A contact center solution and services provider, Liveops has situated itself directly in the center of some of the most important trends in customer care, specifically social, mobile, cloud, and customer experience.

1. Filing Information: June 2013, IDC #241956, Volume: 1
Contact Center Services: Vendor Profile
V E N D O R P R O F I L E
O n - D e m a n d C o n t a c t C e n t e r P r o v i d e r s
P r o f i l e S e r i e s : L i v e O p s
Melissa O'Brien
I D C O P I N I O N
A contact center solution and services provider, LiveOps has situated itself directly in
the center of some of the most important trends in customer care, specifically social,
mobile, cloud, and customer experience. LiveOps' strategy and offerings operate on
four general assumptions about the future of customer service, which IDC observes
as the following:
 Contact centers are moving to the cloud. Because of cost efficiency and
flexibility, more and more companies are moving their contact center technology to
the cloud. Mobile and social customer care interactions are also delivered via the
cloud, further driving the trend of on-demand and cloud-based delivery. LiveOps
was one of the first contact center providers to offer cloud-based delivery, and it
continues to be an important player in the market for contact center on demand.
 Customers are mobile and social. Social and mobile are changing how
customers interact with businesses. Customers will use the channel they want,
whenever they want, and companies need to be prepared to interact on
whichever channel the customer chooses. In particular, social and mobile
interactions are newer means of communication that are adding new dynamics to
the contact center. LiveOps addresses these changes in many ways, most
significantly through its social-savvy agent network and LiveOps social and
mobile solutions.
 Customer experience is paramount. Along with the trend of mobile and social
comes a customer's expectation for a seamless experience. Customers have
grown tired of repeating information, choppy cross-channel interactions, and
having their information siloed. Integration of customer data is important to create
this seamless experience. Companies are realizing that they can drive customer
loyalty by having a holistic view of the customer experience: simply put, the
various interactions with the company across all touch points over time. The
LiveOps Platform with the multichannel plus social desktop, LiveOps Engage,
allows for multiple and cross-channel interactions, helping customers get a step
closer to better customer experience.
 Agent experience directly impacts customer experience. Having an
integrated agent desktop with all channels, including social, visible and available
for contiguous interactions empowers the agent to deliver a personalized
experience. The LiveOps Engage desktop allows agents to have the view that
they need to create a better experience for the customer.
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I N T H I S V E N D O R P R O F I L E
This IDC Vendor Profile highlights LiveOps, an on-demand contact center and
customer care BPO service provider.
S I T U A T I O N O V E R V I E W
C o m p a n y O v e r v i e w
LiveOps, an on-demand contact center company with regional offices and customers
in North America, Europe, and Australasia, is a private organization backed by four
venture capital partners. Founded in 2000, LiveOps handles millions of interactions
every year, through both its on-demand contact center platform and its home agent
customer care BPO services. While LiveOps has a deep heritage in customer care
interaction services via its home-based agents, it has in recent years placed a much
more significant focus on the cloud contact center platform part of the business. The
on-demand platform includes interactive voice response (IVR), ACD, intelligent
multichannel routing, agent management, workforce management, quality monitoring,
chat, email, Twitter, Facebook and SMS, reporting and analytics, outbound dialing,
screen and voice recording applications, and a newly revealed integrated
multichannel plus social agent desktop.
The two aspects of the company's services, the on-demand contact center platform
and customer care BPO services, along with some interesting highlights of each, are
detailed in the sections that follow.
On-Demand Platform
LiveOps began selling the LiveOps Platform to enterprises in late 2008. There are
approximately 37,000+ users on the LiveOps Platform, which includes LiveOps' own
community of independent contractor agents plus customers' own agents. LiveOps
has more than 300 customers worldwide and has datacenters in Nevada, New York,
the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Auckland, New Zealand.
LiveOps does not lease its contact center equipment from other providers. This allows
clients the advantage of dealing with only one vendor and gives LiveOps ownership
control of the technology capabilities it can offer and/or customize for clients.
The LiveOps Platform offers a comprehensive suite of services, including intelligent
IVR such as detailed call filtering and data; live call monitoring; intelligent call routing
using PSTN, VoIP, or WebRTC; call recording; screen recording; email functionality;
desktop API; multichannel routing/queuing and channel pivot (detailed in the
Multichannel Plus Social: LiveOps Engage section); screen recording, call flow
authoring; scheduled and priority call back; reporting; and dashboards.
Workflow management, predictive dialing, and Web collaboration are all on the road
map for future functionality.

