LivePerson, Inc. (LPSN)
Sep 4, 2026 - LPSN was delisted (reason: acquired by SOUN)
3.100
0.00 (0.00%)
Inactive · Last trade price on Sep 4, 2026
← View all transcripts

Earnings Call: Q1 2017

May 10, 2017

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Adam, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the LivePerson First Quarter 2017 conference call. On the call today are LivePerson's founder and CEO, Robert LoCascio, and CFO, Daniel Murphy. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star and then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, just press the pound key. Thank you. LivePerson CFO, Daniel Murphy, you may begin your conference.

Daniel Murphy
CFO, LivePerson

Thanks very much. Before we begin, please note that we will make forward-looking statements during today's call, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future results. These statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions as of today and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially due to various factors, including those described in today's earnings press release, in the comments made during this conference call, and in 10-Ks and 10-Qs and other reports we file from time to time with the SEC. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures is included in today's earnings press release, which is available in the investor relations section of our website. I will now turn the meeting over to Robert LoCascio, CEO and founder of LivePerson.

Robert LoCascio
CEO and Founder, LivePerson

Thanks, Dan. Thank you for joining LivePerson's first quarter conference call. 2017 marks a new chapter for LivePerson as we execute on our LiveEngage growth strategy. With LiveEngage, we're giving brands the power to reap huge efficiencies and strengthen customer relationships by replacing outdated voice contact center technology. LivePerson's creating a real industry buzz as our mobile messaging platform gains momentum. We've signed several new messaging deals in the first quarter. Now scaling multiple large enterprise customers in each region of the globe. These include several of the world's largest telcos and will soon include many leading financial service institutions. Our ability to power an always-on digital connection with consumers is already spurring transformation of the customer care industry. Our announcement last week of LiveEngage for Bots further unlocks the potential of our platform, exposing a true game-changing scenario.

This revolutionary extension of our platform treats bots and AI just like traditional agents and enables enterprise brands to manage multiple bots at scale in tandem with human agents. It's what we call tango. AI and human agents seamlessly hand off conversations to each other, with bots providing instantaneous intelligent responses to consumer queries and human agents supervising the exchanges. By marrying messaging with bots and AI, brands can virtually eliminate capacity constraints, multiplying the benefits generated from a digital connection with consumers. With LiveEngage, large enterprise can leverage one platform to power, measure, and report on all messaging conversations regardless of channel or if they are led by human agents, AI, or a combination of the two. Over the next few years, we expect every leading brand to shift voice agents and even store-based employees to messaging.

We also expect brands to leverage LiveEngage to add robust AI and bot capabilities into their messaging communications. Early adopters are already leading the way. The masses are looking to follow. They just don't know how to implement these new solutions in a scalable, successful way. We are proving we know how to do this at scale. In fact, we shared our vision, our strategy, and success stories just last week when we held the customer care industry's first AI bot summit at Carnegie Mellon's prestigious Human-Computer Interaction Institute. This was an amazing event. Attendance exceeded our planned capacity as approximately 130 senior leaders from 80 of the top brands across the globe heard firsthand from their peers how messaging is the killer app. Brands should deploy messaging with AI now and deploy it quickly.

LivePerson customers Vodafone and Royal Bank of Scotland shared at the summit their successes embracing LiveEngage and AI to manage the tango between AI and human agents. According to Vodafone's U.K. head of contact center transformation, the combination of person and chatbot is where the real magic lies. We also introduced our customers to some of the many AI and chatbot providers already running live with leading brands on the platform, including IBM's Watson, Toshiba, and Chatfuel, whose bot, integrated with LiveEngage, was recently showcased at Facebook's F8 conference. This is the power of our open platform, where APIs enable third-party developers to rapidly integrate new capabilities into LiveEngage. This sophisticated combination of bot technology and messaging is just one of LivePerson's key differentiators.

We have been a leader in digital transformation for the past 20 years, and we had the foresight to build LiveEngage from the ground up to manage the unique challenges of running an always-on enterprise messaging connection center versus a traditional, inefficient call center. We understand the changes that have to happen in the workflows, analytics, and measurements to capture the transformative potential of messaging. We are extending our lead in messaging by rapidly expanding our list of enterprise referenceable customers. For example, in the first quarter, we won back one of Europe's largest broadband providers who left a few years ago to try a me-too chat solution from a voice vendor. Unsatisfied, they joined one of our mobile messaging events and immediately aligned with our vision.

