LivePerson Provides Kasamba with a New Home

          Kasamba’s 30,000 Experts Now Available on LivePerson.com

Have you visited LivePerson’s website recently?  If so then it’s immediately obvious that there are big changes brewing at the company.  For one thing, Kasamba’s 30,000 experts now reside on LivePerson’s homepage.  In case you didn’t know, LivePerson has moved into the consumer business, letting people use its chat service to get advice from a large community of experts covering a broad range of categories.

LivePerson acquired Kasamba in October 2007 with the goal of enabling any person who has a question to find an online expert who can answer it, live and in real time.  Since then they’ve been working to integrate the two platforms, and to add new features that both extend the reach of experts and make it easy for the likes of you and me to find them.  They’re also undertaking a major recruitment effort to build out their expert community.

Morphing Kasamba into a Greater LivePerson Expert Community

Who are the experts?  In LivePerson’s traditional business model, the experts are employees of their business customers who, working as chat agents, answer questions about the company’s product line, and help online visitors make wise choices.

In their new business model, the definition of expert expands to include people who don’t work for the company, but rather use that company’s products or services everyday, such an architect who uses Autodesk’s building information modeling program to design spaces for clients.  Arguably, such people have considerable practical knowledge, and are often willing to share it with others.

LivePerson wants to help companies leverage such brand enthusiasts to provide expert level support to their customers.  These companies can do so by inviting the experts to join LivePerson (that is to say, register to become an expert and take advantage of the suite of tools available through the Expert Messenger).  Once registered, the company can place the expert’s profile on their site.  

Of course, the experts themselves benefit by getting paid for providing one-on-one personalized support.  And the experts have the freedom to choose their own hours of operation; they’re not mandated to keep set hours (though many choose it as their fulltime job).  Moreover, LivePerson handles all the business arrangements, most notably the collection of fees from chatters.  In fact, all of that is arranged before the expert is even “hired” by a customer.

That’s not to say that experts have to be “sponsored” by a company.  Any person who has considerable expertise in a topic is free to join LivePerson and open his or her doors for business.  The trick, however, is earning positive user reviews.  Any visitor who hires an expert is encouraged to rate him or her, and to provide specific comments on the experience.

A New Web Address for Kasamba

Now that the integration is complete, finding the former Kasamba experts (along with the new ones that LivePerson is working so hard to recruit) is easy: simply visit www.liveperson.com.  The old Kasamba domain has officially been retired.

Stay tuned to see if LivePerson achieves its goals of filling out its ranks of experts to cover every conceivable category, from personal finance and medical questions, to business planning and career coaching.  If they do, it will certainly be a huge boost for those of us who want expertise on demand, but don’t have the time and resources to go hunting for it.