SalesTechStar Interview with Katie Bapple, Senior Director Agent Experience at Liveops

Katie Bapple, Senior Director Agent Experience at Liveops shares a few quick tips on enhancing customer and sales experiences in this chat with SalesTechStar:

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Hi Katie, we’d love to hear about your journey through the years…tell us more about your role at Liveops…!

I have the privilege of serving as the Senior Director of Agent Experience at Liveops, a virtual call center company with 27K+independent agents working remotely across the United States (recently named in the 2021 Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies list). I spearhead strategies on our virtual communities, event programs, user research and design, agent support practices and communications. My niche is making sure agents feel connected to the Liveops community by building successful virtual cultures that transcend physical location.

We’d love to hear about some of Liveops most recent innovations and how they are enabling the agent work experience?

 This year we’ve made several optimizations to further enhance the experience for our network of agents. In January, we migrated to a new online community platform powered by Influitive, the market leader in customer advocacy and community software. The platform, referred to as “Liveops Nation” provides a one-stop destination for Liveops’s agents  to support one another, complete their virtual checklist of daily activities, discover how-to resources, and stay in-the-know via news and updates. Through robust game mechanics, agents are incentivized to complete these everyday actions via virtual currency, driving an innate culture of recognition and positivity. The site is personalized, ensuring each agent has a unique experience, interacting with information that is relevant to their home business.

In February, we introduced a new applicant tracking system to streamline and enhance the initial agent onboarding experience and, most recently in June, a new help desk was announced, enabling greater self-service for faster resolution to the agent community’s most pressing questions.

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Can you provide a few best practices you keep in mind and follow to build and nurture the Liveops community of users?

Lean in and listen to your audience. This means building in the time to interview your audience regularly, validating the trends in those conversations with surveys, identifying the gaps in their experience and asking for suggestions to solve them. To build a successful community you must realize you’re a servant acting on behalf of the voice of the majority. That’s how you get adoption and find success.

Can you talk about the importance of sales and customer facing leaders focusing on creating engaged online communities to create deeper relationships with prospects?

Online communities create space and opportunity for the three most critical drivers of long-term retention: power, recognition and sense of belonging. Until you allow your customers to drive the conversation and create change, relationships remain superficial and can be easily replaced.

What are some core sales technologies and customer experience technologies that you feel should form the crux of a tech stack for a customer facing team?

There is not a single-sized solution that will be the perfect fit for every business. Feasibility studies will always point you in the right direction, so do your research and ensure that your core technologies easily complement each other via strong integrations.

For example, core solutions like your CRM and communications platform should seamlessly be able to send data back and forth to drive scalable automation that targets the right person with the right message at exactly the right time.

A few thoughts on what you feel today’s tech innovators and business leaders need to do differently to stand out from the crowd.    

With an increasing percentage of the workforce going remote permanently, understanding how to create a competitive advantage through strong virtual communities is more important than ever. Humans are motivated by social belonging more than any other psychological factor. If more companies can master how to grow virtual cultures, they’ll undoubtedly create more brand loyalty and long-term retention.

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