3. ©2013 IDC #241956 3
Salesforce.com Integration and Features
The LiveOps Platform integrates with salesforce.com's Sales Cloud or Service Cloud
to help clients manage their outbound dialing campaigns more intelligently and
improve agent/customer experience. Using automated preview and progressive
dialers, LiveOps removes the manual aspects of outbound dialing so that agents can
focus on delivering better results. For contact centers that have fluctuating inbound
call volume, LiveOps fully supports blended inbound/outbound agents, allowing
agents to take inbound calls during call spikes and make outbound calls at other
times. For companies that utilize salesforce.com's Sales Cloud and Service Cloud for
both inbound and outbound campaigns, the LiveOps CTI integration for
salesforce.com provides a smarter, more flexible outbound solution that leverages
CTI and LiveOps Data Exchange with salesforce.com. LiveOps also offers the ability
for agents to categorize interactions with wrap-up codes directly within the
salesforce.com customer record. LiveOps' Click to Dial provides one-click dialing from
any field in salesforce.com, which reduces the need for manual dialing by the agent,
thereby increasing agent productivity. Last, LiveOps' on-demand outbound for
salesforce.com can be quickly configured and deployed with flexibility across any or
all agents, making it a good match for telemarketing, surveys, telesales, or
fundraising campaigns. The LiveOps Platform is switch agnostic and can integrate
with multiple telephony platforms. LiveOps has partnerships with several telecom
providers for network services and is also enabled to work with clients' preferred
telephony network.
Multichannel Plus Social: LiveOps Engage
LiveOps launched LiveOps Engage, an integrated multichannel including social agent
desktop, on January 28, 2013. LiveOps Engage is available at no cost to LiveOps
Platform customers. The major objective of LiveOps Engage is to give agents the
ability to respond to customers in any channel of their choice — and to pivot
seamlessly from one channel to another in order to create a seamless experience
interacting with the customer. The channels serviced with LiveOps Engage — voice,
email, chat, SMS, Facebook post, and Twitter — are integrated within a single
window, allowing agents to respond to customer inquiries without having to switch
applications. This single-screen integration enables agents to receive a 360-degree
view of the customer to ensure that the most relevant information is seen at the right
time alongside a history of past interaction. For customers that need a CRM
application to facilitate screen pops of customer information on incoming contacts,
LiveOps has CRM Lite, included free of charge with the desktop, already built in.
LiveOps' customers decide which channels they want to "turn on." Some customers
start with just voice, then add email and chat, then add social. Because the platform is
cloud based, channels can be easily turned on or off at any time. Thus the customer
is only paying for what it uses.
LiveOps' home-based agents played a significant role in the development and
deployment of LiveOps Engage. A pilot program of LiveOps Engage was deployed
with a select group of the community, allowing for feedback and testing on the new
desktop to be performed in-house.

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LiveOps Insight
LiveOps Insight is a suite of reporting and analytics tools. LiveOps Insight capabilities
range from identifying broad trends across all contact centers to performing granular
analysis of individual agent performance. Flexible ad hoc reporting empowers
LiveOps' customers to manage and customize their own performance data without
requiring IT support; clients have the power to select metrics, define dimensions, and
set thresholds/visual alerts themselves with these reporting tools. LiveOps Insight
offers "live dashboard" views that monitor real-time agent performance and display
up-to-date industry-standard KPIs including intraday metrics — by time period,
session, or agent. Additionally, a silent monitor tool allows supervisors to listen in and
provide immediate feedback to agents from anywhere in the world.
Customer Care BPO: LiveOps Independent Contractor Agents
LiveOps' niche in the customer care BPO services industry is customer acquisition
calls, including direct response infomercials and direct marketing campaigns. While
there is a heavy concentration of clients in the retail, telecom, and professional
services industries, LiveOps also has expertise with healthcare, BFSI, and
government.
Utilizing the independent contractor model for its agent community, LiveOps has a
network of 20,000 home-based independent contractor agents. The independent
contractor model means that agents are incorporated business owners who work for
themselves and are contracted by LiveOps. LiveOps has selected this model, rather
than the traditional employee model, because it believes that independent contractors
are more invested and therefore have more accountability for providing good
customer service.
LiveOps' home-based independent contractor agents are all working on the LiveOps
Platform. From an agent perspective, the gamification features of the platform that
allow agents to participate in virtual competitions that boost morale and productivity
are one particular differentiator. Some of LiveOps' independent contractor agents
have reduced call time by 15%, and sales have improved 8–12% among certain
agents that handle sales-related calls. Because LiveOps uses the independent
contractor model, agents have a choice about whether to participate in the
gamification techniques. In addition, LiveOps University, an award-winning, elearning
portal, allows agents to take optional online courses to receive accreditation to work
on various accounts.
Home-based agent profiles often don't fit the typical demographic of agents found in
brick-and-mortar centers, who tend to be younger and less experienced. Figure 1
shows that 42% of LiveOps independent contractor agents have a college degree,
and many have other desirable skills. In addition to their experience, these agents
tend to be "social savvy," a skill that is very important when they reply to inquiries
using social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Independent contractor agents
in the LiveOps community not only use the social tools embedded in the platform but
also tend to use social networks in their personal lives, which further increases the
affinity for social customer care interactions; 79% of the agents in LiveOps'
community are regularly on Facebook, 19% regularly use Twitter, and one out of four
agents has used social media to interact with a company himself/herself as a
consumer.

