Miami entrepreneur Adam Boalt, an innovator in the traditional world of call centers, said his startup LiveAnswer has just released a number of service enhancements.
LiveAnswer’s technology platform creates a marketplace for small businesses and marketers to buy excess capacity -- or unoccupied time -- from call centers by allowing for the seamless creation of individual call center campaigns in under 60 seconds.
This month, Boalt’s LiveAnswer announced that the platform’s Spanish- and French-language capabilities have launched, particularly good news for South Florida businesses looking for bilingual capabilities to support customers 24/7/365. Other languages are on the way.
Boalt also said a new LiveAnswer website launched with additional features beyond multilingual capabilities. These include a Smart Transfer feature, which allows a team to preview the message and direct the transfer to the correct member, an Outbound Dialer, allowing the on-the-go client to be able to essentially create an office line and not disclose his mobile or home phone and MMS attachments for photos.
Since launching LiveAnswer, previously known as Useful Tools, in March 2013, Boalt knew he wanted to add language capabilities but wanted to find the right partners. According to a recent report on Global Consumer Online Buying Preferences, more than 70 percent of customers say they are more likely to buy a product when product information is in their own language.
The new service makes available about 100 Spanish-speaking agents through partner Listen Up Espanol. LiveAnswer's call center partner for French is Skybridge Americas.
"LiveAnswer is helping businesses across America sell more and provide better customer service. Listen Up Espanol is excited to be chosen as a premier partner to help bring LiveAnswer's solution to the Spanish speaking market," said Tom Sheppard, vice president of Listen Up Espanol.
Boalt’s career started in 1999 in online advertising and then in 2007 he began creating his own products and started and sold several online businesses, including RushMyPassport.com, which he successfully exited last December. Along the way one of the biggest challenges and frustrations that he and his clients encountered was the increasing difficulty in having a real person answer the phone, simply take a message or even route the call. Adding to this is the fact that traditional call centers require large monthly commitments and long lead times for setting up campaigns, making it unfeasible for most small businesses, he said. He set out to solve the problem by creating a technologically advanced call center platform that is fast, easy-to-use, and accessible for small businesses by using unoccupied agents at call centers.
Today, LiveAnswer has grown to service about 3,000 businesses, including Uber, Nissan, Precision Hawk and Dome9, a few of which have subscribed to Spanish-language services the instant it was made available, Boalt said. It has partnered with 10 call centers. LiveAnswer is now a team of 10 and work out of Pipeline Brickell. LiveAnswer recently serviced its 1 millionth call.
"We continue to onboard customers and call centers," said Boalt on Monday. "All of our calls are answered in less than nine seconds, which is really great in call center terms, so we are going to continue to be hyper-focused on aquiring more customers."
Posted Dec. 8, 2014