The brand is now live on a seven-figure deal that is substantially larger than the web-based chat program we once had with them. We signed another seven-figure deal in the first quarter with an existing multibillion-dollar financial services provider. This leading brand views messaging as the primary destination where customer service will happen and is looking to use it to reduce phone volume substantially. They're also using messaging to replace a competitor's email solution. We achieved a milestone in the Asia Pacific region by signing an expansion that landed us our first seven-figure customer in Japan. This leading telco started working with LivePerson a little over a year ago with just a handful of agents. Today, they are blazing the trail for other brands in Japan by focusing on digital transformation of their contact center.

Other mid to high six-figure contracts include one of the world's largest music subscription services, a leading automotive financial services firm, and a global provider of corporate travel services. As we emerge from our transition and execute on this tremendous opportunity, we've sought to enhance our board with new directors that have a track record for developing high-growth operating cultures and outstanding customer experiences. We recently added two directors who exemplify these skill sets. Jill Layfield, the former CEO of Backcountry and current CEO of Tamara Mellon, and Fred Mossler, who was at Zappos from the beginning and ran day-to-day operations at Zappos and was instrumental in growing it to be a multibillion-dollar revenue company and further to its sale of Amazon. Jill and Fred's guidance will be invaluable as LivePerson sets its sights on capturing a meaningful share of the multibillion-dollar brand-to-consumer messaging market.

Our strategy to win in this market is clear. In each region of the globe, we have identified a select group of brands that hold the power to change the face of customer care. Each of these brands have thousands of agents in their contact centers, and they collectively connect with billions of consumers every year. Our regional sales teams are intimately familiar with these target customers. Many are already customers with local relationships. As a result, over the last six months, we have empowered the sales directors in each of our regions to direct their own local selling efforts. This places the decision-making closer to the customer, aiding execution and speed to market. LivePerson has reinforced the local selling effort with a globally driven marketing program that brings customers, prospects, and field organization together through high-touch, high-value regional events such as the messaging AI bot we just recently did.

These events showcase the power of LiveEngage platform and how our thought leadership is already helping enterprises shed their roots in analog voice to embrace a digital connection that transforms customer care. This combination of regional sales approach and targeted marketing efforts are being successful and have been key to our wins so far with messaging and AI in 2017. As the effort solidified, it has become apparent that maintaining an overlay of a global sales manager role is no longer necessary for executing on our strategy. As such, Dustin Dean has decided to pursue new opportunities. We want to thank Dustin for his incredible contributions to LivePerson over these past years, especially the last two, where he was instrumental in helping us successfully navigate the transition to our new platform. Our field and marketing structure is gelling nicely.

We are focused on building momentum through 2017 and growing second-half revenue over the first half. This should position LivePerson for a return to year-over-year revenue growth. First quarter results set us on a path to meet this target. Selling activity accelerated sharply over last year's pace, returning to pre-migration levels. We set a record for average selling prices, and we delivered revenue at the high end of our guidance range. We also saw Q1 metrics that continue to validate our key assumptions on the LiveEngage platform and our vision. Mobile usage is expanding rapidly on LiveEngage, and averaged 35% of interactions in the first quarter as compared to about 7%-10% historically on legacy. Same customer interaction on LiveEngage continued to grow faster than 10% year-over-year.

The dollar retention rate remained greater than 100% over the trailing 12 months, a solid indicator of the future potential growth of LivePerson once our entire customer base is on LiveEngage. It is encouraging to see such healthy metrics even before messaging adoption becomes fully reflected in the numbers. Customers are only able to reap the benefits of mobile messaging, AI, and bots once we move them onto the LiveEngage platform. As such, we continue to aggressively migrate customers. We ended the first quarter with less than 20% of revenue on legacy and on target with our migration schedule. We expect to end the second quarter with approximately 12% of revenue on legacy and then to complete our platform transition in the third quarter with less than 5% of revenue on legacy. The remaining legacy customers will be sandboxed to maximize profitability.

LivePerson also remains on target to generate between $16 and $19 million of savings in 2017, excluding one-time restructuring and non-cash expenses as we wind down our legacy infrastructure and realign our operations. This is on top of the nearly $15 million of savings captured in 2016. It is exciting to see our vision, strategy, and execution come together in 2017. The investments we made in our LiveEngage platform and in customer migration are paying off as leading brands across the world are now relying on LivePerson to change how they connect with their consumers. With the migration winding down, our sales engine revitalized, and our primary focus is to extend our lead in messaging and to shift a portion of the 270 billion 1-800 calls made each year onto our platform. We look forward to building on the progress we have already seen in 2017.

