Sramana Mitra: We just went through a somewhat painful migration and then, in the middle, integration of our email marketing system, which was on Aweber. Our CRM system is on Zoho, and Zoho has now released an email marketing product. We were not happy with Aweber, so we are moving from Aweber to Zoho. All
Sramana Mitra: It sounds like one of the big changes that has happened is the requirement to route to a different set of agents. Marty Beard: Right. But there’s the higher level point that the world of the agent is becoming more sophisticated. The demands on the agent are increasing. SM: When the agent responds
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
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
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
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,
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?
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