5. ©2013 IDC #241956 5
In addition to agent-based services, LiveOps also offers automated services such as
LiveOps Mobile Solutions for Direct Response, which was designed to enable brands
to communicate and market to mobile customers via relevant and targeted text
messaging.
F I G U R E 1
L i v e O p s A g e n t S k i l l s
Source: LiveOps, 2013
C o m p a n y S t r a t e g y
LiveOps targets midsize to large enterprises in the financial services, insurance,
healthcare, technology, travel, retail, government, and services industries. The
company sells through its direct sales team as well as through channel partners.
Currently, the ratio between direct and indirect sales deals is 70:30, with the goal
being a 60:40 split. In late 2012, LiveOps officially launched its Channel Partner
Program, which includes referral partners and resell partners. Referral partners
deliver qualified leads to the LiveOps sales team and are eligible to receive a referral
fee if the opportunity results in a sale. Customers referred through these partners are
considered direct customers of LiveOps. Through the channel program, partners
increase their bottom lines with monthly recurring revenue by leveraging LiveOps'
technology along with sales support, marketing tools, training, and more. Referral
partners include KTS, OcX, Force Optimized, and AGC Networks. Resellers
independently manage the sales process and sublicense LiveOps Platform and/or
applications and professional services. Customers brought in through these partners
are considered direct customers of the partner. LiveOps shares in an established
percentage of recurring revenue generated by the joint customer. Reseller partners
include XO Communications, Capstone, BT, CallTower, Astro, ExtraTeam, Gen-i,
Eircom, Connect NZ, and Sybase 365. LiveOps partners with leading providers of

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network services, systems integration expertise, cloud strategy consulting, and
complementary technology.
In late 2011, LiveOps went global with the acquisition of the assets of New Zealand–
based Datasquirt. LiveOps now has employees throughout the United States, the
United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore.
In late 2012, LiveOps launched a new corporate Web site including a United
Kingdom–specific site to benefit LiveOps' second-largest market. The new Web site
along with all of LiveOps' other PR and marketing efforts focuses on positioning the
company and its spokespeople as industry leaders. As of early 2012, a new PR firm
specializing in social media has helped LiveOps position the brand with real-time
social media outreach, a blog focused on promoting cloud, and other initiatives that
focus on multichannel, social CRM, cloud contact center, agent experience, and
customer experience.
LiveOps conducts one or two Webinars per month to generate new business sales
leads. LiveOps' executives regularly speak at LiveOps' own Webinars as well as at
contact center and CRM industry events throughout the United States, the United
Kingdom, and Australasia. LiveOps' success in helping government entities
throughout the United Kingdom transform their departments with multichannel plus
social has also positioned LiveOps as the "teacher" of master classes at government-
sponsored contact center events. LiveOps has sponsorships and commitments in
place to attend more than 15 industry events around the world in 2013.
LiveOps considers the fact that it was an early adopter of cloud computing and has
used the Internet to access contact center services with home-based agents since
2001 as its major differentiator. LiveOps heavily markets this experience, and the
expertise gained from its network of 20,000 agents, as its greatest competitive
advantage. LiveOps also cites proven scalability as another major differentiator.
When natural disasters occur, the contact center has a short amount of time to react
and deliver, and the LiveOps Platform is a quickly scalable and flexible model that is
well poised for bursts of activity. Telethons for the earthquake in Haiti, Hurricane
Katrina, Hurricane Sandy and, in 2013, "Healing the Heartland" tornado relief all used
LiveOps Platform and agent services to provide the agents to answer calls and
process millions of dollars in credit card donations around the clock for fundraising.
F U T U R E O U T L O O K
It is clear that the future of customer care will be deeply impacted by the trends of
cloud, social, and mobile. As LiveOps acutely understands, companies are beginning
to understand that social and mobile don't solely belong to the marketing department
and are in need of customer care–specific solutions. And cloud-based delivery is
becoming more of a reality for contact center services because of cost efficiency and
flexibility. LiveOps has positioned its messaging and offerings squarely in the key
trends that are impacting the customer care services industry today.

