You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. Listen. One way of measuring the virus and all those individuals now working from home like Jason and Sleepy Hollow could be by looking at call centers. So Robert Lcacio he is founder in CEO of Live Person. It's an AI powered conversational platform for consumers to engage with companies. He joins us on the phone from New York City. Um, Rob, great to have
you back with us. Are you're working from home? Actually, I'm in uh. I have a farm up in Connecticut. Song I'm camping out over here with my family. All right, So you're up there in Connecticut, one of the states in lockdown. Let me just first tell let's let's get that tell us about kind of how this is all impacting your life, not you know, on a personal basis, but also as a professional basis, as someone who has
to run a company. Yeah, you know, I've gone through I've been running covering over twenty five years, and I've gone through the financial crisis, not eleven, the Internet implosions. So it's the same thing. You know, we always look there's you got a strength in the balance sheet. You've gotta basically focused on your current customers and just move forward.
But we we I've seen a lot over twenty five years and running the business, and I don't see this any differently, just a different set of changes that are
happening in the industry, and especially to my industry. The contact center world is really being challenged right now because these are fixed locations with thousands of people inside these buildings, and yeah, this is this is you know, everyone talks about the workers who are in corporate headquarters and offices, but there are three million people in United States that are in contact centers, sitting three three ft apart from each other, and they're they're trying to service you know,
customers and make sure they're getting their bills paid and all that. That's the real thing that we're focused on right now. As of last week, it's all all hands on deck with my company trying to fix that problem. Well, and Rob, it's interesting too, I mean, and I'm I know I'm not alone in this. I mean I've got an emails, especially from the big airlines essentially saying don't call us, like we just cannot handle everybody who's coming out at us right now. Is that a function of
just huge volume in your estimation? Is it a function of staffing it is it a collision of both and and how long will that sort of sort of posture continue. You think like there's a future contact centers that we're selling messaging and chat in AI and automation, and that that's why our company is doing very well. We we've Service Delta and all these the biggest brands in the world. Um, but the call center fundamently voice and people sitting in
like a factory line answering voice calls. This is from the past, and we're seeing the challenge Like right now we're very focused on are getting people in their homes the contact center agents. They can message from home, they can chat, they can use our software from home, but
taking a phone call from home is virtually impossible. So that's really the past is being challenged, the whole past structure of call centers, and they should be digital, they should be allowing homework, they should be out of that factory model. And that's what we're faced with today. Well, I do wonder too, and Jason and I keep having conversations with our guests and just even in and around
the newsroom. You know, is what are the longer term, our lasting impact as a result of the virus, Especially as more people do work common maybe they'll find out that it actually kind of works that way. And I do wonder how kind of AI and call centers and just having kind of a virtual capability in our world increasingly, how that might change longer term. It should have happened years ago. You know, this is obviously we've been preaching. But when you think of the world we live in,
you and I were on our devisle. They were messaging our friends and family. We want to message brands, and we don't expect people just be sitting in these contact centers. Why can't they be at home? Why can't they have the freedom to work like that? And they can't. Uh, And that's really where they all these companies should be, and we're taking them there. But I think this is
really moving it because this is a risk. If you look at large banks or telcos in the US, they may have twenty people in contact centers per brand, So that's the largest employee pool. It's not people working in the corporate headquarters or you know, corporate officers, it's in the contact center. So now this is sort of a shock to the system and saying there's got to be
a different way to do this. We've been saying it like automation in AI and boughts, but now I think just the risk of not of not making the change. It's going to be very great for these companies because if you call your bank and no one's there, you're gonna get afraid. And so we know you can message somebody, you can easily do that, but calling being put on hold for four or five hours when you're trying to
check your balance, people are going to get afraid. Well, and that's I'm so glad you brought that up, Rob, because there is that. And maybe this is just I am of a certain age and maybe a millennial. We've been talking a lot about them. Uh lately feels differently just thirty seconds here. Do we just outgrow this idea of like I just want to talk to a human being? Darn it? Is that just something in the past we we have in our minds that we should be talking
to a machine. There are human agents that we want to talk to, but our bonds up in the last week on our our services in hospitality. So like everything's really really going gangbusters, and there's a demand. Whether you're a millennial or eighty years old, you're messaging your grandkids. If you're eighty years old, you're not talking to them any more. So this plays into really the world we're living in today. Especially once again we had all these
calls from our large enterprise coasters. Can you get our agents home? We need to get them out of these contact centers because there's thousand of them that stay next to each other. Dangerous. All right, Well, it's a really interesting perspective. Really glad to catch up with the Reblicacio is the founder and CEO of Live Person. He joined
us on the phone from Connecticut. Great perspectives. The world is changing for sure, and Carol, as you said, uh, it's going to change a lot long term to that kid at home, I know exactly