This just solidifies the great work that our product teams have been doing an extending LivePerson not only having the best messaging platform, but also being one of the leading AI companies now in the world. LivePerson Functions makes this process even easier by offering serverless customization and integration with the ability to create custom automated workflows. “Many of our customers, including those who prefer phone or other means of communication, are finding this new channel very easy to use as they stay close to their money, even while social distancing,” said Katie Jenkins, Head of Direct Banking at HSBC. But even if the brand got the agent in the home and are answering calls, their children and dogs and all the noises of a normal home. Eventually, I got him a Visa, flew him out to the United States, and in two and a half months, he became a better developer than the Apple and Snapchat guys. So the immediate benefits from the demand specifically in our usage-based models like gain share, which is now expected to increase more than 50% year-over-year in the first half of 2020. We’re also seeing brands rapidly embrace automation to address the imbalance between fewer agents that’s the capacity issue I was talking about, and more inbound conversations.
One of our retail customers doubled their labor hours on messaging in one week, onboarding new agents in less than 48 hours, 95% of them who are working from home but also built automation to address their top 10 coronavirus-related intent and quickly achieved a nearly 50% containment rate. Now they virtualize because of COVID, they’re virtualizing all the front end, so that includes service, sales and even their retail agents. And many brands have been really scrambling to try to hold on to the voice contact center agents in the past. And even we know some of our customers tried to keep the contact centers open with social distancing, you’re running at about 30% to 50% capacity, which is not a sustainable model for running a contact center with the physical distancing in those centers. And today, already, over 50% of their entire contact volume is on messaging. The volume level is so low right now that I found myself wishing for subtitles in English.
This is where we see the greatest demand in our business right now. And I looked, I look at the entrepreneurs, the ones who spend, you know, I tell them spend 80% of your time right up front, trying to find the people you need to carry out this vision, like whatever you need to get to the next level, get those people on board, it doesn’t have to be the complete team to take you all the way to IPO. And in 10 case 10 Qs and the reports we filed from time to time with the FCC we assume no obligation to update any forward looking statements. And so I can’t stress to you that, that is absolutely a big part of our investment thesis, not only from an acquisition standpoint, but investing capital internally to pre-build out platforms so that we can show our clients that we can turn them on quickly and get them into the marketplace with these new set of capabilities that they’re looking for. I absolutely think that people should go out and get…
Like how did you I mean, people are always asked me like, how did you get your product, you know, on the shelf? Please note that during today’s call we will make forward looking statements which are predictions projections and other statements about future results. We’ve been planning for a future where voice contact centers go away and are replaced by messaging-based digital conversations powered by AI and humans. I like to now illustrate the path to the future of Conversational Commerce and highlight one of our customers who one of the largest telcos in Australia. Contact center agents, which typically represent the largest portion of the employee base for bank, telco, healthcare or insurance company also need a cloud-based offering to work remotely. And although many call center agents have shifted to work from home, we estimate that the industry is only at about 50% capacity. For example, some popular contact center geographies like India and the Philippines, the agents, they don’t work and live in homes that they have bandwidth, that they have connectivity to the Internet.