This week, Santa Clara, Calif.-based virtual contact center platform company LiveOps announced several new additions to its executive team in its quest to become the leader in the on-demand customer service space.

Notably, industry veteran Wes Hayden, who served as president and chief executive officer at Genesys Telecommunications Labs before most recently acting as president for the enterprise division at Nuance Communications, has joined LiveOps team as its new president.

I had the opportunity to speak with Hayden — approximately two weeks into his new role at the company — about why he came to LiveOps, his thoughts on today’s industry trends, and what we can expect from the company in the next year.

Why come to LiveOps?

There is a convergence of events that I think has made LiveOps a great place to be. First, there hasn’t really been a company that has had a real strong and credible on-demand offering that has gotten traction in the marketplace. Most of the platforms out [in the space] don’t scale as well as they need to. Also, the contact center industry in general has been slow to embrace on-demand technology, and slow to change as a whole. I think the emergence of what LiveOps has done with its platform, combined with environmental factors and the fact that we’re starting to face some serious economic challenges and most enterprises are looking for ways to defer capital expenditures, I think we have an incredible opportunity. The timing has never been better for someone to really emerge as a market leader in the on-demand contact center space.

Why are contact centers slow to change?

People are slow to change in the contact center world because it is incredibly complex. If you implement a contact center solution in-house, it is a six-month to two-year process to get maybe 50 percent of what you ultimately want … it’s a big project. So, most people have undertaken this project really underestimating what it is going to take. In my prior positions, I tried to make chief information officers understand the complexity of it all. If you do something in-house, you’re taking on a new skill set that your information technology staff doesn’t have because it’s fairly unique in that you’re combining the data and telephony worlds. Good people who have that combination of skills are both hard to find and expensive. In general, a lot of pain comes in implementing contact center solutions. Once you’ve gone through that you don’t want to change … you’d rather take a deep breath and hope everything remains stable.

However, in a challenging economy people have to be open to new ideas — especially as I think we’re going to see a continued trend toward mergers of companies — primarily in the financial services space. This means people are faced with challenges they have to address and moving beyond their traditional, existing contact center environment and bridge multiple ones.

What can you bring to LiveOps?

When you look at the technology LiveOps addresses, it is clearly applicable to the broader enterprise contact center market. It requires the ability to speak the language as well as understanding the challenges of contact center managers, and I think with my background — and that of other recent additions — we will have the opportunity to really put the contact center look and feel into the company.

What can we expect from LiveOps in 2009?

We are putting together a roadmap in terms of the capabilities we have in the platform today and what we need to add in the short term. You can expect to see from us the ability to integrate into the brick-and-mortar contact center technologies, making it easier for people to take advantage of the functionality we bring to the table.

On the agent side, we’re going to continue to focus on what we do well: Helping companies generate revenue through the use of the virtual contact center and independent contractor model. That really thrives when people are rewarded for performance, as our model does.

What’s the most important decision you’ll have to make in the coming year?

It always involves people — the ones that we’re going to bring in to make this company the leader in the on-demand contact center space. I’m fortunate because a lot of the decisions [personnel-wise] have already been made. I’m here because we’re committed to delivering availability that is needed to really provide a mission-critical, on-demand capability. It’s really about who the right people are to bring into the company that help us keep up a very aggressive growth rate.

Now, what is the most difficult decision you’ll have to make in your new role?

It’s not unlike most difficult decisions anywhere. We need to determine what it is we’re not going to do. In this space you have lots of opportunities, and it’s really involves a process of prioritizing what’s most important.

One priority for us is the need to capitalize on enterprises’ desire to leverage their contact centers to generate revenue. From what I see of our technology and our capabilities, once again, we’re uniquely positioned to help companies capitalize on investments made in contact center technology — and people — to drive revenue. On the agent side, we’re going to be a little more selective on the types of opportunities in which we will be conducting agent business.