Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California (Part 3)

Sramana: What type of person applies to work in your virtual call centers?

Maynard Webb: The quality of agent you get is far higher in general because we are sourcing from the entire country versus a constrained region. We have more college-educated folks than call centers anywhere else, but they also work different hours than they would be able to work at a regular call center. They work around their kids’ schedules or whatever their unique situation may be. People are looking for that flexibility in their lives. Technology has evolved enough that people are comfortable using it. We are at a point where there are enough people comfortable working at their own homes that this huge trend we are seeing is bound to continue.

Sramana: What is the geographical spread of your workforce in the cloud? Are there any hot spots?

Maynard Webb: We receive thousands of applications a week, and we are able to take only 40 to 50 of them. I am inspired to try and find more business for them. People apply from every state in the country. We have a big population applying in Ohio, Florida, and Georgia. The agent company originated in Florida, so we do have a strong base there.

We use only independent contractors. The beauty is that there are states that are more friendly to that operating method than other states, and we try to focus more on those areas than on other places.

Sramana: The bottleneck at this point is not the workforce itself but finding work?

Maynard Webb: We are growing nicely, but when you think about how many people are looking for work, the need for this platform is easy to realize. At eBay we had several hundred thousand people selling on that platform at a time. Those were Power Sellers, and that is a beautiful thing. It creates jobs. They could expand and hire people. They could do anything that any other entrepreneur would do.

Sramana: Most important, it is an economically sustainable model.

Maynard Webb: Exactly. I see a lot of pain among people who are trying to manage their lives. We have thousands of people coming every week, and I do not have enough work to give them so I can’t take them all. Many of these folks are qualified to do much higher levels of work, so we are developing models that will let these folks grow their teams and companies like Power Sellers do at some point in the future. I think that all of us in the industry should be inspired to help keep increasing the quality of the community, its work, and the opportunities for community members.

Sramana: What trends do you see from companies that use your platform to leverage this workforce in the cloud offering?

Maynard Webb: In many cases, they love our platform because we have unique capabilities that other platforms do not have. We can handle some bursts that other platforms cannot handle because of our model. When the Haiti telethon was hosted by George Clooney, we were able to generate a 4,000-person call center in a matter of hours. Companies love that flexibility.

Our people also perform better than most other companies. We do a lot of sales versus service, but the majority is sales. Our folks are very good at sales, so they perform better. We have to do that in order to keep business. For us it is all about performance. At the end of the day, companies will not pay me for a new model unless I can give them better results than they can get elsewhere. Quality is a huge component of what we do.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California
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