I will now turn the call over to Dan, who will discuss our first quarter results and the outlook in more detail. Dan?

Daniel Murphy
CFO, LivePerson

Thanks, Rob. We are pleased with the start to 2017 as we entered the year with four key priorities and hit the mark on each of them. Our first priority is to refocus on selling and growth as we put migrations behind us, and we successfully shifted back into that mode in the first quarter, accelerating selling activity back to pre-migration levels and generating a record average selling price. Our second priority is to extend our lead in the mobile messaging space, and we did make solid progress here as well. We signed multiple messaging wins in the first quarter, launched LiveEngage for Bots, and held the customer care industry's first summit on leveraging AI and bots alongside messaging for customer care. LivePerson's third priority is to complete the platform transition to LiveEngage, and we're on track with that goal.

We entered the first quarter with less than 20% of revenue on legacy. We are on target to end the migration in the third quarter with less than 5% remaining on legacy. We aim to position LivePerson for steady margin improvements as we return to growth by capturing savings and efficiencies as we wind down legacy and realign on LiveEngage. We are executing on this goal and expect to reduce total expenses, excluding one-time restructuring and non-cash charges, by $16 million-$19 million in 2017. This is in addition to the nearly $15 million we saved in 2016. As Rob stated earlier, LivePerson has started a new chapter in 2017. We are looking forward to capitalizing on the investments we have made in our product, customers, and infrastructure these past few years. I will now review our first quarter operating results and 2017 financial guidance.

Total revenue of $50.9 million was at the high end of our guidance range and consisted of B2B revenue of $46.7 million and consumer revenue of $4.2 million. As outlined on last quarter's call, we set a clean start for LivePerson in the first quarter of 2017, recognizing the majority of the final revenue impacts from winding down our legacy offering. We expect the first quarter to mark the bottom of our platform transition and for revenue to build sequentially as we move through the remainder of 2017. Trailing 12-month average revenue per enterprise and mid-market customer was above $200,000 in the first quarter, in line with our 2016 average. We signed 74 deals in the first quarter of 2017, compared to 84 in the first quarter of 2016.

The lower deal count reflects our LiveEngage growth strategy, which is to focus on a targeted list of leading global brands where we have the opportunity to drive transformation. Our strategy is working, as LivePerson's average selling price increased significantly versus the first quarter of last year. We also signed 25 new customers, up from 20 a year ago. For the trailing 12 months ending March 31st, 2017, the dollar retention rate for customers on LiveEngage exceeded 100%. This measure takes into account the full impact of upsells, down sells, renewals, and cancellations from our existing customer base. The B2B revenue breakdown by industry was retail 25%, financial services 20%, telecommunications 17%, auto 15%, technology 8%, and other at 15%. International operations accounted for approximately 38% of total revenue in the first quarter of this year.

As planned, we continue to wind down our legacy infrastructure and realign our organization around our LiveEngage growth strategy. We recorded $240,000 of charges in the first quarter tied to this effort. We also incurred approximately $1.8 million of non-recurring litigation costs. Total first-quarter charges of $2 million were within our guidance range of $1.9 million-$2.3 million. Excluding one-time restructuring and non-cash charges, total LivePerson operating expenses decreased $3.4 million year-over-year. Gross margin increased 150 basis points to 72.9% in the first quarter from 71.4% a year ago. Excluding one-time charges, the gross margin was 73.1%, an increase of 170 basis points. This improvement primarily reflects the diminishing cost of our legacy operations and lower production costs to LiveEngage as the platform matures at the enterprise level.

First quarter GAAP net loss per share of $0.10, adjusted net income per share of $0.01, and adjusted EBITDA per share of $0.06 were all within the respective guidance ranges. At the end of the first quarter, cash on hand, including restricted cash, was $51.7 million, or approximately $0.92 per share, approximately $3 million higher than a year-ago period. LivePerson used cash from operations of $3.1 million in the first quarter, reflecting typical first-quarter cash flow patterns. Deferred revenue increased more than 50% to $33.1 million in the first quarter from $21.9 million a year ago, primarily based on leading customers to cash payments in advance. Capital expenditures totaled $2.7 million in the first quarter. The company also spent approximately $1 million to repurchase 142,000 shares of its common stock during the first quarter. An additional $19.2 million remains available under the share repurchase authorization.

