LiveOps Solves its Identity Crisis

Last week it was announced that SaaS contact center provider, LiveOps Cloud Platform, has been acquired by a private equity firm, and its pure play home-based agent BPO business, LiveOps Agent Services, will operate independently. This announcement solves an internal tug of war that the service provider has been engaged in for years over which side of the business to focus resources and shape the brand around.

The formal split of the BPO and SaaS contact center businesses will give LiveOps Cloud Platform the independence for greater innovation around its omni-channel cloud contact center platform. At the same time, LiveOps Agent Services can focus on honing its scalable contact center BPO leveraging virtual agents exclusively.

LiveOps Agent Services is a great example of a “plug-and-play” BPO offering. Its home agents all work on the LiveOps cloud contact center platform, enabling quick ramp up times and greater flexibility. LiveOps also has a reputation for having agents who are skilled on numerous channels, in particular social media, and also leading e-learning and recruiting tools and the supporting processes. While it has been clear that the discrete SaaS offering has been the greatest source of growth and focus for the service provider as of late, boasting 84% revenue growth over the past two years, its BPO heritage and expertise have been a vital differentiator for LiveOps. Very few other service providers with the exception of the likes of TeleTech (eLoyalty) have similar capabilities, and even in those cases the cloud capabilities were not organically grown out of the BPO business in the same manner. LiveOps Agent Services could be ripe for an acquisition by a solid contact center BPO provider that is behind in building out home agent delivery capabilities, like Aegis or Concentrix.

The contact center software that is now the LiveOps Cloud Platform SaaS offering was developed internally for the service provider’s 20,000 work at home agents, and LiveOps began selling that software independently in 2008. Its standout elements are a user-friendly interface, with an integrated desktop with for all available channels, including social media. A tight integration with Salesforce’s Sales and Service Clouds is also an important feature. These elements can enable a better, more personalized experience for the end customer as well as a more empowering tool for the agent. The agent oriented legacy should continue to be a critical differentiator and an important part of the service provider’s heritage (and LiveOps Agent services will start out as its largest customer). LiveOps Cloud Platform has the potential to continue its growth independently or get gobbled up by one of the Unified Communications or contact center giants that is aiming to provide a stronger cloud and omni-channel story, or even Salesforce, where there is already tremendous brand synergy, functional interoperability and a strong partnership.

Despite its impressive growth, LiveOps Cloud Platform’s presence in the market to date has been somewhat overshadowed by the larger premise players that have made significant cloud investments (i.e. Genesys, Interactive Intelligence) and its recent instability in the C-Suite has done little to alleviate that problem. This announcement gives both entities the opportunity to refresh and solidify the brands, and to focus resources and investments; something to watch will be to ensure that each thoroughly differentiates and develops a strong independent message to mitigate some of the probable confusion in the marketplace. In the coming year it is likely that we will see the LiveOps Cloud Platform improve on its scalability and flexibility, and LiveOps Agent Services continue to further develop its on-demand agent business, both building on the as-a-service elements that are ultimately generating customer experience improvements for their clients.