Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California (Part 4)

Sramana: How does your workforce-in-the-cloud strategy play out in terms of globalization and outsourcing?

Maynard Webb: Offshoring is playing whack-a-mole. Sourcing is done only from one country, and once you get in the country and get it right the competition shows up and employees start jumping to your competition, which leaves you looking for another country. I think companies should be able to source from any area that has the capability. That can include the United States.

Today, 99% of our business is U.S.-based. I think it is great that we are able to grow U.S. jobs. There is nothing in our model that does not think about the fact that a company should be able to get the right call at the right quality at the cost people want. We should be able to source anywhere.

Sramana: If you want to source from rural India that will not happen. Home workers are hard to find, and you will need call centers there that somewhat mitigate the effort. I love the eBay Power Seller model you were talking about. I have a huge interest in rural call centers and BPO. I want to see more distributed development.

Maynard Webb: As you can imagine, we are quite good at distance learning and certification. Our model depends on that for the most part. There is no reason we could not have five other companies that are great at that sitting on our platform creating businesses for our community.

Sramana: Exactly. You may need specialization in certain areas. Perhaps there is a Spanish-speaking call center out of Costa Rica that has a specialization. They could plug into your platform and deliver a power operation.

Maynard Webb: In our SaaS business, we actually have exactly what you just described. We have partners who run call centers or a mix of them, and they sit on our platform. They then have the freedom to do exactly what you describe. We have a partner who does that in Mexico and a partner who is really excited about bringing jobs back to America. We have a work platform that is not geographically constrained. It can be done virtually.

Sramana: What is the price implications of all of this?

Maynard Webb: It varies widely. On the agent side, we do a lot of calls. We share in the success of those conversions. We do variations of revenue share and commissions. We do the best when we share in the upside in the calls we do because of the performance nature of the community.

Let’s say somebody wanted to start a BPO somewhere. They should definitely leverage our technology. They can pay per seat or per minute. The call center can be up and running in no time with no infrastructure.

Sramana: I understand the technology leverage. Are they also getting marketing and sales leverage? The Power Seller model worked great on eBay because the marketplace was there.

Maynard Webb: For the right people it is there. For the BPO that we set up in Mexico, the majority of their customers are our customers who are looking for a Spanish solution. We are essentially bringing customers to them.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Become The CEO Of Your Own Destiny: LiveOps CEO And Former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Santa Clara, California
1 2 3 4 5 6 7