Ambitious Growth Path Led LiveOps to Acquire Social Smarts

Redwood City, Calif. – Asked what LiveOps is all about, president and CEO Marty Beard says, “We’re quietly disrupting what used to be a traditionally sleepy space.”

To be more precise, LiveOps provides its 350 to 400 enterprise clients –including some of the biggest corporations in the country – with cloud-based technology that allows their call centers to seamlessly integrate telephone, email and social media customer interaction.

“We’re totally focused on software that makes customer service a better experience,” Beard says. “We’re very, very good at handling customer interactions over any channel.”

LiveOps began as a web platform provider to enable call center agents to work offsite, a business model that worked best seasonally, when for example retailers needed extra help to take orders or make sales adjustments.

With the emergence of social media, LiveOps needed to change to accommodate that growing phenomenon. “As time went on, it became pretty clear that the value was actually in not only the agents that we had, but in the platform that we’d built. So we then started selling that platform directly to companies to manage their own agents. That was a pivot that I’ve been pushing very, very hard since 2011,” Beard says.

Beard explains that the many mobile, social and web channels now available to consumers are rapidly replacing the old dial-in 800 number telephone call center access. “We saw that [phenomenon] early and we prepared for that early,” he says. “And that’s a lot of why we’ve grown so quickly over the years.”

Under Beard’s leadership, LiveOps has seen its cloud computing business grow at a 55% growth rate over the past several years and its overall revenue climb to more than $100 million. And thanks to venture capital backing, the company has expanded with offices in Arizona and London, and the acquisition of DataSquirt, a New Zealand firm that focused on text messaging, Twitter and Facebook. The deal opens new markets for LiveOps throughout South Asia and the Pacific Rim.

Asked to explain the acquisition, Beard says he quickly realized that social media was going to have a big impact on how consumers would access customer support. Angry customers who did not want to wait in a lengthy voice queue before speaking to an agent were turning to Twitter and Facebook and other social media when they needed help or had a complaint, he explains.

With his expertise in mobile media, Beard made it a point to acquire the Auckland-based company and merge DataSquirt’s technology with the LiveOps platform. “DataSquirt had all the channels that LiveOps did not have. It was a perfect fit,” he explains.

As a result, “We were able to very quickly expand our offerings” in the multi-channel environment, he says. “Customers, particularly those 30 and under, demand that the brands that work with them interact with them. So it was a great move for us.”

That pivot has not only resulted in LiveOps’ organic growth to some 350 employees, it also has meant the addition of numerous large tech companies as clients that run on the LiveOps platform, including Salesforce.com, Symantec and Electronic Arts (EA) as well as Amway, Kodak and Coca-Cola. And working with a company called Intuitive Solutions, LiveOps is moving further into the multimedia space by enabling call center agents to answer telephone calls on their computers through Web RTC (Web Real Time Communications), a system that “is radically changing the contact center environment,” Beard says.

Asked if there is another big pivot on the horizon, Beard says LiveOps will stay totally focused on software development for the contact center space. “We’re going to continue to focus on driving our vision,” he insisted. “If that $100 million becomes $200 million, that’ll be great. If that gives us the opportunity to go public or something like that down the road, that’ll be great too.”