white paper
Why Companies Are Choosing to
Deploy the LiveOps Cloud-based
Contact Center
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
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Clouds Are All the Rage…for Good Reasons
2
Three Different Journeys to LiveOps
3
Fortune 50 Financial Services Firm
3
Health Plan Provider and Outsourcer
5
XO Communications
7
Best Practices
9
About the Author
5425 Stevens Creek Blvd.
Santa Clara, CA 95051 USA
toll free 1-800-411-4700
phone 408-844-2400
www.liveops.com
sales@liveops.com
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Executive Summary
The availability of network-base contact center solutions is not new; in fact, some might say it as old
as Centrex. But the contact center cloud platforms of today bare a scant resemblance to the featurepoor, inflexible offerings of the past. What is new is an explosion of cloud-based infrastructure,
platforms, and applications working in concert to deliver fast-paced innovation unheard of as recently
as five years ago.
You may be thinking about moving some or all of your contact center solution needs to a cloud-based
platform but have questions:
•What kinds of companies have successfully made that move?
•Is a cloud-based platform best suited to a small contact center operation, say 100 agents or less?
Or are larger centers being successful with the cloud-based model?
•What kinds of questions should I be asking of the cloud-based providers as I investigate my
alternatives?
In the sections the follow we provide insight into these issues and more using companies that have
already made the move to the LiveOps cloud-based contact center.
Clouds Are All the Rage…for Good Reasons
In the past few years, the business and technical press have exploded with stories about the
cloud. Sometimes discussion of the cloud is so intense (platforms in the cloud, infrastructure in
the cloud, applications in the cloud) that it’s easy to lose sight of what the cloud metaphor was
designed to explain and what it might mean to your business.
Cloud-based applications can be thought of as a virtual cluster of pooled resources that
enables a new level of agility and nimbleness that is unfathomable with traditional CPE
(Customer Premises Equipment) deployments.
The benefits that can be realized with the use of cloud-based applications are broad, from
reduced costs to improving the ability for marketing to create and deploy programs addressing
competitor moves such as:
Efficiency and Flexibility: Companies with static agent resources have to consistently grapple with
the tradeoffs related to under- and over-provisioning of in-house capacity. Having access to a cloud
service offering lets companies be more flexible about how they meet their needs.
Time-to-market: Tapping into cloud services drives competitive advantage by making available
capacity that can be added in a matter of minutes. Companies need to find ways to bring products to
market faster – even short delays in product release can dramatically reduce profitability. This means
removing complexity and ensuring customer service needs are met as quickly as possible. Cloud
enables this by abstracting the complexity away from the company and ensuring that resources are
available transparently and on-demand.
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Price: With today’s economic uncertainty cloud applications represent an attractive alternative to
traditional enterprise-owned IT infrastructures. Low total cost of ownership (TCO) is a key driver for
end users exploring cloud-based contact center services. With the cloud, companies can pay only for
the capacity they actually use – avoiding the need to invest in hardware and licenses to meet peak
demand periods that are common in so many industries. In short, companies can still meet their
contact center needs without investing in more hardware and software.
Beyond the direct benefits for the company that deploys them, on-demand solutions are
part of a broader paradigm shift in how services are delivered and paid for. Consumer
experience with on-demand services like Amazon and Netflix are driving expectations
of a higher quality of service and performance from all the companies they choose
to give their business. It’s less and less acceptable to answer a customer call with a
recording that says, “We are experiencing a high volume of calls, please call back.”
The technology is there to buy resources as needed and companies that do that will
compete better in the market.
Three Different Journeys to LiveOps
On-demand services offer a host of technical, cost, and competitive advantages; yet change is difficult.
Each company has a different set of existing technologies, financing concerns, and competitive
pressures and may not understand how the benefits of a cloud-based contact center can improve their
situation.
For the companies that have chosen to move to a cloud-based contact center solution:
•Why have they chosen to do so? •What have their experiences been?
•What criteria did they use to choose among the many available service providers?
