LiveOps (News - Alert), a company that offers a best-in-class On-Demand Contact Center Platform, recently announced the release of the latest applications on its cloud-based LiveOps Platform: LiveOps Multichannel and LiveOps Social.

In an effort to promote quality of management, the applications will offer agents a single agent sign-on and interface that will give them access to Twitter (News - Alert), mobile, SMS, email, and Web chat. LiveOps also confirmed that it has now entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the assets of New Zealand-based Datasquirt (News - Alert), a leading provider of socials and mobile communications channels for the contact center.

"Customers want what they want when they want it,” Matt Zemon, president & CEO, American Support, said. “Why not make it easy for customers to do business with you by giving them more choices for how they interact with your business? LiveOps now provides options for your customers that go beyond the traditional call center and allow for email, chat, SMS, and social network interactions, empowering contact centers like ours to provide excellent customer service in the format our customers want."

Customer care providers are now expected to be the eyes and ears of their customers in the social media space based upon a report from IDC (News - Alert) Insight titled Social Media Trends in Customer Care Outsourcing. Today, it has become essential for the contact center provider to integrate social media as a channel for customer care.

Melissa Stevenson, Research Analyst, Worldwide Contact Center Services, IDC, said, "We are seeing businesses be impacted by what their customers are saying about them in social media like Twitter. While brand reputation is ultimately a marketing responsibility, the social media explosion requires a team effort. Enterprises are recognizing this is an opportunity to engage their contact center agents for better customer service. LiveOps is an innovator in social media engagement. Providing the integration directly to Twitter enables businesses to focus on the new and important task of social media customer interactions."

Sanjay Mathur, vice president, Product Management, LiveOps, said, "It's not enough to just monitor social media for trends. Customer service and engagement takes place with every single interaction in the public social media realm whether a company is conducting the service itself or brand advocates or naysayers are doing it for them. Our customers and prospects have been asking for cloud-based multichannel capabilities including an integrated social media channel. It's important to them that we provide seamless integration to leading consumer channels, such as Twitter."

In other industry news, quality of management solutions like those developed by Genesys (News - Alert) allow enterprises to plan employee resources across all company departments to effectively ensure both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. As an example, the Genesys Workforce Management (WFM) automated software solution provides accurate scheduling, forecasting and employee performance tracking for both back-office and front-office environments.