The pace of life at numero continues to surprise us. We have a strong team in place, our solutions are well received and they are delivering some stunning results. Our challenge now is how to scale the business and ensure our messages are received by a larger audience.

This year we have continued to invest in the business both in staff numbers and in the breadth and scale of our solutions. Our key driver remains to develop a strong nucleus of high profile clients with the major challenge still being our marketing and brand recognition.

October has been a pivotal month for the research and development team who have just completed the first release of a major new version of SmartAgent that has been 18 months in development. Despite the current version of SmartAgent being so successful we have learnt much about customer interaction and business process management in the last 5 years, with many of these experiences being incorporated into what is known internally as Version 4. The full roll out will begin in early 2008.

Version 4 builds on our text based expertise with exciting new channels including voice and interactive chat, however we believe that the real power of Version 4 will be the scope and flexibility of the new workflow engine. This engine coupled with a powerful new agent desktop allows SmartAgent to be configured and perform many roles including that of; a CTI application, a customer interaction hub (CIH), a business process workflow solution or indeed a complaints handling application, all from a single solution. This diversity of a capability is creating much internal debate as we decide on how to position and market this new application.

Acting as a transactional CRM Version 4 provides a complete 360 degree view of the customer via the agents desktop by automatically showing them all of their previous transactions complete with case history therefore allowing them to make informed decisions.

It will be evident to all that the customer interaction market continues to grow with the boom and apparently never ending growth in on line business world. Whatever review one reads it is clear that consumers are flocking to the web and driving on line transaction processing. This effect can be seen by our client’s increases in non voice communications and their investments in the multi channel world. The real surprise to us is how corporate organisations are treating this migration to non voice. We see little evidence of strategic initiatives to implement single integrated multi channel solutions. Instead, we see these organisations continue to spend on new standalone applications e.g. IVR, email, SMS or web solutions which do not see the interactions within the other channels. That is, the agent handling an email response may be unaware of the recent web enquiry or last telephone call.

This lack of integration is understandable from an operational perspective. For example, “let’s get an IVR / email deflection / SMS solution in place quickly to take the load off the contact centre” but it is surprising when the organisation perceives it is a multi channel player. Few organisations seem to be providing the holistic single customer view, agnostic multi channel client choice with a single agent desk top architecture. Or are we missing these organisations?
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Guy Colclough
Chief Executive