LiveVox: Contact Center Challenges Mean Opportunities for Partners
"What we're teaching our partners to do is to pivot their conversations from replacing a contact center into enhancing a contact center."
July 19, 2022
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Channel Futures: Can we talk a little bit about the current technologies that LiveVox is working on and how it fits into the partner program?
LiveVox’s MeiLee Langley: There’s a lot of conversation around the contact center and getting these legacy contact centers and on-premises contact centers up to speed with the agility and the advanced features and products that exist within cloud contact centers. And for a lot of our legacy contact center partners, that can be a bit of an intimidating conversation. They’ve been selling the same technology for a long time. They’ve got customers who are in these long-term contracts with their automatic call distribution (ACD) and their contact center technology.
So we’re trying to do things differently at LiveVox. We enable our partners to sell all our features and different product sets with the land and expand mentality. This means you can sell our artificial intelligence virtual agents (AI/VA); you can sell our workforce management tools; you can sell our analytics without having to replace or touch a customer’s existing ACD system. So, if they’re in a contract or they’re just not ready to move their ACD, which is the core part of the calling contact center, it’s OK. We will layer on top of that.
And because of that ability, what we’re teaching our partners to do is to pivot their conversations from replacing a contact center into enhancing a contact center.
CF: Why do that? Why go that route rather than, say, both replace and enhance?
ML: There’s a lot of uncertainty in the market right now because of what happened with COVID. Companies are hesitant to do a lot of gigantic system-wide changes. CIOs and CTOs are hesitant to sign their name on something that could completely disrupt the operations of their business. So enhancement is more our approach given the current climate that we’re in.
Additionally, there’s a staffing crisis that contact centers are having right now. There is a higher degree of agent churn or turnover now than what we have ever seen. Companies are having unprecedented agent turnover, which means for every agent they hire, they lose an agent to churn. They just can’t keep up with that pace. A lot of these customers and these companies are realizing they must implement a virtual agent strategy. They have to implement an AI-controlled natural language processing IVR system to do advanced call routing. CEOs are going to make sure that their customers don’t feel the pain and the strain of losing agents left, right and center. And when you hire a new agent to replace the one you’ve lost, there’s a period where that new agent has to ramp, and that’s going to just inevitably slow down your systems. What’s great about our AI-powered virtual agents is that supervisors can monitor them, can train them, can empower them, without the burnout. They appear on a dashboard just like the human agents do. The supervisors can get in there and tweak those virtual agents straight from their dashboard. So it just becomes a seamless way for the supervisors to continue to do business the way that they do business.
And by us focusing on the enhanced versus the replace conversation, it allows us to be a lot more targeted, and talk to the solutions that the customers are asking for. It also allows us to teach our partners to talk to those solutions that the customers are asking for.
CF: How is the current economic climate influencing the industry?
ML: I think there’s uncertainty about growth projections and business projections. Pre COVID, a lot of companies could bank on a certain percentage of year-over-year growth if all things remained equal. The economy is now kind of up a day, down a day. There are talks of a recession. There’s also the great resignation. There are just so many uncertainties that executives, in my opinion, are in very much uncharted waters. And they’re doing their best to make guesses and make projections based on the data that they have. And a lot of them are bringing in analysts and third parties to help them. Ultimately, we don’t know what January looks like. We don’t even know what October is going to look like.
CF: So then how does this affect a partner’s ability to sell the product? I mean, how does it change their dialogue with a contact center?
ML: For partners, they can’t just use their normal scripts. They must do a deeper discovery to understand what problems the customer is having and what challenges they’re experiencing within their current contact center. Even if something isn’t necessarily broken, there are areas to make it better. It might be enhancing products or creating a product road map or a digital transformation road map. We’re changing the conversation that there’s no immediate need to replace the system, rather to enhance it as part of a digital transformation journey.
CF: Artificial intelligence offers so much promise, yet it’s not meeting the needs of contact centers. Live agents are still quitting their jobs to a large extent. Shouldn’t AI be able to supplement the workload so that live agents are more comfortable in their positions? Shouldn’t it help live agents do their job better?
ML: This is from my personal perspective and from what I’ve been hearing. AI was this very exciting thing, but where people have really fallen short is from an adoption standpoint and an improper implementation standpoint. AI can be hugely powerful from a workflow perspective, from a routing perspective, outside of the virtual agent side of things. We can automate so many processes and take those tedious tasks off the hands of the live agents and enable them to be hyper-focused on those higher-level, more human-intensive issues or questions. But I’ve noticed that the technology is not implemented in a way that it really solves the workflows. Personally, I feel companies have every intention of doing that, so they do a baseline implementation, but they never come back around as the agents get used to the technology to add in phase two and phase three to really start to create these automations and these workflows. So, they’re not using AI to its full capability.
I think something that LiveVox does really well is we essentially “white glove” our implementation. There is a whole plan around your business case for this technology and how can we make sure it’s implemented in a way to solve your short-term needs. And then, again, we’re creating that road map to come back to do a phase two to solve those concerns later on as well. I think it’s just a misfire of implementation that leads to a lack of adoption. The technology is really advanced and awesome across carriers, and I don’t think it’s getting utilized properly.
CF: For partners, what kinds of challenges are they facing when it comes to helping their clients utilize AI?
