Based on cloud computing principles, which are captured perfectly by the video below, our Sofware as a Service model puts world-class customer service within reach of any organisation – even those with relatively modest operations. Take a look at this overview, for more information.

For example, as part of an overall solution for a large client, we have created an iPhone/iPad app that allows customers to trace their parcel delivery in real time. So, rather than be left wondering about the current location of a parcel or consignment, customers can track progress and monitor the delivery time from the palm of their hands. The application significantly enhances the customer experience and reduces the burden on contact centres.

The numero solution draws on the cutting edge functionality of numero interactive to deliver much more than other apps. And so, for example, should a parcel be damaged in transit or an incorrect item shipped, it can be returned with ease using an in-built utility which scans the consignment label and generates a message to the courier to arrange collection. So, the customer doesn’t need to make any calls or any fuss – reducing the workload of contact centres in the process.

These new apps are just one example of the way we apply our knowledge of customer service needs and cutting-edge technology to streamline customer journeys. To find out more, just ask us about doing the right thing.

This was great news for Lakeland (who we’ve worked with since 2005) as they topped the poll which drew on the experiences of more than 14,000 shoppers across a broad range of product categories from electrical appliances to baby and toddler products. Lakeland was praised for innovative products and great aftersales service. In our experience of working with the team in Windermere, no one tries harder and is more dedicated to customer service excellence than Lakeland. So the top place position is a reflection of their hard work, dedication, systems (which include the numero solutions platform) and ongoing investment, even during a time of recession. It is therefore our pleasure to reproduce the league table featured in The Daily Mail and to congratulate our friends in Windermere for their outstanding achievement.

Whilst Lakeland was praised in the Which? Poll, it wasn’t such good news for a number of others, including WH Smith, who have to content with headlines such as that from the Daily Mail: “WH Smith shamed: Once great name now rated bottom by High Street customers”.  In contrast to strong financial results, the retailer hit rock bottom of the league table with Which? concluding that the established high street name was ‘not as good as it used to be’.

There is, perhaps, a lesson for the high street within the results, with Lakeland continuing to invest in customer service, even during a recession – a fact that clearly hasn’t gone unnoticed given the comments by Which? We hope that some of the poorer performers take a leaf out of the Lakeland book and prioritise their customers’ needs – something our own research recently identified as lacking in many cases.

Of course, back then, the world wide web was a hardly developed, smart phones, Facebook and Twitter were simply unheard of. Communications then, really meant telephones, letters and email.

What continues to amaze us is just how few organisations, even in 2010, have embraced technology and allow customers to correspond using any channel they choose, whenever they like. We just don’t get it. What is the problem? Just what is so wrong with sending an email to a bank or texting your favourite mobile provider? It all seems perfectly logical to us even though many organisations continue to hide behind the usual excuses of “it’s a security thing” or give vague “data protection” defenses. What rubbish.

Ten years on our development program is as full as ever. We have so many new ideas between us to deliver true customer excellence that the team on the second floor continues to expand and to work flat out. How can this be after 10 years?

Lawrence and his team really have excelled – if you read any of the Forrester or Gartner reports we have delivered the true nirvana of solutions which optimise the customer journey. From those humble origins, and our quite brilliant idea around our SmartAgent email management solution, Lawrence has delivered the numero interactive platform. Quite how the team designed this solution none of us are quite sure, but what a new platform this has proven to be. No longer ‘just’ an outstanding email management application but now a fully integrated solution that handles telephony, letters, chat, texts and web transactions managed through a sophisticated workflow and automation technology to create a single view of the customer and their cases. Amazing and we feel we are without equal either technologically or from a business improvement performance point of view.

The real challenge now is describing just how simple it is to configure the solution to address all elements of the front and back office functions. So whether our clients need a telephony application, an HR system, a logistics solution or a web self service suite – numero interactive can be simply configured in a modular way to deliver applications for the most demanding of situations. The problem is we have so many solutions we have struggled to articulate the power of the numero uno platform.

So Guy, along with the brilliant team at Delineo have been working on how we can easily describe these solutions to you. We have built another 75 pages of web content that describes our technology and solutions and in doing so we have tried to bring the pages to life by appending videos of the solution in action. This work is not the end though and having learnt over this past few months we have much more to come………….

So we all hope you enjoy your journey around the new pages and of course, if you wish to see the solution in action, please just get in touch.

Over the next few months, David will hand over all his responsibilities for the Vertex account to Maston Daniel, while working with Guy on some exciting new partnership contracts that will expand the numero footprint in Europe.

David has been a key member of the numero sales team and, following early success with Experian and Teleperformance, he has worked closely with Vertex since 2006. In that time he has helped conclude the Corporate Agreement – a significant milestone for the business that has been pivotal in our development.

Under David’s account management Vertex has successfully deployed numero solutions into a number of clients in both the UK and North America and our solution remains a key differentiator in the Vertex portfolio. Both organisations now believe that there are many significant new joint opportunities in the UK, North America and Australia.

We would like to record our thanks to David for all his hard work and professionalism over the years, especially for helping to develop numero to a position at the forefront of the multichannel communication field (as captured in the video opposite). We wish David and Linda every success and happiness with their retirement plans.

The rise of SMS (text) messaging as a primary channel of communication is well documented within this blog. It is an established fact that the medium is now the method of choice for many consumers, especially younger generations. Against this rise in popularity, many private and public sector organisations are faced with understanding the impact of the text messaging on the way they communicate with their stakeholders and establishing the wider implications of the public’s  changing style of communication.