To answer those questions, McGee-Smith Analytics spoke to a cross-section of LiveOps contact
center cloud customer teams. In the sections that follow we provide insight into the issues these
companies had with their existing contact center solutions, the criteria they used when evaluating
cloud options, and the reasons they chose to deploy LiveOps.
Fortune 50 Financial Services Firm
Firms in the financial services industry are often early adopters of cutting-edge technology. Why?
Typically the economics are there. Small changes in process or resource deployment can very quickly
impact the bottom line. This has been especially true in the contact center spaced where financial
services, along with telecommunications firms, are often the earliest adopters of new approaches
to delivering customer care. In fact, this behavior is seen as part of a financial services company’s
competitive advantage in the market. The Fortune 50 financial services firm profiled here has asked
that their story be told without identification (we’ll refer to them as Innovative Financial Services,
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or IFS).
In the mid-1990s, IFS broke new ground with the deployment of an innovative call center
solution. IFS installed a multi-site routing system that allowed them to centrally manage voice
calls destined for multiple sites across the US. It was accomplished by gathering data from
the ACDs of different vendors on the availability and the skills of those taking calls and routing
directions via any of the major long distance carriers on where best to terminate each call. This
sophisticated routing system was paired with a collection of best-of-breed applications (e.g.
recording, workforce management).
Fifteen years later IFS faced end-of-life status for the core routing application. The company
saw it as an opportunity to do a complete contact center technology refresh. One of the first
decisions was whether to continue with a CPE approach or explore a cloud-based approach.
Taking Plugs Out of the Wall
At the very highest levels of IFS, cloud-based solutions were being investigated for a broad variety of
applications. Should the customer service organization choose a cloud-based approach, they would
not be the first or likely the last group within IFS to do so.
The mindset driving both cloud-based solutions and outsourcing contracts is to offload as much
non-core activity as possible. Applied to the contact center, this translated into statements like, “We
don’t want to use a BTU to route a call ever again,” with BTU referring to the cost for a unit of power.
The point is to reduce the electric bill—all that IFS energy consumption translated into systems and
applications on site that needed to be both housed and managed. The capitalization costs incurred
when purchasing equipment. The real estate necessary to house it, as well as the human resources
required to run the equipment and applications. All of these elements played into IFS’ decision to
choose cloud-based approach.
Lighten IT Resource Demand
The choice of multiple best-of-breed applications had, over the years, meant a heavy integration
load, requiring the support of a significant number of IT professionals. For example, applying version
changes to multiple applications had become a nightmare. If any one of several applications had a
patch or version release, it could mean issues with any other application. Because of the complexity of
making any change, IFS had settled on an annual upgrade cycle. In effect, IFS’s call center technology
was limiting the company’s ability to add innovation.
In today’s climate of shrinking staff, especially in the hard-hit financial sector, IFS was looking for an
alternative that would require far less IT headcount to support. Part of the answer would be to choose
a solution that would allow contact center management to make changes to the call flow without the
need for IT.
With the right cloud-based contact center solution, IFS would decrease IT staff load in two ways:
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1.With no services on site staff would not be required to maintain and upgrade either the hardware
or software – that would be done by the cloud vendor.
2.Day-to-day routing changes required by changing market conditions (e.g. new audio files for
announcements or new skills groups for new financial products) could be accomplished by
contact center management staff quickly, not as an IT project that would need to be queued
before getting attention.
Internal Pilot Followed by Broad Deployment
At IFS, a willingness to be innovative is balanced with an appropriate level of risk mitigation. After
choosing the LiveOps contact center cloud platform from a large field of both CPE and cloud
competitors, IFS initially deployed LiveOps for its internal help desk application. During the course of a
year, LiveOps was deployed and integrated into IFS’ operation for the following reasons:
•Both IT and business management at IFS became familiar with LiveOps tools used to create,
deploy, and revise routing strategies.
