ON DEMAND

Building the ARC

Using Innovation and Culture to Transform Call Center Operations

In this live webinar, our colleagues at Liveops – an Inc 5000 winning call center operation – will join us to share key details on how they used a Salesforce based platform to overhaul their agent system of record, greatly streamlining operations, gaining vital data for better decision making, and recapturing 6,000 work hours lost to manual tracking and processes.

Learn How To Manage Up To 30,000 Independent Call Center Agents.

We’ll share how to bring massive amounts of data into a single source of truth and gain measurable, scalable operational efficiency into complex systems.
  • Get real wisdom from the task force who spearheaded the project
    • How to identify critical business needs and close the gap on disparate data
      • In-depth details of growing a single use case application into a foundational, scalable platform 

THE SPEAKERS

Hear from our experts.

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Denise Ortiz

Director of Solutions Services

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John Wheeler

Solutions Engineer

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Amit Gupta

Director of Engagement

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Todd McClellan

Salesforce Administrator

Transcript

Jennifer Capestany: So, let me wish everyone a good afternoon and I want to thank you for coming here, joining us today. We’re really super excited to share Liveops’ story and really share the digital transformation journey they’ve been going through for a few years now. I’ll tell you a little bit about Liveops. 

Jennifer Capestany: Liveops is a modern call center based in Arizona that offers flexible, scalable virtual contact center solutions for its clients, including clients who have a very complex need. And they built a successful operational model and culture around using skilled, independent agents as a major component of their workforce and routinely win business awards in categories like fast-growth and customer service. So, we have a really great panel of speakers here today to share their multi-year journey, to leverage technology in order to answer major operational challenges. So, I’m going to quickly introduce them and then we’ll just dive right in. 

Jennifer Capestany: If you have any questions throughout this webinar, go ahead and type them right into the Q&A box; if you’re on zoom, if you happen to be on LinkedIn, then you can put it right there into the screen as a comment. And we’ll try to answer them as best we can towards the end of the webinar. So now for our panelists, from Liveops, joining us from the original task force, that’s been spearheading all of this work, we have Denise Ortiz, who is the director of solutions services. Welcome, Denise. 

Jennifer Capestany: We have John Wheeler, who is the solutions engineer for a lot of ups. Welcome John.

John Wheeler: Hey everybody, thank you.

Jennifer Capestany: And from MST side, we have joining us Amit Gupta, who is the practice director for this project on MST side.

Amit Gupta: Hi everyone, good to be here.

Jennifer Capestany: And Todd McClellan, also a Salesforce consultant with MST and important member of the task force for this project.

Jennifer Capestany: Welcome, Todd.

Todd McClellan: Happy to be here. Thank you.

Jennifer Capestany: Cool. So, I think maybe the best way to jump in would be, if we just talk a little bit more about a quick history of Liveops, what its scope of work is and its main goals.

Jennifer Capestany: Denise, do you think you can kind of start us off there?

Denise Ortiz: Yeah, absolutely. As you said earlier, Liveops is a virtual contact center. We’ve been providing agent services for over 20 years. Our agents are all virtual, work at home, remote agents. We have a significant range of working clients from retail support to healthcare, patient support, to sales and just regular customer service.

Denise Ortiz: Our agent community has made of about; I’d say 30,000 independent contractors. They’re all business owners and they choose the work that they do for Liveops. I think our agents are typically more experienced than your standard context center agent. They’re a little older, they have more college experience, more work experience, and they’re working around their lives.

Denise Ortiz: So that gives us a population of agents that really care about what they’re doing, that really enjoy helping the other person on the line. And they’re really passionate about it.

Denise Ortiz: Back to you, Jennifer.

Jennifer Capestany: Yeah. And so, after 20 years of really successful operations, it seems like you reached a point where some of the systems that you had in place had grown very inadequate to your growing needs. And so, can we kind of drive into transition, into talking a little bit about what those major critical business needs were, that drove your decision to just build out a better tech stack and processes? Maybe I can hand the torch back to you, Denise?

