The Interview

telephony’ fathered by Alexander Graham Bell. “It can manage phone calls extremely well, but it was never designed to support online communication channels. The LiveOps cloud contact centre solves this by presenting all interactions in one place so brands can recognise their customers and provide consistent service across all contact channels.

Company Development Fundamentally, LiveOps has undergone a significant business transformation that has capitalised on their original outsourcing (agent services) business and seen them capture significant market share in the cloud contact centre technology market. Cloud platform revenues have grown at three times Gartner’s projected industry Compound Annual Growth Rate of 17.8 percent in the last two years.

Helping fuel that growth, LiveOps acquired New Zealand-based Datasquirt in 2011. “It gave us expertise in non-voice channels, such as email, SMS, web chat, Facebook and Twitter.”

The acquisition enabled LiveOps to develop an ‘all- in-one’ multi-channel solution. This emerged in January 2013 when the company introduced LiveOps Engage™, an easy to use, web-based agent desktop application.

“LiveOps Engage helps contact centres overcome many of the barriers that prevent them delivering great service”, explains Marty. “Typically, contact centre agents have to toggle between several screens – five on average but often many more – to find customer information. With Engage, all interaction types are routed to agents via one application.

“And agents can easily respond via a customers channel of choice, and ‘pivot’ from one channel to another – from Twitter to email or a phone call, for example.

The product stores all contact history in one place, empowering agents to resolve enquiries faster and to

have a better appreciation of the existing relationship that every customer might have with the brand.

“Most recently, we’ve acquired an organisation called UserEvents. Their contextual routing technology helps brands to monitor customer behaviour in real time and take pro-active action where needed.”

Acquisition of UserEvents LiveOps’ acquisition of UserEvents is expected to quietly disrupt customer experience management as we know it.

“We were early and innovative in introducing multi- channel interaction capabilities, and we’re now predicting and acting on the significant impact that contextual routing will have in the contact centre space.”

Some brands use analytics technology to dissect customer interaction history and preferences. They use that insight to drive process improvement, or to identify areas ripe for self-service. Marty says: “Brands must look beyond this by seeking ways to actively manage and influence a customer’s journey in real time.”

UserEvents’ flagship product, CxEngage, is a contextual routing engine that can aggregate and process customer activity on any social, web, mobile or voice channel in real time. It’s being weaved into LiveOps’ existing routing solution.

“CxEngage laces together information across all channels (voice, email, chat, SMS and social) to identify patterns of behaviour. Once a pattern is identified, CxEngage notifies the contact centre and supplies recommendations as to how best to respond or how a customer should be handled.”

With this type of intelligence, a brand can track customer engagement in real time across all touch points and would be able to sense a customer’s possible frustration.

Implications of the Acquisition The acquisition of the UserEvents CxEngage technology advances LiveOps’ cloud contact centre leadership.

“We knew that we wanted to move the industry forward. We very much see ourselves as the innovators in the contact centre space. It was UserEvents’ ability to efficiently analyse big data that first drew our attention. We recognised after meeting with them that if we purchased this technology, it would put us 18 months ahead on our roadmap.”

Many brands measure customer satisfaction for each channel separately. The reality is that customers shift between different channels and contact centres must connect these fragmented interactions across voice, email, chat, social and SMS to properly assess customer experience.

“By incorporating real-time, contextual routing and proactive customer engagement into the LiveOps Platform we will enable our customers to provide a better experience to their customers.”

The Future “We recently secured a round of funding that we’re using to accelerate global expansion. We just announced a new technology centre in New Zealand, and we’re extending our data centres to Australia and Europe. It will also fund strategic investments, like UserEvents, allow us to expand sales and marketing activities, and to support other initiatives to solidify the Company’s leadership of each of its two new subsidiaries – LiveOps Cloud Platform, LLC and LiveOps Agent Services, LLC.”

Contact:

Tel: 020 3006 8280 www.liveops.com

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