How LivePerson Uses AI to Elevate Employee Experience

What does a great employee experience look like? At LivePerson, it’s measurable, scalable—and infused with AI.

For Deanna LaPierre, senior director of talent development at LivePerson, success isn’t just about numbers. “It’s about impact, connection, and support for our employees,” she says. “And that’s what we’ve done by creating a better experience for managers and employees, making it easier for them to do their job better.”

In 2022, Deanna and her colleague, Matthew Meech, the talent development manager, set out to find a better performance management system. “The system we were leveraging just didn’t align with the experience we wanted for our team,” Deanna explains. “It was hard for people to get their minds around it, leading to some frustration.”

With Betterworks, LivePerson transformed performance reviews from a bureaucratic task into a strategic moment of growth — for employees, managers, and teams. 

From clunky tools to real-time alignmentLivePerson needed a solution that would meet its business needs and fit seamlessly into its performance management calendar and processes. At about the same time, its finance team was seeking a company-wide goals tool to overcome difficulties with getting employees organized and aligned around goal-setting. This presented the perfect opportunity for Deanna and Matthew to find a solution with not only a strong reputation in goals management — but one that could also support LivePerson’s entire performance management strategy. 

Betterworks stood out because it offered a holistic platform that could scale with the company. “Once we made the decision, the alignment between goals and performance reviews became much clearer, and our review committee recognized that as well,” Deanna explains. “We focused on the Goals rollout first because we were getting close to quarterly goal setting. We wanted to implement change quickly and see the impact a new software could have on a process that had historically been challenging for us.”

And it delivered: Within the first year, 85% of employees had set goals within 45 days of launch—something the team had never seen before. “This was a direct result of the tool’s intuitive design, which made it easier for our employees to engage with the process while also being a meaningful addition to our HR technology,” Deanna says. For a company that had struggled with clunky interfaces and low completion rates, this was a game-changer.

Bringing AI to the employee experience

LivePerson, an enterprise leader in digital, AI-empowered customer conversations that help brands improve customer experiences, has the distinction of having been named three times to Fast Company’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies, clinching the No. 1 spot in 2022. As an AI-driven organization, the team at LivePerson knew better than most that introducing AI into talent management processes demands both innovation and caution. The team approached AI not just as a new feature but as a tool to test, challenge, and validate before rolling it out company-wide.

As soon as Deanna and Matthew found out about the infusion of AI in feedback, conversations, and goal-setting tools, they were on board. Employees have found it easier to develop high-quality, measurable goals with Goal Assist, while managers have used Feedback Assist to improve the quality of feedback and Feedback Summary to speedily summarize data from conversations in a comprehensive and unbiased way. Feedback Summary has been a boon for non-native-English-speaking managers, too.

“We were being careful and thoughtful about the use of AI so we can ensure it was responsible and fit for our purpose,” Deanna says. “If you have stakeholders who are leery of AI, make them a part of your testing group so they can see. with their own eyes, the safety of the test platform.”

Her team—including HR business partners and directors—set out to stress-test the platform by inputting everything from vague statements to provocative phrases. “We tried to break the Betterworks AI. I’m not gonna lie,” Matthew says, “but it always comes back with something polite.”

In one case, for instance, Deanna entered phrases like “I killed it this year” or even “I should have your job,” just to see how the AI would respond. “The system turned it into a more appropriate phrase about workload distribution and my interest in being able to grow to the next level,” she says.

Betterworks’ AI doesn’t just protect against poor feedback—it models how to elevate casual or clumsy language into constructive conversations. The AI acts like a coach in the background, helping managers deliver more professional and productive reviews, no matter their starting point.

More performance, less ‘management’

LivePerson has built templates for key conversations like employee experience check-ins and new hire introductions, using data from reviews and goals to refine its broader HR initiatives and make them more focused and effective, Deanna explains. Employees can schedule conversations with their managers anytime to get guidance and the right amount of feedback.

Crafting performance reviews in a second language can be mentally taxing—especially when precision matters. Betterworks’ AI feedback tools proved invaluable, helping non-native speakers express themselves more clearly and confidently. “AI played a crucial role here by helping to reduce the mental load—and time—it took for these managers to provide clear and effective feedback,” Deanna says.

The platform also introduced more nuanced goal-setting capabilities, allowing for business, developmental, and personal goals to coexist in one place. Managers and employees could now see how work and growth intersected. By making feedback and goal-setting part of the same process, the Betterworks platform gave people the language—and the structure—to talk about what they wanted next.

LivePerson is now using Betterworks Calibration to establish an all-in-one performance and talent review process that helps leaders identify high-potential employees and critical talent to make better strategic workforce decisions in a fraction of the time it previously took. It’s also using Betterworks Advanced Analytics to better understand where and how to invest in talent development and to better support managers.

Faster processes, better outcomes

In addition to the 85% goal adoption within six weeks, LivePerson succeeded in getting a third of employees to establish developmental goals within the first 90 days of using the platform.

One of the biggest successes was its end-of-year review process, which afforded simplicity and ease of use—in part by leveraging AI to reduce the amount of time it took managers to complete performance reviews by as much as 75%. And, for its first performance review cycle with Betterworks, LivePerson achieved a 93% on-time completion rate. 

“We built something that this organization seems to really like,” Deanna says. “With Betterworks it is really clear for everyone what to do,” she says. “And I think that made a big difference.”

Deanna’s team didn’t treat the shift to Betterworks as a tech rollout but rather as a culture change. They gave managers and employees the tools, training, and space to learn. They tested AI before releasing it. They adapted the platform to the business—not the other way around. And they didn’t wait for perfect conditions to begin.

“Trust your instincts,” Deanna advises. “Just do it.”