Call Center Featured Article

LiveOps (News - Alert), a virtual call center company, today announced comprehensive updates to its On-Demand Call Center Platform, just months after introducing several enhancements and new features in February 2008.

 

"The enhancements we've made to our already-robust technology platform are further proof that LiveOps is committed to delivering continuous innovation for call centers," said Maynard Webb, CEO of LiveOps. "We're constantly seeking new ways to optimize the efficiencies of call centers and deliver unparalleled scale and flexibility to our customers."

 

The Summer 08 version includes new functionality in the areas of data monitoring, real-time agent call monitoring, call center usability and agent testing. LiveOps now provides the ability to create customized, real-time monitoring dashboards that include data sources from across the enterprise into the LiveOps monitoring architecture. The solution also allows silent monitoring of phone calls handled by a targeted agent or from a specific call campaign and also has improved search capabilities.

 

Proctored call simulations with agents for skill enhancements and a new set of telephony testing capabilities are included in the new version.

 

"We are seeing a migration toward preintegrated 'all-in-one' application suites, which - together with increased use of integration standards - is lowering system integration costs and reducing the complexity of ongoing maintenance," said Drew Kraus, research vice president of Enterprise Communications (News - Alert) Applications for Gartner. "Internet technologies and a renewed interest in the hosted delivery and operating model offer early adopters the opportunity to innovate and benefit from significantly reduced deployment times."

 

In response to the need of call center managers to access comprehensive real-time information, LiveOps has developed a new programming framework that enables customized real-time monitoring dashboards. The framework is designed to allow data from other call center systems or enterprise applications, such as a CRM or a finance system to be embedded into the call center customer dashboard, delivering a comprehensive view of call center optimization and activity. Additionally, customer dashboards can also be embedded into other Web pages to provide unparalleled monitoring flexibility. With customized real-time monitoring, enterprises will now have immediate and unified views of information, improving visibility into call center operations and promoting faster and more informed decision making.

 

The ability to monitor agents on the phone in real time is critical to the success of both outbound campaigns and inbound customer support. The LiveOps solution allows supervisors to listen to calls in real time, by agent or call type, from anywhere in the world regardless of where the agent is located thereby enabling them to monitor and provide feedback on recorded calls as well as live calls.

 

The LiveOps solution now includes readiness assessment testing, a simulation feature that allows virtual call center proctors to guide agents through live test call scenarios, prior to them ever handling a live customer call. Proctors can track agent performance in customized test scenarios, rate their progress and provide feedback. Another feature enables supervisors to designate anyone as a proctor, including high performing agents thereby maintaining the proper ratio of proctors to agents in the virtual training environment. The LiveOps Readiness Assessment Testing reduces the costs and resources associated with training new agents and ensures a better customer interaction for every call.

LiveOps is delivering universal search coupled with "at a glance" capabilities to enable call center managers to have greater control over how they access and view information. Using these tools, a call center manager can traverse all of the call center's data sources - configuration elements, programs, campaigns, users and documentation - with a single query and immediately locate the information needed.

 

"We had been struggling with two other hosted call center platform solutions and their unreliability was impacting our business," said Jack Sands, president of VForce, an organization that exclusively handles AAA membership renewals.

 

"With LiveOps, we were able to get a new solution up rapidly and we finally have a call center platform upon which our business can depend and grow. We've seen an increase of 20 percent in the number of outbound calls per agent due to LiveOps' reliability and functionality,” added Sands.

 

With the availability of Summer 08 On-Demand Platform, LiveOps extends its commitment to provide highly scalable, enterprise-grade call center technologies.