“Software is eating the world.” Remember that famous line? Venture Capitalist Marc Andreessen declared this bold statement in a 2011 editorial for The Wall Street Journal. Those five words have had a significant impact on my time at LiveOps, so it comes as no surprise that we’ve joined the ranks of industry giants like Google and Facebook to make Andreessen’s declaration a true statement.
I joined LiveOps when the customer service industry was teetering on the brink of something momentous. What it needed was deliberate disruption to push it over the edge. That disruption came in the form of my vision for the next-generation contact center. Having pivoted LiveOps from “agent outsourcer” to “global leader in cloud contact center solutions” within my first year with the Company, it was time to bolster our investment in the cloud. We did so in several ways – from shifting the contact center to the cloud to the creation of true multichannel environments to the enablement of contextual customer experiences. We understood that if you arm contact center agents with those innovations, you create a newly liberated workforce that can work from virtually anywhere, eliminating the need for brick-and-mortar call centers. Now, we are once again transforming the customer service experience by encouraging contact centers to hang up their phones. In doing so, we’re asking them to embrace our vision for the next-generation contact center – one that is not limited by the confines of hardware or real estate.
Imagine a world in which contact center agents are untethered from cube farms and the hardware they currently use. Physical contact centers go the way of the dinosaur. Agents can work from anywhere, with nearly any technology because all of the tools they need are available in the cloud. The hardware barriers that currently exist disappear, and brands are able to provide customer service with a whole new level of responsiveness, personalization and flexibility. That’s been my vision.
I’m transforming the way brands provide customer service by removing the last hardware barrier inhibiting brands from running their contact centers exclusively on software. By replacing datacenters, telephone systems, PCs and desktop phones with cloud-based technologies, such as WebRTC, brands can become more agile and more flexible while reducing costs. WebRTC solutions in the cloud contact center transform a browser into a full-featured agent desktop with a phone without the need for plug-ins or telephony infrastructure. Inbound and outbound calls can now be routed directly into a web browser, dramatically reducing total cost of ownership by as much as 50 percent while improving agent productivity and enhancing workforce utilization.
Want to learn more about the next-generation contact center? Starting today, LiveOps is embarking on a six-city roadshow with partner companies, including Twilio, Google and Plantronics, to talk about “Engineering the Customer Experience.” We’ll be in Atlanta, London, Chicago, New York, Santa Monica, Calif. and San Francisco over the next seven weeks to explore ways in which customer service is changing. The very WebRTC technology we’re enabling, in particular, is having a dramatic impact on customer service because it’s truly bringing the software-driven enterprise to life by bringing the phone into the browser.
If software is eating the world, we’re the hand that feeds it. There’s a clear path forward to an all-software, cloud-based contact center that returns the phone to its cradle. Join us.
Image courtesy of ponsulak at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