In light of this, research undertaken at the University of Coventry makes fascinating reading. As reported on the BBC website, a study of 8 to 12 year olds has found that rather than damaging reading and writing, ‘text speak’ is associated with strong literacy skills. The researchers found that it uses word play and requires an awareness of how sounds relate to written English. Furthermore, children who regularly use text language – with all its mutations of phonetic spellings and abbreviations – also appear to be developing skills in the more formal use of English.  When children replace or remove sounds, letters or syllabels – for example gr8 for great and w8 for wait – it requires an understanding of what the original word should be.

numero has pioneered support for multi-channel communication within organisations, as this video helps explain. We have done so as companies concerned with delivering world class customer have to move with the times and trends. It is not enough to simply provide facilities for customers to communicate via different communication channels, you must also implement workflows and processes to enable the different mediums to be handled efficiently and effectively.

The new release of the numero uno software platform is designed to do exactly that. Amongst the many things it does, the platform offers an inbound and outbound communication gateway for all forms of communication – including SMS messaging – and has in-built intelligence to interpret messages in order to automatically respond to the message and route it to the appropriate person, team or department. This is an incredibly powerful solution for businesses looking to maintain or establish a leadership position through their interactions with customers.

Importantly, with numero uno, the timeline for implementation is almost as fast as the speed of texting amongst the younger generations – with payback periods to match.

Maston has completed an intensive induction programme to gain a detailed insight to numero act, numero uno and numero pro. A central focus of which has been the multi-channel capabilities of our solutions – to ensure that Maston can put his 20 years’ experience in the IT sector to best effect for the benefit of clients. Following the conclusion of his numero training, Maston commented:

“Making a difference has always been an objective in my career and numero allows me to do exactly that. The ability of the platform to streamline customer journeys – regardless of the communication method used – is both exciting and inspiring. After more than 20 years in the industry I am firmly of the view that there’s never been a more important time to demonstrate ROI from IT projects. Having seen the results of numero’s work with leading brands, I know we can deliver outstanding results and payback in a matter of months”.

numero sales director, Mark Morris, who has known Maston for many years, is equally enthusiastic about expansion of the team:

“Since joining the business at the start of the year, not a week goes by without another numero reference site or customer being added to our list of success stories – most recently from the CEO of Ideal Shopping Direct. The driver of which is the new numero software platform and its support for all communication channels including phone, email, written correspondence, fax, text and more. It’s been a pleasure introducing Maston to all this and his new colleagues, whose know-how and expertise is the key success factor for clients.”

Maston already has a busy work schedule as the new release of the numero uno software platform has attracted a great deal of interest. However, he’ll hopefully still have time to spend with his wife and two children – enjoying their collective passions for motorsport, rugby, cricket and sailing.

Mike Hancox the CEO of Ideal Shopping Direct plc, the TV shopping and online business, today highlighted the importance of the numero software platform within its Preliminary Results announcement to the City. Commenting on the strong return to profitability within the business, Mike heralded the impact of numero commenting that:

“We invested in numero customer management software which significantly improved our customer service in the area of e-mail processing. With regard to product delivery, we increased the speed of delivery to the customer and introduced track and trace technology to give visibility to the delivery process”.

The latter point is a clear indication of the strategic fit of the numero solution with the Ideal Shopping business, as its logistics partner the Home Delivery Network, also depends on the numero software platform.

The multi-channel capabilities of the numero software platform are an excellent fit with the strategy of Ideal Shopping. Paul Wright, Chairman, states:

“Having undertaken a strategic review and refocused the business on the fundamentals that had originally made the Company successful, I am delighted that Ideal Shopping Direct has completed its turnaround plan and delivered an excellent performance in the second half of the year. The strategy we have adopted to diversify from being a TV centric shopping company to become a multi-channel business, whilst exploiting our core values and strengths, has begun to pay dividends”.

Our 2 minute masterpiece utilises some rather clever CGI techniques, which are well worth watching and will be revealled in an upcoming ‘making of’ blog entry. However, there’s more to the video than special effects as we hope to raise £1,000 for The Stroke Association by donating £1 for every person that takes a look via our website. So help us to put something back, while learning more about tacking the communication challenge, simply by visiting this link.

You can find out more about the excellent work of The Stroke Association here or post your messages of support via this blog story. Happy viewing.

Entitled ‘Learning to Improve e-mail Classification with numero interactive’, the paper describes how the numero interactive platform uses a small number of manually classified messages to create a sophisticated statistical model from which to classify new messages.  Whilst the paper focuses on e-mail communication, the same approach is used for all message forms, including those submitted by phone, fax, letter and web form.

Copies of the paper – which contains both a high level and detailed technical overview – are available from numero, free of charge.  To request the paper in electronic format please use the contact form opposite or contact us here.

From an Artificial Intelligence perspective, the statistical classification service detailed in the paper represents just one of numero’s capabilities, as we have a number of NLP services that deliver some rather clever functionality including:

• Entity extraction: identifies names, addresses, phone numbers, order numbers etc contained within messages
• Language identifier: identifies the language used within a message, with support for 40 languages as standard
• CMS/knowledgebase: identifies content from a knowledgebase that is relevant to the content of an inbound message
• Spell-checker:  through the use of smart algorithms we can support large dictionaries without a significant drain on system resources and ensure no delay in look-up time
• Profanity checker: identifies profanities within messages (typically applied to restrict outbound misuse), including all variants and derivatives

A well defined development roadmap exploits the reuseability of our proprietary AI technology and algorithms to bring fresh functionality for customers. Developments include:

• A sentiment analysis service that establishes whether a message is positive or negative
• An FAQ service that establishes whether a message can be automatically answered by information within a knowledgebase
• A content-sensitive spell checker

The numero paper presented at AI-2009 is a great place to find out more – request your copy using the form opposite.