Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Marty Beard, CEO of LiveOps (Part 5)

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 of these systems need to work together. Then we have a support question that we haven’t yet fully tackled, but we want all of this to work off the same database.

Marty Beard: Right. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Marty Beard, CEO of LiveOps (Part 4)

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 through a channel, he has to know what happened in the other channels as well so he can give an integrated answer. >>>

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. >>>

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 are also looking for agents to augment the run their own agent communities, we do that as well. That’s what you had spent a lot of time talking to Maynard about. >>>

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 the previous CEO a little while ago. So, let’s start with some context.

Marty Beard: Sure. There are two parts to LiveOps’ business. There’s the agent outsourcing, virtualized workforce part, which Maynard did a fantastic job of growing. We also have the cloud applications part of the business, which is selling our customer service solutions directly to any call center or customer service organization looking for a cloud alternative to an on-premises solution. We are focused on the platform and cloud applications part of the business. We’ve been working hard to grow that aggressively and innovate our solutions in that space. That is the primary focus of the company at this point. >>>

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, and that’s all. We have created a delivery model as well as a business model that allows us to offer a level of incubation service to anyone and everyone. We are working on a completely inclusive basis. Anybody who wants to use the program is welcome to use the program, be it an entrepreneur in Indonesia or an entrepreneur in Africa, whatever. One of the things we don’t do is one-on-one mentoring. We do group mentoring. We do online, video-based roundtables where we provide mentoring. We do a lot of the mentoring with a curriculum that is video lecture and case study based. And it’s self-service. Now, if each entrepreneur wants to talk to us one on one, the business model goes completely out the window. >>>

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 between businesses and their customers, greater levels of transparency. We’re seeing some of that in, for example, what we’re doing with our Chatter communities. Chatter is a great way for businesses to have internal collaboration with all of their employees. There’s a greater collaboration with internal employees, but now we’re opening that up and allowing those employees deeper into the organization to collaborate directly with customers in a public forum, and customer can collaborate with customers and employees. >>>