Why VCs Like NewVoiceMedia’s Trajectory

What can you do with $50m?

Personally this is an exercise in creative imagination I find pretty easy! But I guess the leadership team at NewVoiceMedia have already honed their wish list for powering the globalisation game-plan. The news about ‘exciting news’ has been bringing smiles to the faces I’ve seen at their HQ for a few weeks now.

It has to be said they are on a roll. Pretty much every time I visit, I can never find the marketing team. They are always moving to a new part of the building as yet more people turn up on the payroll. The whole organisation has more than doubled in twelve months.

To be fair, this is ‘just in time’ resourcing rather than ‘just in case’. Revenues have already doubled in the last year. Customers now span North America, APAC and EMEA. Would you like the HR director’s job? Not me. Far too much like hard work! Finding quality people is tough. Inducting them into the NewVoiceMedia ethos takes effort. Making sure they are settled and productive even more so. Still I’m sure it’s the kind of problem both the board and investors like to have.

So where is the cash going?

Every time a business wins more investment, it is validation they are on the right track and the strategy is trusted. This is not the first time NewVoiceMedia has secured funding. I bet it is not the last. The market opportunity which the investors are excited about is certainly a compelling one.

Customer engagement is sitting plumb centre in how organisations are reinventing themselves. That’s why the forecasts speak of 20 million contact centre seats over the next five years. Live engagement by voice, text and most probably video, together with effective self-service and proactive messaging will combine to make the core of every service strategy for the next five years.

That’s why those multi-channel contact centre seats remain crucial to fulfilling this service mix. It is also why those forecasts see a third of the contact centre space migrating to the cloud in that timeframe. In North America, Gartner sees 18% growth for the next few years. This is all part of a broader corporate reinvention that needs cloud services to facilitate the flexibility, scale and ubiquity that competing in global markets demands.

So cloud is where the action is. In fact last year NewVoiceMedia won market share five times as fast as its cloud competitors. So you can imagine why investors are excited and want to back a brand looking like they are capable of coming out on top. It’s a big prize they are chasing.

This is how the contact centre industry is re-inventing itself. Going cloud to gain access to all those features such as multi-channel that always ended up as unaffordable in the legacy days of on-premise infrastructure. On top of that ‘cloud’ also re-invents the service proposition infrastructure with baked in integrations and off the shelf APIs allowing customer ecosystem to be easily developed. Here are a few examples.

I’m personally absorbed with exploring the value proposition of scalable personalisation which situation-based routing offers: a focus that NewVoiceMedia is pioneering. I'm also pretty excited about how outbound communications are in the process of being reset to deliver the kind of relevance now expected by today’s consumer. Think intelligent dialler-driven campaigns in the context of marketing automation disciplines. NewVoiceMedia is a creative company to work with.

So in answer to my question, they are spending the cash on super-fast growth: product, people, place, promotions. All the classic market growth stuff.

This is why VCs like NewVoiceMedia’s trajectory.