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Free your workers... but track their output
Her husband and her two daughters asleep, Sandy Neal is at work in the basement of her suburban Connecticut house. It's after 2am on a cold winter night and Neal, 38, is dressed in a rumpled tracksuit. A headset taming her mass of curls, she's on the phone selling exercise equipment to some insomniac stranger.
Neal is not allowed to reveal the brand of exercise equipment she's touting tonight, but she doesn't work for the manufacturer -- at least, not directly. Neal is an independent contractor working for LiveOps, a fast-expanding company out of Santa Clara, California that creates and manages "virtual call centers," for its clients, which include infomercial producers, insurers, direct marketers, even pizza delivery chains.
LiveOps is by no means the only "call centre in the sky" business, a format in which freelancers working from home take calls for companies. What makes LiveOps innovative is how it does this. The LiveOps software doesn't just route calls to freelancers, it manages them: keeping performance stats based on whatever criteria each individual client wants and giving the better performers better and more work.
If that sounds a tad Orwellian, Neal says she loves it. "The software keeps a log of my productivity, and that challenges me," she explains. Neal sleeps from 8.30pm to around 2am, works around 30 hours a week, earns around $24,000 a year and cares for her children during the day. "I've grown my business and watched my earnings grow with it," Neal says.
She also appreciates being able to work from home and at her schedule, and she likes the way the LiveOps software, by keeping track of the situations in which she works best, steers her towards the work she most enjoys. In fact, in some cases, LiveOps software will even seek out employees with special areas of expertise and interest, such as Spanish language, or an insurance broker's license.
Sheila McGee-Smith, a communications industry analyst, says the LiveOps software is leading the pack. "Their software is so good,"
McGee-Smith says. "They've begun packaging it and selling it as a management tool for other companies."
Element Customer Care, a North Carolina-based billing and customer service provider, has been subscribing to the LiveOps software for the past two years. Element's president, Matt Zemon, says the tens of thousands a month he spends on the product is well worth it, because the software essentially supervises his workforce. "We use their software to recruit workers over the internet,"
Zemon explains. "Potential hires have to pass a series of tests.
Then we hire them using LiveOps, route calls to them using the platform, train them and monitor their performance."
LiveOps began in 2000, according to its current president, Wes Hayden, who lives in Chicago not Santa Clara. The company is private and does not disclose financial information, but Hayden says LiveOps has been profitable for the past three years and is showing a double-digit growth rate per year, with well over $100 million in annual revenue. And it's going international: A new company, Virtual Contact Centre, announced in January it would be bringing LiveOps software to the UK and creating 2,000 new call centre jobs.
Back in the US, LiveOps has around 300 full-time employees and a pool of some 20,000 freelancers scattered around the country. One of the most interesting benefits of the LiveOps software is that it is so efficient that it makes it affordable for companies to hire US workers. "When I started the business," Element's president, Matt Zemon says, "more than half my calls were taken in the Philippines, we are now 100 per cent American." And soon, elsewhere perhaps, 100 percent British.
More companies in our Work Smarter package:
Howies
Devi Shetty
UBS
HubSpot
Best Buy
Red Gate
Vestergaard Frandsen
Inditex
McLaren
Behance
Atlassian
D'O
Victors & Spoils
Happy Computers
Mosaic
Cancer Research UK
Generation Press
The Public School
37signals
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