Denise Ortiz: Yeah, absolutely. As you said after 20 years and, growing with 30,000 agents, we needed to change our processes. Our technology was no longer scalable to what we were doing. We’re, you know, we’re, we’re still growing and we’re getting more and more advanced, adding more client types. And we want to make sure that we have a system that allows for that. Our needs were mainly in businesses and data, we were lacking a system that could hold all of it in one place.

Denise Ortiz: So, we have a lot of manually check processes, a lot of reports and a lot of blind spots and data. So, this was impacting the way that we could analyze our agent behavior and their performance. Data discrepancies between systems was causing too much reliance on our people to put this together, stitch together the data and make sense of it.

Denise Ortiz: This has created gaps in records. It creates delays in agents getting paid, and we have a lack of visibility into agent attrition and again, agent behavior.

Denise Ortiz: Along with that, we had a more staccato onboarding process. Our agents weren’t getting a streamline process for onboarding, for training and the data capture that comes along with it. John, do you want to go into a little bit more detail there?

John Wheeler: Yeah, certainly. Do you know what? We were a company that was growing really rapidly and whenever you have a high growth company, you have certain areas of the company that are making decisions on an island.

John Wheeler: And in our situation, we’d sort of created islands so that they could create their own decisions. The result was these really great teams were making the very best decisions that they could with the tools at their disposal. The tools at their disposal were Google sheets, Excel documents. They had. They had outlook and they had the swivel on their desk chair. They could take the piece of paper and move it to the guy next to them. And that was usually the most efficient tool set that they had at their disposal. For our purposes though, as we were growing, we were identifying that, that was starting to become unscalable. And so, we wanted to develop a really strong grouping of software, so that way we could standardize our operations allowing our people to focus on the things that they do best and enable Liveops to grow more rapidly through process consolidation and automation.

John Wheeler: And so that’s why we brought on this solution and that’s ultimately why we started engaging with groups like MST.

Jennifer Capestany: Okay. So, with all of those considerations in mind, how did you then go about the process of assembling a task force, identifying the critical businesses- which ones to go after first and creating an implementation plan.

Jennifer Capestany: If you can you start us off Denise? Maybe you can start.

Denise Ortiz: Yeah, absolutely. So, I began by building a really small team of just minds across the organization that were curious and driven to create solutions for these needs that we’ve obviously observed and identified. We interviewed every business unit at Liveops to discover pain points, hidden issues that people have been dealing with over years and just a desire for a new system. What do they want from a new system? We wrote down all of these business requirements and a proposal for a solution and presented that to our leadership. We determined that our most critical needs were streamlining that agent life cycle and providing a single source of truth for our agent data.

Denise Ortiz: Both of these obviously work really hand in hand and the solution became really clear. What we ultimately needed was again, just a single source of truth for our information. I think creating something like this was, incredibly necessary after 21 years of having disparate systems across the board.

Jennifer Capestany: Great, cool. John, can you take us down even further into that one?

John Wheeler: Yeah, certainly. So, after Denise said put together the task force, we identified, we needed to come up with a software solution. And some of the considerations that were made were, do we build it ourselves? Do we go out into the market and find some sort of open-source software and identify some developers who can help us with that?

John Wheeler: Do we go with a new vendor? Somebody brand new, I think there were a couple of really just sort of prudent business decisions that came to the conclusion that working with Salesforce and identifying a great partner to assist us with developing on the Salesforce platform would be the right decision.

John Wheeler: Some of the kind of prudent decisions where we were already using Salesforce by our sales team. So, we had existing contracts. We had the sort of infrastructure that is often necessary before you start up a new vendor or a new relationship with a new organization. We have folks at Salesforce that we trusted to help us make these decisions.

John Wheeler: And Salesforce has a lot of infrastructure that’s really important. I can go to the local community college, and I can get a class on Salesforce. That’s when, you know you’re on the right track. But also, they have infrastructure such as their support structure. So, they already have trusted folks that they work with- trusted partners on a list. We can find somebody who’s local, we can find some. Better ratings, we can find somebody with the right competencies, and we can identify those really quickly get into a conference room with them (this was 2019) and start a conversation about what we want to accomplish.

John Wheeler: And I think some of those really key parts are the reason we went with Salesforce and ultimately why we went with MST solutions. For one, we vetted a number of different of these partners. But something that you have to be aware of with Liveops is our business model, much like the business model of most businesses is weird.