As we turn our attention to guidance, we are raising the low end of our previously issued revenue guidance range due to solid initial traction with the efforts to reignite our sales engine and our continued progress winding down legacy. We expect modestly higher revenue in the second quarter of 2017 than in the first, and continue to target second half of 2017 revenue better than the first half. Our goal is to exit 2017 as a run rate that positions LivePerson for renewed growth in 2018. Full-year guidance for 2017 net income, adjusted net income, and adjusted EBITDA is unchanged. However, as efforts to wind down Legacy infrastructure and realign on LiveEngage are proceeding slightly ahead of plan, the pacing of forecasted restructuring and severance charges is likely to pull forward a bit.

Our revised expectations are as follows: Restructuring and severance charges of $300,000-$500,000 in the second quarter, and $2 million-$2.2 million in the third quarter. This compares with the prior guidance for the entire $2.3 million-$2.5 million of charges to take place in the third quarter. Timing of non-recurring legal expenses tied to IP litigation is unchanged and expected to total $6 million-$6.5 million for the full year of 2017. Our intent remains to maintain, if not improve, GAAP and non-GAAP margin in 2017 relative to 2016 and position LivePerson with a leaner and more nimble footprint as we prepare for growth in the years ahead. I will now review our more detailed financial expectations.

For the second quarter of 2017, we expect revenue of $51 million-$52 million, GAAP net loss per share of $0.12-$0.10, adjusted net income per share of $0.01-$0.02, and adjusted EBITDA, $3.3 million-$4.2 million or $0.06-$0.07 per share. For the full year 2017, our expectations are as follows: Revenue of $204 million-$209 million, from $201 million-$209 million previously. Revenue guidance includes a negative foreign currency impact of $3 million. GAAP net loss per share of $0.40-$0.31, which includes $0.16 per share in one-time and restructuring. Adjusted net income per share of $0.07-$0.12, and adjusted EBITDA of $17.3 million-$21.3 million or $0.30-$0.37 per share.

As a percent of revenue for the year excluding one-time charges, we anticipate gross profit to be approximately 73.5%, sales and marketing 38.5%, G&A of 16.5%, and R&D to be 20%. Note that these margins exclude the above-discussed one-time restructuring and litigation charges. Also, as a reminder, we have updated the methodology for calculating adjusted net profit per share in 2017. Whereas we previously incorporated the GAAP tax rate into our calculation, we now start with GAAP pre-tax profit/loss, add back restructuring to one-time and non-cash expenses, and then apply a standardized 35% tax rate. The goal of the revised calculation is to limit the volatility of GAAP tax rate fluctuations and to more closely align non-GAAP taxes with cash taxes. Please refer to LivePerson's earnings release issued earlier today for details on our full year 2017 assumptions.

We have also published a supplemental presentation on the investor relations page of our website that reviews key points from the earnings call and a full reconciliation of 2016 adjusted EPS under the historical and updated methodologies. You may find the presentation on the investor relations section of the company's website. I'll close with what I view as a summary of key takeaways. The migration to LiveEngage is on track to end in 2017, improving our visibility to target the first half as the bottom in revenue for LivePerson's transition. This visibility, along with the initial traction from reigniting our sales engine, has enabled us to raise the low end of our revenue guidance range in 2017. We are extending our leadership in messaging and now building on our value proposition by integrating the management, measurement, and reporting of bots and AI at scale for enterprises.

We continue to see greater than 100% dollar retention rate on LiveEngage for full-service customers, a solid indicator of future growth potential. We are on target to shed approximately $16 million to $19 million in 2017 expenses, and by the fourth quarter of 2017, rebuild our gross margins back to 75%, in line with historical peaks. We have a healthy capital structure with $52 million in cash and no debt, providing us with ample resources to execute on our vision. With that, I will open the call to questions. Operator?

Operator

At this time, I'd like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, just press star one on your telephone keypad, and we'll pause for just a moment to compile a Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Koji Ikeda from Oppenheimer. Koji, your line's open.

Koji Ikeda
Senior Analyst, Oppenheimer

Oh, hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Just a quick question here. Looks like there was a pretty big jump in the percentage of recurring revenue that is being generated on the LiveEngage platform in Q1. Was there anything in particular in the quarter that was contributing to that good pace of that recurring revenue migration? I guess just thinking about that remaining, that less than 20% out there that's left, is the profile of these revenue transitions more or less the same as what has been going on over the past few months, or is the profile of these transitions a little different?

