Hosted Call Center Featured Article

LiveOps Proves Value of At-Home Agents in Live Telethon

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

When Americans donated nearly $1.8 million in the “Disaster in the Gulf: How You Can Help,” a two-hour celebrity telethon hosted by Larry King and CNN June 21, few realized that their calls—some 26,000 - were actually handled by 1,300 independent at-home agents provided by LiveOps.

The Nature Conservancy, National Wildlife Foundation and United Way chose the firm - the only one involved -to handle the call volume for the telethon pledges. The funds generated from them will be used by these non-profit organizations to help the people, wildlife, and habitats impacted by the oil spill disaster along the U.S. Gulf Coast region.

The telethon proved out once again the effectiveness at-home agent programs on a large and visible scale. One of the long-touted benefits of having agents in home facilities rather than in employer-subsidized bricks-and-mortar premises is the ability to ramp up and respond quickly. LiveOps (News - Alert) received confirmation on a Wednesday for the telethon the following Monday. The call volume remained pretty consistent after about 15 minutes into the show says the firm; there were about 2,500 calls every 15 minutes.

During the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, LiveOps was the only contact center firm able to respond and ramp up in hours (versus other contact centers’ timeframes of days) to assist the Red Cross with calls from family members looking for missing or displaced loved ones. Since then, the company has been on hand to help many other relief organizations with emergency and fundraising efforts.  

There is also another if possibly unintended benefit is that these individuals, by working from their homes, did not have to commute as they would have to had they been employed at contact center and in not doing so did not consume the very substance that has been leaking into the Gulf of Mexico a.k.a. oil.

The argument can be made is that if as many Americans who can work from home--based on what the tasks actually entail versus management inertia--would have been permitted to do so when the demand for petroleum products would be significantly reduced, and so would air pollution. So that the oil companies would not be tempted to drill and mine hydrocarbons in equally environmentally-sensitive areas like Alaska and in the Canadian wilderness.

“This oil spill has had an overwhelming impact on our country and it is important that we all get behind helping the families and our coastal ecosystem recover from this devastating event,” said Maynard Webb, LiveOps chairman and CEO. “For this important project, LiveOps was able to quickly source agents motivated to get the maximum number of pledges. It is a tremendous opportunity and honor for us to be able to leverage our versatile technology platform, as well as our large and giving agent community, to help an important cause like this.”

“The tireless efforts of The Nature Conservancy, United Way, and the National Wildlife Federation are astounding. LiveOps is pleased to partner with these organizations to provide the ‘on-demand’ technology and people resources needed to put a national telethon effort together so quickly,” added Webb.