LiveOps raises $30M, acquires CxEngage so you won’t suck at customer service

Bad customer service can be the death knell for businesses of all sizes.

LiveOps, which provides a “cloud contact center” and customer service solutions, announced the acquisition of UserEvents today, as well as a $30 million round of debt financing and the formation of two separate corporate entities — LiveOps Cloud Platform  and LiveOps Agent Services.

LiveOps supports customer service across voice, email, chat, SMS, Facebook, and Twitter. The system doesn’t require hardware or software to download since it is based in the cloud and operates on a pay-as-you-go model. LiveOps said it has processed 1 billion minutes of customer interaction and 3 billion interactions to date.

The cloud platform includes a number of applications that help customer service managers track everything happening in their department. They can look at dashboards with real-time analytics, create custom reports, look into individual agent performance, and make changes (without the help of IT) to the “interaction flow.”

“Flow” refers to what happens when customers reach out to the business — what kind of greeting they are met with, how their information is pulled from a CRM system, etc.

Related: 10 powerful, cloud-based help-desk services to help you win at customer service

This platform will now be a separate subsidiary from LiveOps’ agent service, which outsources customer service queries through a network of 20,000 independent agents working at home. Agent services now handles 70 million interactions a year for 250 clients.

CEO Marty Beard said in a statement that these two elements of the business experienced strong growth over the past couple years and will scale faster as separate entities.

This financing and acquisition will accelerate LiveOps’ growth worldwide and is intended to expand its share of the market. It has a number of competitors, however, including Zendesk, Deskero, Desk.com, Freshdesk, and others without the word “desk” in the title, such as Kana and Kayako.

The acquisition of UserEvents will help make LiveOps cloud platform “smarter” and more predictive.

UserEvents’ flagship product CxEngage is a routing engine that processes events on social media, the Web, mobile, and voice to identify behavioral patterns for each customer. It looks for patterns “indicative of a positive or negative customer journey” and gives businesses tools to engage with customers at the right time.

Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Comerica Bank led this debt financing.

LiveOps is based in Redwood City, Calif.