72%
5%
5 min
Liveops is a virtual contact center company that connects brands with a distributed network of home-based customer service and sales agents, helping them scale support without the overhead of a traditional call center. Sourcing, screening, and onboarding that many independent agents at once put constant pressure on Liveops’ small recruiting team. That changed when Cue, Fountain’s AI copilot, took over the manual work standing between recruiters and the candidates they needed to reach. Today, Cue pulls reports in minutes, opens new roles in a day, and gives recruiters their time back for the work only a person can do: connecting with candidates.
The Challenge: A Small Team, a High-Volume Sourcing Strategy
Liveops runs a lean recruiting operation against an outsized sourcing load. Every open role means finding, vetting, and onboarding a wave of independent, home-based agents, and until recently, nearly all of that work was manual.
“It’s a lot of manual work on the back end to create an opportunity, especially within our industry and the number of candidates we’re trying to source,” says Shannon Hare, Director of Agent Acquisition and Experience at Liveops.
Reporting was just as heavy a lift. Pulling the data recruiters needed meant knowing the exact data keys and attributes to request, and waiting, sometimes up to an hour, for a large report to generate.
The Shift: From Manual Reporting to Prompted Insights
With Cue, that process collapsed from hours to minutes.
“Now with Cue, what we’re able to do is ask the agent to pull this data for us, and within five minutes we’ve gotten reports back, where previously it may have taken an hour or two hours for the reports to come in the old fashioned way,” Hare says.
It’s not just speed. It’s depth. Hare logs into Cue, types a prompt describing exactly what she’s looking for, and gets it back within five to ten minutes, complete with the format she needs. “Not only will it provide an Excel spreadsheet, it will provide us graphs, it will provide us a PDF, a summary if we need to present to the executive team,” she says.
Faster Hiring, Lighter Workload
The same shift played out in how Liveops stands up new roles. What used to take a week of preparation now takes a day.
“It would take a week to prepare to get everything we needed formerly. Now, with Cue, we can have everything done in a day,” Hare says. “Cue has helped us reduce the time spent with the administration side, so we can connect with the human.”
A New Mindset for Recruiters: 90% Manual to 25% Administrative
For Liveops’ recruiters, Cue changed more than their task list. It changed how they spend their day.
“Our recruiters are very, very happy with the tool. I think just the change in the mindset where their day was 90% manual work, pulling reporting, to now maybe more of 25% doing administration work,” Hare says. “With Cue that work has been significantly reduced, so their time is truly spent now with the human interaction, which is ultimately our goal at Liveops: AI plus human.”
Moving Candidates Through Faster, and Converting More of Them
The impact showed up in the pipeline almost immediately.
“When we first implemented Cue, we definitely saw an immediate return. Most of our candidates now are able to get through our application flows within minutes,” Hare says. “We’ve seen conversion rates definitely increase. I think right now we’re looking at a 3 to 5% of an increase.”
A Tool Recruiters Won’t Give Back
Adoption wasn’t a hard sell. It was the opposite. When the idea of scaling back to a lighter version of the tool came up, Hare’s team pushed back hard.
“With Cue we’ve made a giant step forward within our ability to reduce the manual tasks and really set my recruiters up. My recruiters were like: ‘You’re not going to take this away from me, right?’ And you know it’s like, you’ll have the basic features, and they said we don’t want the basic features, we want the whole thing. We want it to be able to do all the heavy lifting,” Hare says. “If they ever lost the tool, they would be very upset and angry with me, because now that they use it for a lot of things.”
AI Plus Human: Scaling Without Losing the Human Touch
For Hare, the real win isn’t just time saved. It’s what that time gets reinvested in.
“At a cultural level, the blend between AI and human power is key,” she says. “Cue really does help us with that, so we can continue to focus on growth, focus on building our employee base with new skill sets, and just allowing them to feel the joy of what they do on a day-to-day basis.”