CALLCENTER LIVEOPS HOW TO

When I finally answered, he apologized for interrupting me, then came to the point. Shortly after we hung up, I turned my attention to an assignment due that afternoon, only to receive more calls from Mr. Still, there is undeniably a brass-tacks quality to the work. Liveops goes to great lengths to attend to their needs, addressing technical-support issues, even answering agents’ emails to the chief executive within 24 hours. The agents must obtain a certification before they can handle such calls, which sometimes takes weeks of online coursework. Today, in addition to sales calls, Liveops agents handle calls from people trying to file insurance claims, those in need of roadside assistance, even those with medical or financial issues relating to prescription drugs.

The enormous amounts of data that companies like Liveops and Working Solutions collect allowed them to connect callers to the best possible agent with remarkable precision, while allowing big clients to avoid the overhead of a physical call center and full-time workers. Houlne said, alluding to the overseas agents.īy the early part of this decade, quality was in fashion. The savings on wages were often wiped out by lost business from enraged customers, who preferred to communicate with native English speakers. But within 10 years, many companies decided that the practice, known as offshoring, had been oversold. The call center industry took a hit during the 2001 recession, when cost consciousness unleashed a wave of outsourcing to India. “The only thing people were interested in was the abandonment rate” - that is, the number of people who would hang up in frustration from being kept on hold - said Kim Houlne, the chief executive of a Liveops rival called Working Solutions, which she founded in 1996.

CALLCENTER LIVEOPS HOW TO

He is such a valued worker that TruStage invited him to its headquarters earlier this year for a two-day visit by an elite group of agents, in which executives pumped them for insights about how to increase sales. He estimates that he works roughly 40 hours each week, beginning around 8 most mornings, and that he makes about $20 an hour. Jones sells life policies to callers, often those who have just seen a television commercial for TruStage insurance. “I wanted to make sure I gave the right tone that they were looking for.”Īs a Liveops agent, Mr. “I must have did the voice test four or five times,” he said. “I can’t work and be worried about how she’s doing,” he said.Ī few years later, when his daughter told him of a friend who worked with Liveops, he was eager to sign up - but refused to send in his required voice test until it was close to perfect. Jones, who lives in Chicago, was the top rated Liveops agent for an insurer called TruStage for much of this year.Īn AT&T technician for decades, he decided that he needed to be at home not long after his wife was diagnosed with vertigo in 2008. You start to wonder: Is there really such a thing as a righteous gig-economy job, even if the company is as apparently well intentioned as Liveops? Or is there something about the nature of gig work that’s inescapably dehumanizing? Just the Right Tone The more you talk with them, the more you detect a kind of Darwinian struggle behind the facade of community and self-actualization. Jones and some of his Liveops competitors. What Uber is to cars, Liveops is to call centers. All were among the more than 100,000 agents who work as independent contractors through on-demand platforms like the one Liveops operates, which uses big data, algorithms and gamelike techniques to match its agents to clients. Some of them may have answered your customer-service calls to Home Depot or AAA. The company behind this spectacle, Liveops, had invited several dozen freelance call-center agents to a so-called road show. Paradise, for these pilgrims, lies at one end of a phone line. Her commitment to me that she made earlier, she looked me right in the eyes and told me she’s going to be an agent.” “Kelly went through the process a while ago, then life happens, now she’s back. “By the end of the day, Kelly’s going to be an agent,” the group’s square-jawed leader said. The gathering in a private dining room at a Mexican restaurant had the fervent energy of a megachurch service, or maybe an above-average “Oprah” episode - a mix of revival-style confession and extravagant empathy.

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