ML: In my mind, it’s a lack of enablement. Partners have been selling telco, and contact center, and CCaaS and UCaaS … they’ve been selling these other types of technologies for so long, that they’re not the experts in AI/VA as they are in these other technologies. Right now, I think the lack of knowledge that exists is not the fault of the partners; they just don’t have the time and the bandwidth to put in the time to learn, to take the trainings, and go to these webinars and do the research. Not only do they not have the time to learn what the technology is capable of but also how to implement it in a way that’s going to be powerful and impactful to the customer. How do partners stay up to date with what the technology is going to be able to do in six months to a year? There’s such a big learning curve there. My personal suggestion is if partners want to build an AI practice, I suggest they hire someone — one person within the organization — to become that AI/VA and IVR subject matter expert and spend three months learning the providers, and learning at an industry level, each provider, where they’re strong and where they’re weak. Position that individual so that the partner sales teams can lean on them. Where there’s a knowledge gap, lean on your providers. As a provider, we’re spending a lot of money and a lot of resources putting this training together for partners because we know this is where the technology is going, and we know this is where the knowledge gap is. Ask us for webinars, ask us for e-books, ask us for recommendations and we will happily pass them along.
CF: There’s been a lot of conversation about what the role of a partner is as time goes on. Many people say they are evolving into more of a consultant. Talking to you now, it almost sounds like what you’ve just described is the perfect definition of a consultant.
MF: It is because, to me, customers care less about the speeds, the feeds and the pricing than they do about whether it’s their use case, their problem, their business need. They want partners to help them solve those things in the most cohesive way possible. And that’s where partners are so powerful right now because companies are realizing, “Sure, I can google ‘best of breed’ and put all these solutions together,” but they don’t know if those solutions work well together. Companies want to go to that partner to be that consultant.
At LiveVox, we have a new partner program, Activate. We want to focus our time on those who are not only going to take the time and learn to be solution sellers across our LiveVox portfolio but also technology as a whole. If we can also teach partners where LiveVox fits in across a cohesive technology stack that complements the contact center, then the partner is going to position us more often into solutions. As everything is getting commoditized to an extent, partners can’t just sell one product; they have to focus on selling the stack in order to remain profitable for them.
CF: Do you have anything you want to add about the partner experience? Is there anything else that readers should know?
ML: When it comes to partners being asked to be more of a consultant, we know that’s putting pressure on the partner to do more than what they’ve been traditionally been doing. We’re asking them to become more knowledgeable, to take the time to invest in training where they can’t just focus on selling and sales. The latter is what puts food on the table and money in the bank. And we understand that. So, I would really encourage partners when they’re feeling like, “Oh man, these providers and customers are asking for so much more of us.” Understand that the providers are also giving you more and trying our hardest to make programs easier.
For example, at LiveVox, as I’ve built this partner program, I’ve been hyper-focused on building out demand-generation campaigns and programs and tools from things as basic as campaigns in a box to actual appointment setting. We want to take that burden off of our partners so they have the bandwidth and the time to focus on researching and learning the technology. Reach out to your providers and ask them what they have to offer by way of helping partners do demand generation and marketing. Because a lot of our partners are weak in those areas and it’s the can that gets kicked down the road.
Let the provider be an extension of your team, because if you’re willing to invest in them from a time and knowledge perspective, I would bet, and I speak from LiveVox and my own personal experience, we are ready to put in these program dollars and invest our time to augment your team and make it easier for you to do business.
CF: Do you have anything you want to add about the partner experience? Is there anything else that readers should know?
ML: When it comes to partners being asked to be more of a consultant, we know that’s putting pressure on the partner to do more than what they’ve been traditionally been doing. We’re asking them to become more knowledgeable, to take the time to invest in training where they can’t just focus on selling and sales. The latter is what puts food on the table and money in the bank. And we understand that. So, I would really encourage partners when they’re feeling like, “Oh man, these providers and customers are asking for so much more of us.” Understand that the providers are also giving you more and trying our hardest to make programs easier.
For example, at LiveVox, as I’ve built this partner program, I’ve been hyper-focused on building out demand-generation campaigns and programs and tools from things as basic as campaigns in a box to actual appointment setting. We want to take that burden off of our partners so they have the bandwidth and the time to focus on researching and learning the technology. Reach out to your providers and ask them what they have to offer by way of helping partners do demand generation and marketing. Because a lot of our partners are weak in those areas and it’s the can that gets kicked down the road.
Let the provider be an extension of your team, because if you’re willing to invest in them from a time and knowledge perspective, I would bet, and I speak from LiveVox and my own personal experience, we are ready to put in these program dollars and invest our time to augment your team and make it easier for you to do business.
A contact center may face a host of challenges these days. One of the biggest problems is agent retention, as contact centers have experienced unprecedented turnover in most circumstances. However, with the advent of virtual agents and other artificial intelligence tools, one might think these centers could easily remedy high turnover. This is not so much the case.
LiveVox’s MeiLee Langley
MeiLee Langley is head of worldwide channel marketing at LiveVox, the San Francisco-based next generation contact and call center software company. In April, Langley and LiveVox launched Activate. The new channel program provides partners with key tools to sell LiveVox’s blended omnichannel capabilities – including AI – to new customers.
In this interview (see above slideshow) with Channel Futures, Langley discusses the promise and shortcomings of AI implementation in contact centers. And she explains what a temperamental economy is doing to disrupt these centers. She also outlines the role that partners will need to play to sell AI. The technology evolves every six months to a year.
Finally, Langley shares LiveVox’s approach to guarantee, she says, partners will feel supported when learning how to be a technology consultant.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Claudia Adrien or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
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