Facebook and Twitter users who are always online via smartphones and tablets.
“LiveOps used to be known primarily as an outsource call centre partner for numerous brands in the US”, says Marty. “We’ve grown this core agent services business while also refocusing the company by taking our cloud contact centre technology to market as a separate offering.”
The cloud is simply used to describe the availability of an application via a browser. “It’s a web-based solution that allows brands to deliver excellent customer service across all interaction channels.”
LiveOps is at the forefront of the transformation of call centres, from antiquated call handling ‘factories’ to centres for multi-channel customer engagement. For more than ten years, LiveOps has been “answering the call” of modern day customer communication.
More than 350 companies around the world, including Salesforce.com, Symantec, Royal Mail Group and Amway New Zealand, trust LiveOps’ technology to enable effective multi-channel, social and mobile interaction with their customers. And LiveOps’
award-winning cloud platform has processed more than a billion minutes of customer calls.
LiveOps’ mission is to make every organisation a
responsive social enterprise where customer interactions across multiple communication channels are smartly managed and harnessed to increase customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and customer lifetime value.
Marty says that: “Social and mobile communications are forcing brands to contend with a mega-shift in consumer behaviour and expectations. Brands used to tell their customers how and when to contact them, and many still dictate their opening hours via their web sites. However, now it’s the customer that decides how and when they want to be serviced.”
Traditionally, the overwhelming emotion for those lucky enough to receive good service via a call centre was surprise and relief. “Now, customers are likely to take their business elsewhere if they don’t receive great service. And they use social media to provide a running commentary of their poor experience, all played out in public to heap maximum shame on the offending brand.”
Marty believes that the problem is that traditional contact centre technology is based on the ‘plain old