•IFS experienced how the LiveOps cloud-based platform was able to deliver the kind of scalability
and resiliency that IFS had in the past paid dearly for in over-engineering of equipment and
carrier facilities.
•LiveOps Web Services API layer was used by IFS to build integration with its existing call routing
solutions as well as with IFS’ custom company-based applications.
Two years later when the revenue-generation and customer service portions of the business were
ready to replace their out-dated solutions, different management was making the decision. But the
internal LiveOps deployment was there to serve as a reference site, and eventually, 90 percent of IFS’
calls will be handled by the LiveOps contact center cloud platform.
Health Plan Provider and Outsourcer
In the technology business when one thinks about the healthcare vertical the first things that spring to
mind are security of data and HIPAA-compliance. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a set of US-government privacy and security rules. Because of the importance
of safeguarding the inherently private data, hospitals, doctors’ offices and other businesses that
operate in healthcare require not only robust security features but ongoing compliance with
government regulations.
Health Plan Provider and outsourcer (the identity of this company will be cloaked and
referred to in this document as HPPO) is in the business providing healthcare insurance
to individuals, families, and businesses. In addition to supporting its’ own customer base,
HPPO operates as a business process outsourcer (BPO) processing claims and providing
subscriber customer care. When they made decisions to re-look at their contact center
solution they brought a set of security-based requirements that went well beyond those
needed in other verticals. They found that with a cloud-based solution, they could rely on their cloud
provider to deliver what they needed, instead of having to bear that burden themselves.
An End-of-Life Boat Anchor
In late 2009, HPPO found themselves in need of a complete contact center technology overhaul.
The vendor who provided HPPO’s ACD, which had been installed more than 10 years ago, had been
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acquired by another vendor. The IVR solution, while still supported by the vendor, was also outdated.
Together, the ACD and IVR were based on 1990s technology that required complex proprietary
programming to create routing strategies. As the outsourcing component of the business increased
HPPO found that the contact center was unable to respond with agility to the day-to-day needs of their
BPO business.
Proposals from several of the market-leading CPE-based contact center vendors, including the
incumbent ACD provider’s acquirer, confirmed that a complete technology refresh would mean costs
of $5 to $10 million in capital expenditures. HPPO had become all too familiar with how easy it was to
fall behind the technology curve – and the high cost in both dollars and people to avoid it. Purchasing
another CPE system to replace the outdated one could lead to a repeat of the same problems down
the line.
Variable, Location-Independent Requirements
As HPPO investigated alternatives for upgrading their contact center, the variable volume demands of
the outsourcing portion of the business were an important consideration. The nature of outsourcing
meant that fluctuations in call volume could vary not just month-to-month but also day-to-day.
A client could be looking to sign a three-to-five year commitment with HPPO or looking for
three to five days of support to cover an annual enrollment period or clear an unexpected
backlog.
Remaining competitive the outsourcing business also means being able to provide
comprehensive reporting data to clients. Not only were the existing systems woefully underfeatured in this regard but it became clear that a web-based system would give HPPO the
flexibility to be more responsive to its outsourcing customers’ information requests.
One unique attribute of HPPO’s environment is that they run their approximately 1,000 concurrent
agents organized into 30-plus different contact centers. Some centers support individual clients,
others different product lines, e.g. dental insurance, eye care, etc. Most of these individually-managed
centers are co-located but HPPO still needed the flexibility to route calls among the centers.
Like many outsourcers, while multi-tenancy is not a hard and fast requirement, the feature would
enable HPPO to more easily support both their internal and outsourcing operations. And like the
innovative financial services firm (IFS) discussed earlier in this paper, HPPO wanted to empower the
management of the individual centers to make ad hoc routing and reporting changes as dictated by
changes in the volume or character of calls.
Which Cloud Provider?
