Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Marty Beard, CEO of LiveOps (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what specifically you’re doing in mobile and social.

Marty Beard: We have integrated all the channels. The channels are voice, email, chat, SMS, Twitter, and Facebook. We’ve integrated all those channels onto one screen. So, you don’t have to open up several different applications to do social analysis. You have one screen in front of an agent, and that agent can handle any of those incoming channels in a two-way fashion. If somebody wants to call an 800 number and get support, we can do that. If somebody wants to tweet “I need some help,” we can handle that. Most important, we can pivot between all channels in real time. So, if somebody tweets and we want to pivot him from a public channel like Twitter to a private channel, like chat or a phone call, we can do that within the application.

We’re the only cloud contact center player with native technology that’s our own that fully integrates the channels I mentioned on one screen.

SM: How do you bring all of that to one screen?

MB: Remember this is a cloud application, so it’s browser based. An agent comes in for her shift. She logs into the application. The screen pops up. She has a queue in front of her that shows voice, email, chat, SMS, Twitter, and Facebook. There’s a number associated with the queue that will show how many interactions are in the queue to be resolved. This is dynamic. As another call comes in, the queue goes up, as she resolves it, it goes down. It shows in real time the active queue by-channel. In the middle of the screen is the case the agent is actually working on. When she works a case, it will show your history of interactions with that call center. So, the agent will know when was the last time a person communicated with the call center, how it was resolved, and which channel the call came in on. So, we know your channel preferences. We’ve all had the frustration of contacting a call center and then getting shifted over to somebody else who makes us repeat everything, or we get put on hold. This allows for a much more dynamic interaction across any channel. That’s the key.

SM: What is the assumption from a usage model point of view? Will all the channels be handled by the same agent?

MB: It depends. The reason you would have an agent deal with all of those channels is because the end user is demanding it. In other words, you have end users who are using all of those channels to get things solved, which is quickly the world that we’re heading into. People don’t just focus on one channel to solve an issue. Certainly, the companies that we work with want to prioritize interactions across agents. So, they may have some agents who have been trained on replying socially. You don’t want all your agents going out and publicly making comments. You have prioritization across agent pools depending on the training they’ve had. But you definitely have agents who can handle all channels, and they’ve been trained and authorized to do that. The reason for that is because end users demand that interaction.

There are all kinds of examples of people who use three, four, or five channels over time to get various issues resolved. You might tweet for one thing, call for another. Email’s fine … email, chat. There are a lot of different things going on. But the routing capability needs to be smart. It needs to get to the right agent pool in the right way. All the enterprise customers that we deal with have various routing rules they want to apply depending on their own situations.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Marty Beard, CEO of LiveOps
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