Contact center company LiveOps (News - Alert) certainly has a lot to be thankful for this holiday season as the company recently announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire the assets of New Zealand based Datasquirt (News - Alert) and it has launched two new cloud applications, LiveOps Multichannel and LiveOps Social, that integrate Dataquirt's CONTACT solution with the LiveOps Platform.

LiveOps provides the full platform, applications, and talent in the cloud. More than 200 companies, including Salesforce.com, Symantec (News - Alert) and AAA have enlisted the help of LiveOps to exploit the interactions between today's multichannel, social and mobile consumers and the enterprise contact center to ultimately enhance brand preference, according to company officials.

By acquiring the assets of Datasquirt – a company that enables customers to communicate with businesses in real-time across all major channels – LiveOps will be able to further establish itself as a leader.

"The main benefits for LiveOps are three-fold: first, it immediately gives us an international presence with established sales and engineering offices, strong customer base to maintain and sell into, and a solid partner network to leverage. Second, we strengthen our portfolio with an award-winning, cloud-based multichannel solution consisting of social, mobile, SMS, email, and web chat, that like the LiveOps Platform, has ten years of proven development and sales success. Third, a significant part of Datasquirt’s ongoing success is its talented people that we are excited to add to the LiveOps’ team,” Marty Beard, president and CEO of LiveOps, told TMCnet of the acquisition.   

When asked why LiveOps first set its sights on Datasquirt, Beard told TMCnet that the company’s technology partner strategy includes looking for proven, best-in-class solutions that are developed by companies that share LiveOps’ similar goals for success.

“We became aware of Datasquirt earlier this year through the sales success that they were having in the UK,” Beard said. “As we entered into an OEM relationship with them, it became very obvious that these two companies are as close to a perfect match as you can get. It’s very rare that acquisitions ever produce a perfect match but this one comes very close.”

Thanks to the acquisition, one of the main advantages that LiveOps has enjoyed is that the company has unveiled two new cloud applications, LiveOps Multichannel and LiveOps Social, that integrate Dataquirt's CONTACT solution with the LiveOps Platform. According to Aaron Ridgway, managing director/CEO and founder of Datasquirt, the integration of CONTACT with the LiveOps Platform will simplify the process of adding consumer-desired channels that extend the voice channel.

The latest applications on the cloud-based LiveOps Platform, LiveOps Multichannel and LiveOps Social, will provide agents access to Twitter (News - Alert), mobile, SMS, email, and web chat with a single agent sign-on and interface.

“Depending upon which research you look at Twitter is ranked either the first or second most popular social channel in the world,” Beard told TMCnet. “Consumers have become so accustomed to tweeting about good, bad or indifferent experiences they have with a company, its products or services, that it has become imperative for those companies to start paying attention via monitoring and then interacting.”

“Providing access to the channel directly from the phone panel of a customer service agent gives the company the opportunity to interact with their customers via Twitter and provides those customers individual and channel preference,” he added.

As recent reports indicate, it is imperative that customer care providers become the eyes and ears of their customers in the social media space. Accordingly, providers must integrated social media as a channel for customer care, state LiveOps officials.

LiveOps Multichannel relies upon LiveOps' experience in performance-based intelligent routing to give enterprises the opportunity to offer customers the channels they want and the routing capability to interact with the right agent every time, according to company officials. Business benefits to the cloud contact center for integrated multiple channels include:

·         Providing customers the option to switch between channels during a single interaction

·         Searching message history by customer record

·         Analyzing customer service performance across multiple channels

·         Understanding customer interactions

·         Planning improved offers, services and communications

·         Improving service and efficiency

Thanks to LiveOps Social, agents can participate in multiple customer sessions across social channels such as Twitter, as well as bridge traditional text channels through LiveOps Multichannel. One of the main advantages of integrated social channels is the ability to meet customer expectations by offering social channels as a choice for interaction. Additional business benefits include:

·         Identifying which customers are active brand advocates or brand naysayers

·         Providing quality control for responses to all social interactions

·         Synchronizing customer service with marketing for online reputation management

The LiveOps Multichannel and LiveOps Social applications are available for purchase for companies using the LiveOps contact center platform.