Traditional call centers support one channel: voice. While simple and straightforward, this is no longer ideal in the age of a zillion marketing and communications channels.
Meanwhile, Call-Centers-as-a-Service—CCaaS—platforms, like LiveVox, let call centers keep in touch with customers across traditional and online channels. Oh, and they save time and money, secure data, and help you monitor customer and agent satisfaction.
The best way to decide if LiveVox will actually help your call center is to take an in-depth look at its features, pros, cons, and pricing.
LiveVox: The Good and the Bad
LiveVox is quite an advanced call center solution. Given the suite of features and pricing, it does seem to be designed for the higher end of the market. But you can buy particular à la carte options as well—so there’s flexibility.
Still, even within its target market, LiveVox isn’t for everyone. Before going all in, you’ll have to consider a few drawbacks it has vs. other options.
What LiveVox Is Good At
Omnichannel services: LiveVox provides various human and AI-driven communication channels so you can meet every customer on the channel they prefer. A few of these channels include, but are not limited to:
- Inbound voice
- Outbound dialing
- Two-way SMS
- Mass SMS
- Interactive Voice Responsive, or IVR
- Webchat
- Multichannel chatbots
- WhatsApp, via an integration
AI-powered customer service: Speaking of chatbots, LiveVox gives you multi-channel, AI-powered ones.
What makes these “smarter” than regular chatbots? Well, they can help more customers across more channels, significantly reducing agent workload. And a lower agent workload means better customer service from them and higher job satisfaction.
Of course, these AI bots can work around the clock for you, too. So customer service improves even more.
LiveVox also has another AI-driven feature: no-code, intelligent virtual agents—think of this as an upgrade from the chatbot. You can easily drag and drop to set up your intelligent bot assistant workflows, and you can use batch updating to make changes to all agents simultaneously instead of individually.
These bots can pass information to human agents if interactions must be escalated. And, naturally, you can track and measure their performance like you would a real human agent.
Contact center CRM capabilities: LiveVox’s contact center CRM lets you pull all contact methods and interactions with each customer into one place. The interface is neatly organized and easy to find your way around, too.
As you can see, agents can access scripts directly from the CRM contact page for seamless and effective conversations with customers.
Agent satisfaction monitoring and improvement: Customer satisfaction matters, but so too does agent satisfaction. Happier agents create a better customer service experience and get more work done in general.
LiveVox has several features to help you keep tabs on each agent’s job satisfaction and how it impacts performance.
Some of these features are only available on certain plans, but every plan has at least a few of them.
Agent elearning and development: Similar to the last feature, LiveVox offers elearning and coaching features to help you train and develop your agents to be their very best.
Call center managers can give individual agents and teams targeted training to ensure areas of improvement are addressed without wasting time on areas where agents are already strong.
Managers can also create training tasks and monitor agent progress over time as they knock out those tasks. Plus, the manager can leave detailed feedback on each assignment to encourage agents in their training and ensure they address anything they miss.
Best of all, these features are fully remote—managers can train agents regardless of physical location.
Speech IQ+: Enterprise-level users get individual call monitoring capabilities with Speech IQ+. SIQ+ transcribes and processes each call and then scores the calls for keywords and phrases.
It also detects agent-caller intent and sentiment, creates reports for each call, and alerts you to any issues.
LiveVox’s Potential Drawbacks
Pricing: There’s no denying LiveVox has a fantastic feature set—but it comes at a cost. Its plans do cost more than most of the competition.
It’s worth noting, though, that LiveVox offers two ways to pay: per user per month, or per minute, in order to more closely tailor your usage to your needs and budget.
Campaign management is an add-on: Campaign management is quite a helpful feature if you need to run multi-channel marketing campaigns. The problem is that it hikes up your monthly or per-minute fee quite a bit.
Enterprise, the highest-level plan, sees the smallest jump percentage-wise. To add in campaign management, the price rises about 25% on the per-minute model and about 37% on the monthly per-user model.
That said, it’s all about the returns. The extra fee can more than pay off if these marketing campaigns earn enough to justify the price increase.
Potential complexity: We won’t lie: a lot goes on inside LiveVox’s software. There are tons of features included in each plan and more to add à la carte. This is a double-edged sword, as there’s a slightly higher learning curve as your agents figure out how to maneuver around the system.
LiveVox Plans and Pricing
LiveVox offers three plans for call centers with different needs. Each successive plan keeps all features in the previous plan and adds more on top of it.
You can pay a monthly fee per user or pay per minute—LiveVox offers both options, depending on which best fits your needs.
Users can add campaign management to any plan for an increased per-minute or monthly per-user fee. Campaign management lets call centers create, manage, and optimize targeted marketing campaigns through voice and digital channels.
LiveVox doesn’t offer a free trial or permanent free plan. What you can do is schedule a demo with LiveVox, and they’ll show you around the software for free.
Essential: $65 per User per Month or $0.0343 per Minute
LiveVox’s Essential plan is its entry-level package. This one has all the basics a call center needs to thrive:
- Voice connectivity
- Voice engagement
- IVR and contact flow
- Contact management
- Configurable dashboards
- ACD and routing
- Real-time coaching and monitoring
- Configurable phone panel
- Reporting
- API
- Partner access
- Single sign-on (SSO)
If Essentials users add campaign management, their fee spikes up to $120 per user per month or $0.0481 per minute.
Professional: $120 per User per Month or $0.0480 per Minute
The Professional plan is for call centers that need to create a more comprehensive customer service experience, automate specific management tasks, and add more customer service and marketing channels beyond what the Essential plan offers.
It includes everything in Essential, plus the following:
- Omnichannel communications suite: email, SMS, chat & WhatsApp
- Contact center CRM and ticketing
- Agent assist via scripting
- Desktop editor with RPA functions library
- Contact center scheduling
- Collaboration & task management
- Quality management
If Professional users add campaign management, their fee changes to $175 per user per month or $0.0618 per minute.
Enterprise: $150 per User per Month or $0.0555 per Minute
Enterprise sits at the top of LiveVox’s plans. As the name implies, this package is designed for the largest call centers—or those with big-time clients—that need the most advanced reporting capabilities to stay ahead of the competition.
It has everything in the previous plans and adds the following reporting features:
- Advanced analytics: Get more in-depth analytics to optimize every possible metric.
- Agent performance dashboards: Monitor each agent’s performance individually to evaluate strengths and identify improvement areas.
- Speech IQ+: This analyzes call recordings and scores agents on various KPIs, such as talk time, silence time, keywords, agent and customer sentiments, and script compliance.
SIQ+ contains its own reporting. It auto-scores interactions, but you can manually score them as well.
If Enterprise users add campaign management, their fee changes to $205 per user per month or $0.0693 per minute.
Final Thoughts
LiveVox is one of the more advanced CCaaS options out there, offering very advanced omnichannel interactions and comprehensive CRM for customers.
AI-powered multichannel bots and intelligent virtual agents reduce human agent workloads quite a bit—and if you jump up to higher plans, you can run personalized marketing campaigns and hone in on agent performance even more.
If this all sounds pretty good, that’s because it is. But it comes at a high price. Thus, we think LiveVox best suits bigger call centers or those that work with big-budget customers. The work this software can do for these types of companies will more than justify the higher investment.
