LiveVox Opens the Doors on Voice Portal 3.0

On-demand voice portal vendor LiveVox today released Voice Portal 3.0, a call center platform that emulates a dialer and adds to its functionality, enabling customers to transition from their dialers to a VoIP environment. Built on open VXML and SIP standards, LiveVox Voice Portal is an open source hosted dialing architecture that allows companies to use multiple engagement models to reach customers using a single platform.

Part of the LiveVox offering is a new Quick Connect feature, which reduces abandon rates by connecting the call with the agent prior to connecting with the customer, eliminating lengthy pregnant pauses associated with dialer-generated calls that many people associate with incoming sales calls. This will likely be a key factor for LiveVox’s continued success among collections and billings contact centers, the company’s primary customer base.

Traditional hardware-based automated call dialers [ACD] are old technology, which brings with it a number of limitations, as well as an extremely high price tag—in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase, upgrade, integrate, and support. "We are leveraging voice portal architecture for outbound and inbound calling, and Voice Portal 3.0 represents an opportunity for customers to replace old technology," says Louis Summe, CEO. "LiveVox can coexist with the ACD, but it can also take its place."

LiveVox claims users of Voice Portal 3.0 can expect to see benefits including lower IT support costs, full application integration, unlimited capacity, and lower WAN equipment requirements. Voice Portal 3.0 includes the following new features and functionalities:

LiveVox Quick Connect: Provides the ability to have the outbound agent on the line while the call is connected, eliminating call hold times and pregnant pauses, and reducing caller abandon rates.
Enhanced Campaign Scheduler: Flexible scheduling allows users to re-queue campaigns ahead of time. Supports multiple call attempts on same number or sequencing attempts for same account holder using multiple contact numbers (home, then work, etc.).
Enhanced Queuing and Pacing: Multi-threaded 64-bit queuing supports extremely high calls-in-progress volumes.

At least one analyst is enthusiastic about the company’s chances with its new portal. "LiveVox looks like more like a standard contact center switching fabric along the lines of CosmoCom or Genesys," says Keith Dawson, senior analyst with Frost & Sullivan. "I think their future ambition lies beyond being an inbound/outbound call center integrator for collections agents." His discussions with LiveVox indicate they know they can’t be constrained by their vertical, and are trying to capture more horizontal business, as well as verticals such as outbound loyalty calling. "They’re looking to emerge from their niche as a more full-featured contact center provider."