John Wheeler: We’re a weird company and something that worked out really well with MST is we just sort of clicked. And it was a really great personal relationship, right out of the gate. But it’s also and acceptance, right? We weren’t asking MST to help us like mold the company into something different.

John Wheeler: We were asking MST to work with us, partner with us and develop something that was really unique to Liveops and really stretch their own understanding of how Salesforce could function. And our use cases always going to be a little bit odd. But MST really early on indicated to us that they could work with us and that that’s certainly panned out over time.

John Wheeler: Amit? you were in the room quite a while ago. What was our early planning? Like, how did that go? It was a long time ago.

Amit Gupta: Thank you, John. So, when we started our engagement with you at Liveops, we had you talk about the vision and challenges. So, we understand how we can help them, help your organization, how we can make both Liveops and MST successful.

Amit Gupta: So, we noticed a few areas where we needed to focus immediately. We realized that data integrity and data access need that required data exchanges across a large number of applications that was very critical. And we wanted the data to be available easily to everyone who needs it at the right time.

Amit Gupta: And then second one, we realized that there may be dynamic priorities at Liveops that would require a lot of flexibility from MST. So, what we did is, we focused on the functional side as well as non-functional side, both. We had a dedicated Architect on the team to ensure we use the right tools available to deliver on these requirements around the data integrity and data access. Our Architect who worked very closely with you guys at Liveops ensured that we keep our design scalable and easy to adapt to the changing requirements.

Amit Gupta: We ensured our team had a mix of both Salesforce and integration skills. So, we can work on a comprehensive solution to address these challenges. Our timely demos, as we started working with you guys, our timely demos of the completed work, it was critical in ensuring that we are on the right track. We decided to take a phased approach because there was a lot to be accomplished to achieve the vision that you had. So, we’ve completed three phases so far, and now starting to work on phase four. We remained very flexible actually in accepting the requirements and the changes over time, we knew that Liveops had a small IT team, which means that we may be needed to work on different priorities at any time.

Amit Gupta: So, we remained open to adjusting on MST side, to better support you. We ensure throughout the project that we do it right. So, to summarize, we started with a goal of becoming an extended team and a trusted partner to Liveops without adding any much forehead. And I think we have come a long way in this game-changing journey with you all at Liveops.

Amit Gupta: Back to you, Jennifer.

Jennifer Capestany: Thank you. That’s very, very enlightening. It sounds like a lot of the early planning is really focused on agility, Architecture and building that right size team so that the implementation itself is also right sized and scalable.

Jennifer Capestany: So, let’s get into solutions and project execution. Yeah, I think it’s a really good time. We’ll talk about the project execution and ARC as it came to be called, the custom solution that Liveops and MSP solutions developed and put into place. I’m going to have him torch back to Denise to get us started off on a general idea of what ARC is.

Denise Ortiz: Sure, Jennifer. Yes. ARC as we, so lovingly call it is our Agent Record Center. it truly is just a Salesforce based platform, but it allows us to do our weird things, as John has stated. It gives us full visibility into our agents and all the accounts they work on. It’s provided a huge amount of transparency around our agent and their life cycle here at Liveops. It’s replaced a lot of manual processes with automated workflows.

Denise Ortiz: So, it helps cut down on time that the teams are spending, not talking to agents, not helping out their team. We’ve enabled an improved agent and facilitator experience when it comes to certification, you know, the agent training; Allowed us to integrate with multiple platforms that we’re still using.

Denise Ortiz: You know, we’re still a BPO that handles lots of different business types. So, we do have a lot of platforms that we must access, but this integration has led us get the data in one place. Because we now have our data in one place, it’s a lot better quality. We can see our agent behavior a lot easier, and it helps us with hiring new agents.

Denise Ortiz: It helps us retain them for longer and it helps improve their onboarding process.

Denise Ortiz: Todd. Do you want to talk a little bit about how we configured Salesforce to do all of this for us?

Todd McClellan: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Denise. You know, one of the greatest things about Salesforce really is its ability to adapt to how you want it to work for you.

