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Arizona-based Liveops is a contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) provider that provides agent services for several industries, including insurance, retail and health services. The company was launched 20 years ago in the gig economy and maintains a large work-from-home workforce with more than 25,000 independent agents who provide contact center services to businesses of all sizes. The company has grown rapidly and provides services to many name brand companies across the US.
Because of the company’s rapid expansion and large customer base, it had a massive amount of data based on different customers and functionality – data that was located in several silos. Having separate data set a limit on the level of data analytics Liveops could perform.
Data science practitioners often say: “good data leads to good insights.” And that is certainly true – yet so is the thesis that silos of data leads to partial insights.
Also see: Top Digital Transformation Companies
A Single Data Lake Provides Digital Benefits
To help bring the data sets together, Liveops put a plan in place to aggregate all the data into a single data lake, which would provide the following benefits:
• Single source of truth for all call statistics. Liveops is unique in that most CCaaS providers work with a single stack. Liveops works with nearly every contact center solution in the market today and that creates a significant amount of overhead to connect and use the data sources.
• Provide a horizontal understanding of the company. The silos of people, processes and capabilities prevents the organization from creating companywide analysis so the admin/group responsible for agents can share data with the admin/group responsible for clients.
• Ability to understand and learn from individual programs and accelerate the company’s evolution. If one program is doing something well, that can be compared to others, which creates portability of best practices within the company.
• Better understand revenue streams. With the Liveops model, every agent is an independent contractor. The data lake lets the company measure and monitor how a good agent progresses through the company. Liveops can also use the information to find friction points through the lifecycle of the agent.
• A road to the future. The data can be modeled in different scenarios to develop better products. The contact center space is highly competitive and requires constantly informed innovation.
Also see: Digital Transformation Guide: Definition, Types & Strategy
Liveops Leverages CDW to Transform Faster
To help with this initiative, Liveops contracted with the Digital Velocity team, part of CDW Amplified Services.
CDW’s Amplified Services offers full-stack, outcomes-based professional and managed services that brings the knowledge, patterns and practices to bear to help businesses accelerate their digital transformation efforts. One of the reasons Liveops chose CDW is for its project-based pricing model. Many professional services firms use an open ended, time and materials model, which often causes prices to skyrocket during the project. CDW’s approach de-risks the project for the customer.
Additionally, CDW has deep expertise with Google Cloud. CDW has a well-established relationship with Google and was able to leverage that experience on behalf of Liveops. Due to the expertise CDW Amplified Services has with Google, the CDW team was able to accelerate development. For example, CDW built a call redaction system using Google in only 10 weeks, which Wheeler described as an “obscenely short time.”
When the project started, Liveops and CDW measured success in the following ways, centered on outcomes:
• Strong communication: CDW assigned a project manager to Liveops and she effectively became part of the Liveops team and was responsible for continuous communications and updates. This allowed Liveops to quickly pivot when necessary.
• Digital velocity: One of the goals was to speed up operations by launching a contact center domain with a single line of code. This was achieved and now Liveops can almost instantly create the infrastructure set up to pull data from a system and deliver it to the data lake.
• Documentation: This was necessary to conduct knowledge transfer sessions between CDW and Liveops for more efficient ongoing operations. CDW leveraged industry standard best practices – and its own best practices from years of successful engagements – to drive the most value from these sessions.
Now the project is complete, and Wheeler is expecting a significant payoff for Liveops. As a result of the analytics, agent retention should improve by more than 10 percent, revenue should grow 10-15 percent per client, and the new business pipeline will increase by more than 5 percent.