Interview: Louis Summe, Co-Founder and CEO of LiveVox

Question: How did you get into the communications technology field?

Answer: I’ve really been involved with communications services through technology for my entire career, certainly at EDS – a subsidiary of Merck – and Physicians Online. After that, I started a company that developed speech recognition systems. The original vision of the company was to help hospitals and doctors with clinical and administrative applications. But client demand quickly pushed us in a different direction.

Q: Is that when you became involved with the accounts receivable management industry?

A: Yes. During the tech recession in the early 2000s, our clients liked our initial applications, but they said that they really needed help with billing and collecting money. In a recession, companies begin to focus more on their finances and they press their vendors to help shore up their cash flow. That’s what our initial clients were doing: asking us for innovative ways to help them recover money. So in 2002, we began focusing on the debt collection function.

Q: How long did you focus on healthcare clients on the collection communication technology side?

A: For a year or two, most of our clients were in healthcare. But there is a lot of overlap in healthcare receivables management and other receivables management, at least from a communications technology standpoint. So we began to focus on clients with other types of receivables fairly quickly.

Q: What specific services does LiveVox offer to ARM companies?

A: We provide hosted, on-demand dialer technology. Historically, dialers were physically located in the call center. When hosted technology for the call center came along, at first it was used as a compliment to the existing equipment, helping the technology perform better. This was the first phase of hosted technology. The second phase is transitioning to an all-hosted environment. This is really what LiveVox is all about; replacing the premise-based dialing environment with a hosted one.

Q: In the current economy, how do you see LiveVox helping its collection clients?

A: In this difficult collection environment, our clients are asking themselves, “What can we do to get better results?”  Maybe an inbound IVR campaign will work better in a high-volume, low liquidation environment. With hosted dialing technology, they can try that out right now. And that’s really the key: changes need to be made now. Collection operations can’t afford to go through procurement and a large capital outlay to experiment with dialing strategies. Hosted technology allows them to try new approaches very quickly and without the large capital expenditure.

ARM companies are also thirsty for robust reporting tools so that they can understand the ROI of certain moves. We believe hosted technology is fundamentally better positioned to deliver accountability and ROI measures.

Q: How has LiveVox changed their product offerings to allow clients to cope with the difficult environment?

A: Like all technology companies, we really listen to our clients. Basically, they are now looking to process more accounts with fewer resources. To accommodate this, we’ve rolled out some new offerings and updates in the past six weeks or so.

One is called QuickTrace. This allows for calling across an account, for example, calling 10 different numbers for one consumer. This was actually a client idea. When collectors switch over to “skip mode,” they can effectively attribute contacts to the proper campaign, which helps with reporting and strategy setting.

Another product is SmartMessage, a system that tracks callbacks more effectively on voice messaging campaigns.

Louis Summe, who joined LiveVox in October 1999, has spent over 15 years creating and building technology based communication services. Before joining the Company, Mr. Summe served as the Vice President of Business Development and Product Management for Physicians’ Online (POL), the leading online service for physicians with over 200,000 physician members. Mr. Summe was instrumental in selling POL to Mediconsult – now part of WebMD (Nasdaq: HLTH) for $200 million. Prior to joining POL, Mr. Summe held Marketing, Product Development & Business Development positions at Merck-Medco. His accomplishments include physician and patient communication programs for Pfizer and Merck, which enrolled over 10,000 physicians, 3.5 million patients and generated $50 million in annual revenues. Prior to Merck-Medco, Mr. Summe was a Systems Engineer at EDS.

Mr. Summe holds an M.B.A. with honors from Columbia University and a B.A. in Physics from Xavier University.