Todd McClellan: And, you know, working with Liveops, they came to us with a really great vision of, what that looked like for them. And with that vision, we were able to identify, what Salesforce tools were needed in order to build out this powerful data management resource, which they’ve called the Agent Records Center or ARC, you know, MST has been involved in doing some of the Salesforce development, but the big lift for us was really trying to figure out how to integrate all these different outside systems.

Todd McClellan: To get them to communicate with Salesforce in a way that worked for Liveops business process was the real challenge. So we utilized MuleSoft as our main integration tool in order to accomplish that, , by accurately sharing data and updating records in Salesforce, , we’re able to eliminate a lot of the manual effort related to tracking data in the process and making ARC that source of truth, really a one-stop shop defined accurate data and status related to the different stages of an agent’s journey. Liveops also identified Service Cloud and Community Cloud as tools that would help enhance their org and improve their user experience. Agents and Liveops employees can now submit requests through community portals, which then can be routed, managed, and even tracked all within Salesforce.

Todd McClellan: You know, rather than having to use multiple systems outside of ARC, as John mentioned, which can lead to more manual effort, you know, longer turnaround times and even bad or lost data and one of the great things working with Liveops, as I mentioned before, is that great vision that they came to us.

Todd McClellan: So, by integrating these different systems and developing Salesforce, providing a better user experience, for their employees, as they track these agents’ journeys, they’re set up with a platform now that allows them to be an enterprise level solution for contact center. And I think it’s worth adding, a project like this does take a lot of flexibility and trust in our partnership.

Todd McClellan: Liveops were working with a lot of different internal teams. We’re also being introduced to new systems that weren’t familiar with and that we have to learn. But although they brought their own unique challenges, working so closely with Liveops, , as I said, as an extended part of their team, we were able to come up with the right solutions and work together in order to identify, how to work through these roadblocks, what areas do we need to grow and how do we eventually make these different systems come together and treat this really powerful platform that can and will continue to grow with Liveops. So, it is really exciting to see this start, to come together as we’re getting closer and closer to helping them realize that vision.

Todd McClellan: Back to you, Jennifer

Jennifer Capestany: thank you. I’m going to pass the torch to Amit.

Jennifer Capestany: We know that this project was implemented in phases. Can you just kind of walk us through that timeline and just kind of maybe talk about some of the major software players behind ARC really?

Amit Gupta: Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, we have completed three phases of this project so far and are now starting to work on phase four.

Amit Gupta: So, when we started phase one, our being focused was to have these systems start talking to Salesforce. So, integrations with our main focus, we set up integrations with between Salesforce and open force Domo topics, right? So, we started making these connections so that we can start talking to the Salesforce from these systems and back and forth.

Amit Gupta: Right. We started setting up the data model within Salesforce to set up the groups and engagements so that it would accurately reflect the agent and their businessman relationships. One of the major piece and phase one was around duplicate management. We obviously don’t want it to pick a data in the system.

Amit Gupta: So, we’re working very closely with Liveops to understand what’s the duplicate criteria and how do we, implement those criteria so that we don’t end up a lot of duplicate data provisioning of Salesforce access, where the stuff was part of phase one. We came up with the concept of a global ID basically using the global ID across the system so that we know that we’re talking about the same better.

Amit Gupta: So, we did all of this in phase one, again, as they said it, it’s a phased approach -it was a phased approach. And we didn’t want to just do a lot in phase one when we take a baby step and then see how. The phase one was a big success, and then we moved into phase two ways when, now that we have the systems talking to Salesforce and, you know, we started bringing data into Salesforce.

Amit Gupta: So, bringing the DOB data from open force, the forward end application, which Liveops use for recruitment. We start sinking that good within between fountain and Salesforce. The talent acquisition team started receiving welcome emails from that. The life cycle of agents starting to come out right in Salesforce, whether it’s a new agent or an existing agent, or if some deactivated. The document storage- we started thinking about as part of phase two. So, we did all of this in as part of phase two. And, after we completed phase. That is when we started seeing the platform starting to work from end to end. And we started getting ideas that, oh, this is how it works. How about we bring this also into Salesforce or how about we connect this application also?