It soon became apparent that many of HPPO’s requirements would be best met with a cloud-based
solution and the timing couldn’t be better. Cloud-based contact center solutions began coming into
their own in 2008 and now there was a good mix of traditional players and new market entrants to
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consider. An on-demand solution would solve many of the company’s short-term challenges. Cloud
would also deliver the technical sophistication and flexibility HPPO required without the multi-million
dollar CAPEX price tag they were hoping to avoid. HPPO had also seen how easy it was to get behind
in the constant need to refresh technology; a cloud solution would put that burden on the service
provider going forward, not on HPPO.
Once the decision had been made to choose a cloud-based solution, HPPO did a thorough
investigation of the cloud-based contact center solutions available. An important requirement was
the ability of the vendor to allow HPPO to embed telephony controls into a new, internally-developed
desktop that was being designed. HPPO was moving to a web-based architecture and wanted a
vendor that could work in the new environment – for example supporting the open SAML standard for
single sign-on to the HPPO and contact center solution.
But while tight contact center integration based on the new HPPO desktop application was the
ultimate goal, the desktop development was not yet complete. LiveOps quickly and easily created a
deployment plan that allowed HPPO to begin moving their call centers to the cloud-based contact
center using the standing LiveOps desktop until the new desktop was available. Using a floating phone
panel, LiveOps sent the required data to the existing HPPO proprietary application to trigger a screen
pop. When the new HPPO desktop is available agents can be transitioned to the new interface.
Security a Key Decision Driver
The LiveOps solution also boasted impressive proof points in the area of security. HIPAA-compliant
since January 2007, LiveOps has continued to deliver a steady stream of security enhancements.
This is an area where LiveOps, as a contact center outsourcer itself, has a shared interest with their
customers in keeping the security attributes of the software and platform aggressively current.
In 2008, LiveOps became the first cloud-based contact center provider to appoint a Chief Information
Security Officer (CISO). A CISO is the senior-level executive within an organization responsible for
establishing and maintaining the enterprise vision, strategy, and program to ensure information
assets are adequately protected. He/she directs staff in indentifying, developing, implementing, and
maintaining processes across the organization to reduce information and information technology
risks, respond to incidents, establish appropriate standards and controls, and direct the establishment
and implementation of policies and procedures. The CISO is also responsible for information-related
compliance. Becoming a LiveOps customer means that HPPO derives all the benefits of a senior
security officer and their department without incurring the direct cost.
XO Communications
XO Communications made the decision to expand into a cloud-based contact center
solution with a solutions partner. Management felt that in the area of hosted contact center
services, the company wasn’t able to invest the time and focus required to truly scale. To
be successful there was also a near constant need to add functionality such as additional
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CPE interaction, extensive reporting, and interaction modalities such as chat.
Over the years XO built solutions internally but with the fast pace of change in contact center
technology they made the decision that they required outside resources to fully invest in the contact
center space to keep up with the often shifting demands of their clients. XO Communications looked at
several cloud-based contact center vendors and made the decision to roll out an XO-branded service
partnering with LiveOps.
Choosing a Partner
When asked what decision criteria drove the choice of LiveOps, XO Communications starts with the
conversation talking about partnership. XO was looking for a cloud-based contact center provider with
the ability to partner along multiple dimensions. Obviously a technical partnership is required
so they could create an open dialog between the two companies’ engineering and operations
groups to easily iron out the inevitable minor glitches along the way.
LiveOps was the perfect fit for XO Communications because they are a service provider.
The technical partnership required an even deeper level of integration and interaction with
the chosen partner. LiveOps was able to provide the tight integration into the network that
allows the XO Communications contact center solutions suite to realize the cost and network
efficiencies necessary to deliver profitable margins.
Beyond the technical aspects, XO Communications was looking for a partnership between both
company’s executive teams with marketing and business development as well as sales and sales
support.
The partnership also needed to extend into the back office where end-user customer billing issues
might need to be resolved.
A unique benefit of partnering with LiveOps is the ability to not only deliver the cloud-based contact
center technology but also access to LiveOps’ skilled set of agents for XO customers who might want
or need to add ad hoc agent resources. For XO this capability will help them differentiate themselves
as they take their cloud-based contact center services to market.