Robert LoCascio
CEO and Founder, LivePerson

I'll answer the second question first. The profile of these customers is relatively the same. We've gone through a lot of migrations with enterprise clients, mid-market clients, and these transitions are relatively the same. It's just timing for us. As far as the first part of the question, just remember, Koji, on the RMR, there's two things that are occurring. We're selling, obviously, LiveEngage to new customers, so that has an impact on the RMR. The second thing is that we're migrating customers over from our legacy onto the LiveEngage platform, which has an impact on RMR as well. We made quite a bit of headway from Q4 into Q1.

As we've talked about in previous calls, our expectation is to be done with the migration and have approximately 5% or less of revenue on the legacy platform, which, of course, we'll sandbox and manage for profit.

Koji Ikeda
Senior Analyst, Oppenheimer

I guess just a follow-up. I think you had about $10 million in recurring revenue that you say you're going to be sandboxing in the third quarter. I believe you've mentioned on a couple calls before that some of the timing of those transitions is due to new product features. If you could you please give an update on those updates and how to think about the product roadmap going forward?

Robert LoCascio
CEO and Founder, LivePerson

We're very focused on those roadmap items to move that revenue back onto the LiveEngage platform. We are juggling between features that they want to make the move from the old platform to the new one, also all the new features that we have around messaging and AI and all that stuff. They're being prioritized around the revenue opportunities, we're very focused on obviously migrating all those customers, or as much as we can, onto the platform. That's why we've seen we're on target. We'll be down to less than 5% of revenues in Q3 because of all the capabilities that we delivered in LiveEngage.

Koji Ikeda
Senior Analyst, Oppenheimer

Great. Thank you for taking my questions today.

Robert LoCascio
CEO and Founder, LivePerson

Thank you.

Operator

Again, if you would like to ask a question, just press star one on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from the line of Richard Baldry from Roth Capital. Richard, your line's open.

Richard Baldry
Analyst, Roth Capital

Thanks. Can you talk a bit about the breadth of sales on the messaging, maybe across your sales quota teams , how well you think that's spread around them, and maybe geographically as well, so we get a feel for how that's playing out across your go-to market?

Robert LoCascio
CEO and Founder, LivePerson

Yeah, we're seeing a high demand around the world, U.S. and Europe being the largest segments of customer demand. The enterprise sales reps are just focused on that. They're just focused on new sales. We've put their compensation against selling messaging and all the capabilities. It's a very high focus, obviously, for each of them. As we know, last year, they were very focused on migrations and not really new revenue opportunities. There's a big focus on new revenue opportunities, and we had a very strong Q1 from a bookings perspective, and so we're seeing some good traction with those guys.

Richard Baldry
Analyst, Roth Capital

You've had a lot of success with telcos like Orange, T-Mobile, Telstra. Can you talk about whether you see them as a really strong channel for you to get into their own customer bases on a go-forward as sort of a leverage channel for you?

Robert LoCascio
CEO and Founder, LivePerson

Not today. It's a possibility in the future. We're just very focused on, as you point out, telcos. We have the largest telcos in every region now. Except for South America, we're really not active direct. We have some partners, but we have the largest telcos that are on messaging. They were the first to adopt and go live. Part of it is because they have control over their devices, they have very active apps, and they understand messaging because they see it all day on those apps. That's really a focal point from selling. I think there's other areas that you're going to see some channel pickup for us, especially in the AI space and the cognitive space, and there's some partners there that we'll be announcing in the next quarter. I think there's some exciting things happening on that side.

We're also becoming, because we built a platform, it's truly an open platform, we have many companies that are integrating with us now, too. If we look at, go back to bots, it's kind of like there's a lot of talk about them, but actually implementing them and managing them and getting them onto a platform where they're transparent, most of the platforms don't do that. They just provide core AI technology. We're able to put them onto a platform, and you're measuring them and deploying them like an agent. Where we've been very direct in the past, I think you're going to see more indirect opportunities for us coming up shortly. That's what I can see.

Richard Baldry
Analyst, Roth Capital

Last one would be, if you look at the customer that you won back, was there anything unique about that customer that made that an opportunity to bring them back or something that would be more of a pattern that you think you could take that same sort of characteristics and look at the customers that have churned and put a concerted effort on bringing them back because of something that's consistent across the base? Thanks.

Robert LoCascio
CEO and Founder, LivePerson

I think the most unique thing about this customer is that the person who let us go is the person who signed the deal. Two years ago, he went to one of the voice platforms that he has. They threw chat in, and he didn't think it was strategic. If you look, we worked with that customer for four or five years, and we got it to a certain place. Well, a few years later, we just fit the strategy that he was thinking, and he signed with the deal at the start, which was the size of what chat was at its end. There's an excitement around really attacking voice. In that instance, we're up to about 500, 600 agents already in a matter of weeks. That's really, I think the unique part is usually that doesn't happen.