Amit Gupta: So, as part of phase three, which we recently concluded we started talking about how we provision all these applications from Salesforce itself, so we don’t have to send an email or a request and to have somebody create some account for accesses. And so, we started this provisioning across those applications from Salesforce.

Amit Gupta: We used Community Cloud, a starter for two, for an in-house compliance team. It was a perfect use case where a user would come on to Community Cloud and some of the data where that, and then it would go on the back end and Salesforce to the right people at the right time. So, we also talked and did, the HelloSign integration.

Amit Gupta: There are a lot of contract renewals, contract extensions, contract creation, the documentation that happens with agents to Liveops. So, we brought in HelloSign and then we started working on that. We recently completed that. The document storage for HelloSign, where do we store all of those contract documentation?

Amit Gupta: Right. So, all of that was part of phase three. So yeah, I mean, we have come a long way on this engagement. And then, you know, with this amount of work that we competed over the last three years, The change management becomes equally important you know make sure that we have to do proper internal communications or external communications.

Amit Gupta: We were, there to ensure that Liveops team has everything available to support their communications, the access to the changes and do our environment so that they can create their training documentation, excess to pilot users. They pick their own time right before launching it live in production, the trainings, the user guides that we provided with each demo.

Amit Gupta: So, whenever we complete anything, we do demo and we put user guides for the team saying that this is how you can tell us this is how it works. So, it worked out pretty well. I think that that form is up and running. It’s been very successfully adapted over these last couple of years.

Amit Gupta: What we’ve done is a game changing and amazing journey with Liveops. And it’s been working out pretty.

Amit Gupta: Well, back to Jennifer.

Jennifer Capestany: I think it’s interesting how you mentioned it’s almost an unmeasurable benefit where once you start the process and you put that first phase one into implementation, it kind of opens up the mentioned flood gates into, okay, we’ve gone this far where else can we improve operational efficiency? Where else, how else can we create better quality data and get that data to where it needs to be? So that’s kind of interesting how there’s a little bit of an even more of a growth mindset that comes with something like these changes how we think when we don’t have to do, you know, like spreadsheets acrobatics anymore.

Jennifer Capestany: So, I think that’s actually a good time to just go into benefits and return on investments and just giving a quick talk about, okay after all of that meticulous planning and in a carefully implement a careful implementation using a phased approach, how has ARC proved itself to be an effective engagement and collaboration tool?

Jennifer Capestany: Denise, you want to start us off?

Denise Ortiz: Yeah, sure. By switching over to ARC, as our beta source, human errors and reporting have disappeared, you know, we’ve seen a lot fewer human errors because we don’t have as many hands touching this data anymore. That’s incredible because it gives us more trust in ourselves and our systems and our agents, knowing that this data has been automated untouched by a typo here or there.

Denise Ortiz: So that helps a ton. That’s a huge benefit already. We’ve created transparency, good or bad, you know, we’ve allowed ourselves to understand the true behaviors of, and trends of our community. Sometimes we don’t like to see what, you know, see what we see, but it’s a good thing. It helps us learn, helps us grow.

Denise Ortiz: And when we see the good transparency, it reminds us that we’re doing the right thing, that we’re developing our agents correctly. We’re engaging them like we should. As I mentioned earlier to hiring and onboarding has become so much smoother and faster with ARC, we have less steps for the agent to take less steps for our employees to take and it’s created more retention.

Denise Ortiz: It’s created a faster time to production for our agents. We get them on phones faster. So, they’re more excited about what they’re doing every day. And with this, we’ve created an overall better experience for our agents. This is huge, you know, at the heart of Liveops is the agent community, so anything we can do to improve their experience is a win for us.

Denise Ortiz: And because we’re spending less time on these manual processes or giving our teams back a ton of hours, we’ve redirected something like 6,000 hours (about 8 months) of manual work. So, this is time that they get to spend engaging with their agent teams instead of working on a spreadsheet every day.

Denise Ortiz: John, do you want to go into this a little bit more talk about where this data was hidden before and how our teams are using this.

John Wheeler: Well, you know, when we implemented the agent record center, we saw immediate improvements in really significant metrics. So, some of the major metrics were in places like Time to completion of their application.