Finally the partnership needed to include a shared vision. One of XO’s goals when choosing a contact
center partner was the ability to offer and deliver the state-of-the-art capabilities that companies are
looking for and to address a bar that is constantly being raised. With its’ single-minded focus on the
contact center business the XO Communications team felt that LiveOps was a partner with a common
vision of supporting their customers’ evolving needs.
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Best Practices
In reviewing these case studies of companies that have chosen to implement the LiveOps contact
center cloud platform a number of themes begin to emerge.
You Can Migrate to the Cloud at Your Own Pace
The move to a cloud-based contact center solution is a decision each company made very carefully
often committing to a wholesales replacement of existing technology only after the company had some
experience with the cloud.
•IFS used LiveOps for an internal deployment for more than a year before the external-facing
organization chose LiveOps for a much larger, revenue-impacting implementation.
•The limitations of HPPO’s legacy environment led them to want to move to LiveOps contact
center cloud platform sooner rather than later. LiveOps ability to support an out-of-the-box
desktop while HPPO built a custom integration, and its ability to transition HPPO’s many contact
centers to LiveOps over time served a similar purpose in building trust in LiveOps with a phased
deployment.
•XO evaluated other hosted contact center vendors before deciding on a broad partnership with
LiveOps
Business Management Empowerment of IT
In each of the scenarios outlined in this paper, companies were looking for a solution that allowed
IT to get out of the business of regularly having to change routing strategies. This empowerment
ultimately leads to better customer service as ad hoc changes that – in the past might have been
delayed or even dismissed entirely – can now be executed with ease.
Cloud Provides Access to Ongoing Innovation
Access to ongoing innovation in contact center technology was also a factor for each of these LiveOps
customers. IFS installed the most advanced solution of its day – almost 15 years ago – only to find
themselves a near prisoner to the policies, procedures, and ballooning headcount that had grown up
around the technology. HPPO was particularly mindful of how easy it was to go from the state-of-theart system to the current “boat anchor.”
Ad Hoc Scalability is a Direct Cloud Advantage
Ad hoc scalability was an important variable for both XO Communications and HPPO. As
services providers themselves, choosing the LiveOps cloud contact center solution will allow
XO Communications to grow their contact center cloud business seamlessly. For HPPO, with
industry-driven seasonality, the ability to quickly scale to meet their bursting spikiness was a
key factor in their decision.
Contact Center Size is Irrelevant in the Cloud
Finally the three stories illustrated here show that cloud-based solutions can meet the needs
of any size contact center. From the mid-sized HPPO, to a large enterprise IFS, to a carrier XO
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Communications, each found that their particular needs were best met by a cloud-based contact
center solution.
No one can predict precisely how contact center technology will morph over the next few years. But
each of the companies profiled here are not just betting on the cloud, they’re betting on LiveOps.
And in each case, they’ve decided that LiveOps is a company that they can depend on during the
challenges that might lie ahead.
About the Author
Sheila McGee-Smith, the founder of McGee-Smith Analytics, is a leading communications industry
analyst and strategic consultant. With a practice focused on the contact center and enterprise
communications markets, Ms. McGee-Smith works on a daily basis with both solution providers and
enterprises to help them develop strategies to meet the escalating demands of today’s consumer and
business customers.
Ms. McGee-Smith has spent 20 years in the communications industry, including 12 years with the
New Jersey-based analyst firm The PELORUS Group. Prior to joining The PELORUS Group, Ms.
McGee-Smith held sales management, market research, and product management positions at AT&T,
Timeplex, and Dun & Bradstreet. She received a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College, Columbia
University, and an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
This custom whitepaper was funded by LiveOps, Dec. 10, 2010.
For more information about LiveOps, please visit www.liveops.com.
LiveOps®
5425 Stevens Creek Blvd.
Santa Clara, CA 95051
toll free 1-800-411-4700
phone 408-844-2400
www.liveops.com
sales@liveops.com