Somebody fires you 24 months ago, usually they believe you're not going to have something new and cool. Our platform's so different and so unique in what it can provide that this person did that. I do think there's opportunity to go back. We are inviting customers back to look at what we have on the platform, that's a very exciting opportunity in those customers who maybe left us that we can bring back.

Richard Baldry
Analyst, Roth Capital

Thanks.

Robert LoCascio
CEO and Founder, LivePerson

Thanks.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Van Rhee from Craig-Hallum. Jeff, your line is now open.

Jeff Van Rhee
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Great, thanks. Rob, a couple questions. Just first on the bots. I don't know how to best frame the question, but I guess I'm curious in terms of the cycles that you're working on, what the frequency is where sort of this, one of the key or central features of that cycle revolves around your ability to cope or handle with bots. I'm just curious where the adoption cycle is among the target customer base.

Robert LoCascio
CEO and Founder, LivePerson

Fundamentally, what I'm seeing today is that most deals will include AI, so we term that as a bot. I believe we're gonna see a pretty heavy mix of bot and human together. The way we built the platform is pretty unique in that they actually live together side by side. The agent can come in and there's no transfer. Agent comes in when a bot's not working. An agent can watch a bot and see its performance. Actually, we have a system to manage the performance and rate the performance on a scale, which we're using the Meaningful Connection Score that we developed in the platform. Then we also have the ability for the human to pull in the bot if they want to run an automated process.

They could be talking and messaging, then they say, "Okay, you want to pay your bill, let me bring in the bill pay bot, and we'll run the automated process on that." We have Watson, we worked with Watson, we showcased Watson with a couple clients at the conference last week, it's a pretty integrated, very comprehensive experience that the consumer gets with it, will bring power of the bot to care. I think we have a really good offering there, I would suspect going forward, we're going to see a lot, most of our deals having both.

Jeff Van Rhee
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Okay. With respect to sales, Dustin's departure. Can you expand on this a little bit? The timing. Obviously, you haven't had a lot of outbound sales. You've been much more focused on migration. Given his sort of core expertise in the outbound, let's-go-book-new-business kind of mode, it would seem he would just be coming into a window that fits him really well. I guess 2 things. One, just the timing and a little more color as to what led that departure. Two, churn. I'm just curious how the churn in the sales org has trended over the last 2, 3 quarters.

Robert LoCascio
CEO and Founder, LivePerson

There's been a little churn over the last couple quarters. We have a stable enterprise customer base. Dustin's been with us close to 10 years. He went from a sales rep to running Asia and then really came back during the transition and helped with the migration. We really are not going to go back to a global role. We have a very small group of customers that we are focused on. We have strong regional heads that are working those deals, and I hired a new global head of marketing 10 months ago, who's really doing a fantastic job overlaying all these conferences and go-to-markets. Marketing's playing a far greater role on the global way to bring the expertise to our customers and bring them together.

It's kind of like for him, there's not much to do here anymore, and unless you were going to go back to run a rep or run a region, and we have people doing that. It just seemed like a good time that we're exiting our migrations and we wish him the best, and it's all on very friendly terms, and we want to thank him for all the service that he did. Today, we have to align to where the business is, and that's more of a regional-focused head, very targeted group of accounts.

Jeff Van Rhee
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Last one for me. Where are you with the rep count now, and how do you think about it, I guess, at year-end?

Robert LoCascio
CEO and Founder, LivePerson

We're at about 45, 46 reps right now, quota-carrying. Based on where we are in the first quarter, we're comfortable with that number. As the quarters pick up, we can add to it if we think it's necessary. Once again, our goal is, there's a very targeted group of enterprise customers that run very large contact centers, and that's where we are. This is a very targeted list, so we don't need a ton of reps to do it. It's more of a very focused approach to those reps owning telcos, banks, cable, some retail, healthcare in these different regions.

Jeff Van Rhee
Analyst, Craig-Hallum

Got it.

Operator

There are no further questions in the queue at this point. I'll turn the call back over to the presenters.

Robert LoCascio
CEO and Founder, LivePerson

Thank you, everyone, we will see you on the next Q2 call. Thank you.

Daniel Murphy
CFO, LivePerson

Thanks, everybody.

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.