John Wheeler: So, we were placing a lot of artificial barriers in between an agent and the completion of their application because of some sort of process latency, right. Somebody had to go over to the data, verify it, and then move it on to the next step that was adding in some cases, days and some cases weeks onto just the application process to become an agent.

John Wheeler: This Agent Records Center has reduced it from an average of approximately 17-ish days to approximately 3-ish days. And that means that we have significantly greater throughput. We’ve also made a number of different agents facing applications. So previously, if an agent wanted to correspond with us, they had to communicate with us in their agent ID or their name or their email, or, any other number of human error possibilities, that contributed a lot to confusion on their side, increases in length of time necessary to complete the case and just sort of general analytics gaps. We didn’t know that an agent had corresponded with us because we didn’t know who that agent was. We’ve completely removed that by implementing a Service Cloud and now agents are able to log in to a portal that they can interact with us and create cases. They can explore new opportunities. And there’s quite a bit more to come for the agent community there as well.

John Wheeler: In addition, we’ve improved significantly our analytics capabilities. So, because we have data in a singular place and because that data is a cleaner, more trusted and there’s more inputs, right? There are more places where this data is coming from or able to see the agent life cycle in a much more textured way. We can see the agents as they move through each system and see where the friction points are and more efficiently identify how to remove that friction.

John Wheeler: And a lot of that has contributed to the phased approach. As we added more to the system, we were able to gather more data and then react to that data collection by implementing new or better systems or prioritizing systems for development. So, effectively, this has resulted in significantly less system maintenance.

John Wheeler: A lot of the hours that we’re saving, is in time that we don’t have to resolve for a spreadsheet, or somebody changed a header to them. We don’t have to track down a particular change in a spreadsheet. And we don’t have to take two spreadsheets and VLOOKUP them as a part of a daily process.

John Wheeler: So, all of this combined has resulted in significant benefits, significant ROI, and more than that, a more humane process for our own people and for our agents in coming into and contributing to Liveops. So, it’s really been transformational in a really big way.

John Wheeler: Amit, you might have something to contribute to this as well.

Amit Gupta: Yeah. I mean, hearing all these benefits and ROI that has come out of this journey and you know, I have been firsthand in the discussions with not just you, Denise and John, but to your extended team who have been part of these various projects. And, you know, I have heard saying that this is it? I don’t have to do anything. Is this done? You know, all those kinds of quotes and feedback that we’ve received, it’s been truly a game changing journey you know, with Liveops.

Amit Gupta: I’ll talk a little bit about more about MuleSoft, how it was so critical as a tool, and it really helped in a big way to facilitate the integrations across these different applications to ensure that the teams across the enterprise have access to the data.

Amit Gupta: It’s been, some of the things like, you can have reusable assets to build your APIs and integrations that helped in a big way for us to deliver the solution. The Cloud set up, you know, we just configure things in Cloud, and this is there right for us to use. Deployments to various different environments using MuleSoft was pretty easy, straightforward. It was just some cliques here and there with some minor changes you’re up and running and then into a different environment. Some out of the box features that MuleSoft that we get is, to gain real visibility and you go on your APIs and integrations from one interface, you can see all of your things in just one screen.

Amit Gupta: It’s just amazing how the data you can see makes sense all the time. Time to market obviously was faster with the MuleSoft. So, they also have some pre-built APIs, connectors, templates, accelerators, and all that stuff. Right. There are some assets that you can just jump start your development. So, yeah, it’s been huge. And again, as I mentioned earlier, hearing those quotes directly from the team at Liveops in our public discussions and demos was just so overwhelming know it was like something that we really played a critical role with Liveops in this journey.

Amit Gupta: Todd, you also have been part of some of these or most of these discussions.

Amit Gupta: Do you want to add more?

Todd McClellan: I should unmute myself. Yeah. I think the biggest thing regarding MuleSoft is, early on, as you said, having those discussions and really trying to understand what Liveops was trying to accomplish, we needed something that was going to play nicely with Salesforce, where we can integrate multiple systems, and MuleSoft provided the ability to do that.

