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Kelli McMillan is taking her experience in contact center as a service (CCaaS) and indirect channels to the conversational AI and digital transformation platform LivePerson.
McMillan last year accepted the role of head of global CCaaS and voice partnerships for LivePerson. She’ll work to establish and strengthen the vendor’s technology partnerships. Alliances are one of LivePerson’s main routes to market, with companies like Cisco and Avaya using LivePerson’s platform to create more omnichannel experiences for customers.
LivePerson’s Kelli McMillan
McMillan has a background working with tech services distributors (TSDs) and technology advisors (TAs), but she said the referral/advisor model is something the vendor may be looking at down the road.
LivePerson Alliances
For now, McMillan says LivePerson is prioritizing the tech alliances with voice and CCaaS companies that have been helping the company get into customer deals. McMillan brings relationships with many such vendors into the fold, including CCaaS companies not currently in LivePerson’s partner stable.
“A lot of our customers have voice with someone else, so we need to partner with them, because they’re not buying digital channels through the voice providers; they’re buying digital channels through us,” McMillan told Channel Futures. “It only makes sense to figure out what our strategy is together so that we can really be entrenched in these customers and help them as they grow.”
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Some of those vendors are voice providers who are looking for CCaaS features. Others are on-premise CCaaS providers who need cloud features. McMillan said LivePerson allows providers to bring together customer experiences across voice and messaging.
“It helps us innovate those organizations as they’re still trying to figure out what their cloud strategy,” she said. “Because competitors are trying to displace them, they need LivePerson to come in and help make them agile while they’re still working on the other pieces in the background.”
Who is Kelli McMillan?
McMillan spent the last six years at contact center as a service (CCaaS) provider Five9. She oversaw the company’s relationships with TSDs and helped the vendor significantly grow its revenue with those partners. Prior to Five9, McMillan worked at the TSD Intelisys.
In 2019 she founded the Xposure IDC, which has helped people in the channel and in technology with mentorship and advocacy as well as assistance building employee resource groups. Part of her passion, McMillan told Channel Futures is to help people listen to other people better. And that made LivePerson’s customer strategy a natural fit, she said.
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“We want to meet our customers in their channel of choice and give them the experience they deserve. Our customers need to have whatever channel that they want to interact with,” she said. “That’s why UC organizations that are normally UCaaS are jumping into the CX space. This stronger ecosystem means that we are listening to what humans need to interact with other humans.”