The 2015 CRM Rising Stars: NewVoiceMedia Builds Multichannel Contact Centers for Salesforce.com Customers
Dedicated to delivering what analysts call a "truer" cloud experience than its competitors, NewVoiceMedia is making a name for itself as a multichannel cloud contact center provider. Unlike traditional cloud contact center vendors that require plug-ins or local downloads, the U.K. company exists entirely in the cloud, Monica Girolami, head of marketing for NewVoiceMedia's North American arm, says.
"Our founders have always believed that telephony could be delivered using only cloud methodology, and that's what they've created. NewVoiceMedia is a true cloud solution," Girolami says.
NewVoiceMedia entered the North American market in October 2013, and currently supports more than 300 contact centers with 15,000-plus employees across 115 countries. Over the past several years, the company has been busy "perfecting" a solution that would seamlessly bridge contact centers with CRM systems, and began aligning itself with Salesforce.com because of "the caliber of its CRM offering and its market reach," Girolami explains.
The vendor currently has an exclusive partnership with Salesforce.com to build multichannel cloud contact center technology for Salesforce customers. Its flagship offering, the ContactWorld solutions suite, compiles data from multiple channels, including the customer or prospect data from Salesforce CRM, to give organizations the insight needed for facilitating personalized contact center experiences.
ContactWorld integrates with both the Salesforce Sales Cloud for outbound engagement and the Salesforce Service Cloud for inbound engagement to not only boost sales performance, but also enable organizations to provide a better service experience in a nonsales interaction. Every time someone calls a contact center, for example, NewVoiceMedia can connect him to the same agent that he spoke to during his last phone call.
As of December 2014, NewVoiceMedia was the highest rated Cloud Telephony Integration application on the Salesforce AppExchange, with a score of 4.9 out of 5, based on more than 100 reviews. Girolami attributes this to the seamlessness of the app experience, as well as its unfailing uptime.
"Customers want an app that works well, and works all the time. It's as simple as that. With NewVoiceMedia, it's hard for users to tell where Salesforce ends and where NewVoiceMedia begins. It's completely frictionless. We've also got a 99.999 percent uptime, and we're very transparent about it. We don't have any plug-ins that update and slow or halt performance. There are no interruptions," Girolami says.
In 2014, Salesforce.com invested in NewVoiceMedia twice, and also invited the company to power its own contact center during the Dreamforce conference in September. Other investors, including Technology Crossover Ventures, Notion Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners, came on board in 2014 as well.
"I've been seeing [NewVoiceMedia] come up a lot over the last several months. They're doing a great job of tying Salesforce to a contact center cloud solution. A lot of other companies are trying to penetrate the cloud, so there's a lot of competition in this space, but NewVoiceMedia is trying to pull ahead. What it's ultimately going to come down to is performance," Brent Leary, partner at CRM Essentials, says.
Within the past year, NewVoiceMedia's revenue grew by 61 percent, and, given the rapid growth of the contact center technology market, it expects to double its business in 2015, the company told CRM. NewVoiceMedia also plans to continue working closely with Salesforce, strengthening its recently announced integration with Salesforce1 Mobile and bolstering its presence on the Salesforce Desk.com app hub.
"It'll be interesting to see how NewVoiceMedia will continue to distinguish itself in this crowded market, but they're on a good trajectory so far, and they've got the right understanding of what it means to be in the cloud," Leary says.
NEWVOICEMEDIA
CEO: Jonathan Gale
Founded: 2000
Headquarters: Basingstoke, England
Revenue: N/A
Employees: 280+
Customer count: N/A