Todd McClellan: Its goal as a middleware is really to, you know, expose data and consume data, sending that data back and forth through the API really to provide a seamless experience, in looking at Liveops, trying to create that source of truth, a place to go for accurate data. , it really ended up being , a great fit, the way that the data can flow, it’s consistent, it’s accurate, you know, it’s an automated service.

Todd McClellan: So, we’re able to control that data and ensure that accuracy, which is why it was such a great fit for this project. So hopefully that helps answer that a little bit.

Jennifer Capestany: I think it does. Thank you.

Jennifer Capestany: That’s actually, it’s a really amazing story because it sounds like with respect to benefits this one, I suppose, in some ways you could call it this one single platform ARC has benefited operational efficiency, data analysis, data-driven decision-making was now much more possible with this system, but you also had impacts- improving employee retention, making creating a better experience for them that in turn is going to create a better experience for your clients. So, I really, it’s almost like a real cascade of benefits.

Jennifer Capestany: And, if that makes us weird that we want it to go on that journey, then weird is good. So that’s, pretty awesome. I’m guessing that we have some questions. And we’ve got to my shock plenty of time to answer a couple of questions from anyone who has, so I’ll go ahead and start.

Jennifer Capestany: One question I that I’m getting is, let’s see here. Oh, here’s an easy one. What’s next for live hops with regard to digital transformation, phase four, if you will, who wants that?

John Wheeler: I think I can take this. So, phase four came out of feedback and collaboration as we’ve developed the Agent Records Center.

John Wheeler: So, we started kind of end of 2019 you know, a bit of a law through first half of 20, and then really started barreling in through 20 and 21. And all through that time, what we’ve been doing is really rapidly improving certain features and identifying, where else can we take this?

John Wheeler: Where else can we improve? Where else can we make the experience better for our team and for our agents? And one of the major places that we identified was system provisioning. Right? So, contact centers are made up of weird pieces of software that have been around for like hundreds of years. And they enable an agent to receive calls. And these are systems that are often, sometimes difficult to interact with because of their age. And so, a lot of times what we have to do is create a process that’s really human driven that takes a list of agents and then email this guy and they’ll upload it to this system and then email this other guy and they’ll upload it to this system and then email this other guy and they’ll verify that everything works.

John Wheeler: So what we’re doing is using phase four to implement a consolidated API that’s just for Liveops and we will effectively be able to manage that whole process through a single system that is extensible over time and really takes advantage of the key benefits of MuleSoft, Salesforce as a data platform and really brings us to normality actually, in terms of what these tools are really for.

John Wheeler: In addition, we’re doing some really great things in a process improvement all throughout the organization. And in things like the development of a better agent experience through bringing on more data that we can make visible to that agent. And in addition, where we’re doing some great wrap-up work.

John Wheeler: So, making sure that the system or all of the systems themselves have a really great continuous delivery and continuous improvement pipeline. Standardizing that inside of our own organization and producing the sort of technical documents and personnel that enables us to maintain that long-term.

John Wheeler: So, it’s a real, just sort of a cherry on top of the, the cake to help us transition to us owning it, but also us continuing to improve it for the long term.

Jennifer Capestany: Okay. So, for Denise or John, I think this would be, how did you ensure that you would have a high adoption rate amongst the crew who’s using ARC? How did you, ensure that everyone is on board, that they’re happy they’re using the software?

Jennifer Capestany: Yeah, how was that?

Denise Ortiz: I can take that. I think a few things that have helped us ensure engagement from the stakeholders and the teams really using this tool is focusing on their needs make sure that while solving for problems. That the team has that you’re giving them what they need.

Denise Ortiz: You’re giving them what they need. And not just that providing some enhanced features that they maybe didn’t know could happen. I think we’ve surprised and delighted a few teams with some really cool features that no one really expected. And I can thank MST for that. They’ve really helped put those pieces in place.

Denise Ortiz: Ask help from those teams. They’re, willing to put in the work because they know that they’re going to reap the benefits at the end of it. So, they’re more likely to adopt a system that they helped build. So, we’ve been doing a lot of that and create engaging training. It’s so difficult to train all people with one methodology, create videos, FAQ’s documents create different ways for people to understand the system, because it is a new tool.

Denise Ortiz: It can be overwhelming at first, but if you’ve provided the right support and training it helps go that extra mile in getting people to get themselves involved.

