€3m boost for VoiceSage

CORK SOFTWARE company VoiceSage has received a €3 million investment from a group of private investors which the company will use to fund its expansion into the British market.

Following considerable interest in its hosted suite of voice applications - which are used for tasks such as debt collecting and management of deliveries - the company has established a dedicated British sales office.

The new investment has been raised through chief executive JJ Kett's network of contacts and the backers want to remain anonymous, according to VoiceSage's director of innovation, Paul Sweeney.

"It shows that there is still support out there for good enterprise propositions," he said.

Founded in 2002, VoiceSage provides software that allows automated telephone calls to be made to clients of its customers.

The software is hosted by VoiceSage and customers access and manage it over the web in the classic software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

"The interest in the UK has been so good that we have more leads than we can deal with," said Sweeney. "The challenge now is to hire the right sales people."

The company plans a major push into financial services in Britain.

One UK insurance company is an early adopter and VoiceSage has helped it improve policy renewals by 35 per cent through a combination of automated text and phone call reminders.

Mr Sweeney, who was formerly European marketing director with the firm, said his new role involves looking at new products or services that VoiceSage can introduce based on the technology it has already developed.

He gives the example of Indesit, the white goods manufacturer, which has been using VoiceSage to schedule deliveries to customers homes. "Is there data in the van or around the customer location that the network could expose?" asks Sweeney.

"That will be really important as we move into the world of Telco 2.0. There is a lot of a value for companies in using the available data in the telecoms network for better co-ordination of activities."

VoiceSage is also getting a lot of interest in its Click 2 Talk product which was launched at the recent Technology for Marketing conference in Britain, according to Mr Sweeney. It allows customers to include a link in their online text ads which facilitates a call-back at a convenient time.

"With all the noise around 'click throughs', this one really resonated with people," said Mr Sweeney. "People are spending €20,000 a month on [ Google] AdWords, but did their phone ring even once?"

As a SaaS play, he says it is essential that customers continue to use the product every month.

British catalogue business Scotts of Stowe is one customer that has gone from using Voice-Sage simply to confirm deliveries to more advanced functions such as collection of late payments and fraud detection.