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E S S E N T I A L G U I D A N C E
A d v i c e f o r L i v e O p s
LiveOps has built mobile, social, and cloud into all of its messaging and services. By
embracing and relying on these up-and-coming trends, LiveOps has positioned itself
as a player to watch. As it continues on its growth path, the following factors will have
an impact on LiveOps' future success:
 Partnership with salesforce.com. Part of LiveOps' strategy to position the
company closely around cloud, social, and mobile is the complementary
partnership with salesforce.com. Salesforce is leading the industry in discussions
about CRM, customer experience, mobile, cloud, and social. LiveOps Platform's
apparently seamless integration with salesforce.com's Sales Could and Service
Cloud is a very complementary benefit of LiveOps' portfolio.
 Expertise from agent network. LiveOps is uniquely well positioned to sell the
contact center platform because of its legacy and expertise in the agent services
business. While LiveOps has shifted its business to focus much more heavily on
being a platform provider, the agent business provides a very strategic
competitive advantage to LiveOps' portfolio. Not only does the platform business
gain insight and expertise from its in-house users, but the focus that LiveOps
places on positive agent experiences translates directly to positive customer
experience. Keeping a focus on understanding the agents' needs will be a true
differentiator for LiveOps.
 More focus on big data/analytics. IDC believes that the "four pillars" shaping
the industry are social, cloud, mobile, and big data/analytics. LiveOps' brand is
almost synonymous with the first three pillars, but LiveOps' messaging lacks
focus on big data/analytics. Some big data implications are inherent within social
and multichannel efforts, and it would behoove LiveOps to create some branding
around its analytics offering. LiveOps Insight, while robust and flexible, isn't
marketed as a major differentiator. LiveOps would be well served to make some
additional investments around analytics and offer marketing messages that
highlight the amazing customer insight that can be generated through customer
data.
 Market visibility and growth opportunities. While it has embraced all of the right
trends that are poised toward growth and has a robust marketing and PR function,
LiveOps is still a relatively smaller player that lacks the visibility of many major
customer care BPO and contact center providers. On-Demand contact center
services, while picking up steam, are still a small portion of the larger contact center
marketplace that is dominated by on-premise vendors and includes a host of other
players, including telco providers, BPOs, large IT outsourcers and integrators, and
software companies. LiveOps has received significant coverage from the press that
is hopefully translating into more buyer awareness in the market. Additionally, as
the market for on-demand contact center services accelerates, LiveOps will be one
player to watch. As LiveOps continues a strong investment in marketing, continues
complementary partnerships, and keeps beating the drum of social, mobile, and
cloud, it will be well poised to move from an up-and-coming competitor to a major
contact center brand name.

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L E A R N M O R E
R e l a t e d R e s e a r c h
 Arise Virtual Solutions: Using Flexible Staffing to Drive Business Outcomes in the
Contact Center (IDC #241312, June 2013)
 Worldwide and U.S. Outsourced Customer Care Services 2013–2017 Forecast
(IDC #240893, May 2013)
 IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Customer Care BPO Services 2013 Vendor
Analysis — Leveraging the Four Pillars to Modernize Customer Experience (IDC
#240710, April 2013)
 TCS Business Process Outsourcing Services: In Pursuit of Excellence (IDC
#240274, April 2013)
 Meet Your New Boss: The Chief Executive Customer (IDC #239047, February
2013)
 The Best of Customer Care Services 2012 (IDC #lcUS23891712, December
2012)
 The Future of Customer Care Services: Social, Mobile, and Virtual (IDC
#WC20121206, December 2012)
 Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Customer Care BPO Services, 2012
(IDC #238122, December 2012)
 Customer Care BPO Services Buyer Needs: A Demand Side Study (IDC
#232820, January 2012)
C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e
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