Jennifer Capestany: Mm, cool. I’ve got one more and this one looks like several people can contribute to answering this one. And it’s basically, what advice would you to other organizations considering a similar monetization project or digital transformation project. What, advice do you think each of you would give regarding anything, any part of that process?

Denise Ortiz: I’m happy to start. Thank you. One of the, one of the pieces of pieces of advice I’d give is ask your stakeholders for input.

Denise Ortiz: I know we just talked about that, but really get your end users, your stakeholders, to understand the problems and the solutions and help you out with this project. And another piece of advice I’d say is foster buy-in from your leadership team.

Denise Ortiz: Here at Liveops, we’re really lucky in having a leadership team that trusts us, that understands our problems and wants to see them get solved.

Denise Ortiz: So just foster by and right at the beginning, your leadership team is more than likely aware of the current pain points and they’re most likely excited to help you solve them. So those would be my two biggest pieces of advice.

Denise Ortiz: And if anybody else wants to jump in?

Amit Gupta: I think I can, chime in here from a partner perspective that you know, when you are undergoing such a huge change in the information, right, from the technology perspective as a partner, it becomes equally more important to support the clients. And what we have done the last few years is, is being truly a trusted partner and an extended team, which means that don’t come in as a partner or the consultancy. And then, okay, this is it. You need to do this. Here it is, right. That’s not how it’s going to work out for, for this kind of journey.

Amit Gupta: It is that, you know, we are in this together and this is what you asked for, but “hey, our other clients have done this as well. How about this?” We brought in some suggestions as well while we were working with the requirements, and we just work together to make sure that it works. out finally in the end, right?

Amit Gupta: At the end of the day, we all will be successful together. So, at the partner, I would suggest that it’s not just taking orders, but come with suggestions as well.

Jennifer Capestany: Right. So from a standpoint of system integrator or consulting partner the ideal SI is going to be someone who does not come in and tell you what you need, but instead comes in with just kind of an open mind and actually listens first to make sure that we’re matching the needs of that company, instead of just telling them this is the software for you and, you know, and make it is key.

Jennifer Capestany: Cool. Anyone else or before we close out?

John Wheeler: Yeah, I would say from a, from an engineering perspective, there’s a tendency, I think among folks like me to want to go at it alone. And I can do this. This is trivial work. Right?

John Wheeler: But the, the challenge to that is when you’re changing an entire organization, when you’re changing the transmission, while the car is running, you’ll need a couple of extra hands and the challenge is finding a platform that is extensible, that is flexible, but also one that has a lot of experience already built into it.

John Wheeler: Has the battle scars and has healed from them. And it’s also about finding a good partner that has outside experience. As you, mentioned, you’ve spent a lot of time with us, providing experience, and lending us some of the best people I’ve ever met with their knowledge and experience.

John Wheeler: And that’s been really, really impactful in not only implementing ARC, but also in re-understanding how to develop things and how to approach these sorts of products. So, I would say to somebody who’s embarking on this journey to find a partner and find it soon, find it before you start because your ROI is going to be faster and your leadership is going to be happier sooner, and they’re going to support your journey more, if you can return their investment quicker. And it’s a sort of conglomeration of, of all of this, which is if you find a great partner, they will help you and usher you through this journey and provide you with something that is far greater than the sum of its parts. So that would be my advice.

Jennifer Capestany: Perfect.

Jennifer Capestany: Thank you. I guess we’re about done. I am going to suggest again that if anyone has any questions, it’s okay to go ahead and put it onto the LinkedIn page or email us. We’ll also have an on-demand recording sent out to each of you who signed up, and if you have any questions at that point, go ahead and send them and we will all do our best to answer you. Anyone who actually signed in intended will be entered into a drawing to win that Apple watch You’ll get an email letting you know if you’re the lucky winner. So, one more time, I want to thank the panelists for joining us so much. Thank you, Denise, John Todd and Amit for coming on here and sharing the story best of luck, in phase four and future phases and thank all of the people who attended.

Jennifer Capestany: So, thanks again, have a great day. And we’ll have the recording and drawing results out to you by email very soon.

Jennifer Capestany: Thank you.

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