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

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Marty Beard, CEO of LiveOps (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: OK. I guess the discussion is a bit different from what I had expected. Marty Beard: Yes. Again, LiveOps, we always sell directly to an enterprise. We offer our cloud applications to help them run their customer service organizations, their contact centers. We are a cloud contact center vendor. For those enterprises that

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Marty Beard, CEO of LiveOps (Part 1)

We’ve featured LiveOps on the blog before, when I interviewed then CEO Maynard Webb for my Entrepreneur Journeys series. Now, the company has a new CEO, Marty Beard, and has gone through many other interesting changes over the years. Sramana Mitra: Hi, Marty. We are speaking with LiveOps for a second time. I spoke with

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Bard, VP and GM of Desk.com, a Salesforce Company (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There are limits to what you can do for your customers without blowing your profitability or viability. For example, we have taken this charter of democratizing entrepreneurship education. One of the value propositions we are working on is democratizing management consulting. Now, that cannot possibly happen. We charge a $1,000 annual membership fee,

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Bard, VP and GM of Desk.com, a Salesforce Company (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Is there any specific area that you’re looking at as an area you want to bring expertise in-house for? Alex Bard: That’s not something I can comment on. SM: OK. What about innovation? What’s on your radar in terms of companies that are doing interesting things in this domain?

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Bard, VP and GM of Desk.com, a Salesforce Company (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Given what’s going on in your business right now, and given the things that are happening in the industry, where do you see trends and open problems? Alex Bard: First we’ll talk about social, and then we’ll talk about mobile. Some of the interesting things that we’re seeing in social are deeper engagements

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Bard, VP and GM of Desk.com, a Salesforce Company (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What strikes me also is that Virgin has a good product. The service is its product, and the company is doing a nice job of its core offering, whereas United is not doing a good job with its core offering. As a result, I don’t think it’s easy to turn around a social

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Bard, VP and GM of Desk.com, a Salesforce Company (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This is not an easy problem to solve. It’s not easy to do social customer support, right? Alex Bard: Well, it depends. The way we think about it is – and this is if I was giving advice to an entrepreneur or business – you have to start by listening and understanding that

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