LBB ContactEngine – shaping the customer journey for high street brands

Little British Battler ContactEngine is a small, but ambitious SaaS provider, which offers an omni-channel customer communication service for big household names like Virgin Media, Telecom Italia, Whirlpool, Wickes and BSkyB, to improve the efficiency, reliability and overall customer experience around scheduling appointments.

Formed in 2009, and run by an experienced team in CEO Dr Mark K. Smith and European MD Giles Bryan, ContactEngine’s raison d’etre is to help its clients automate how they reach out to their customers to acknowledge an appointment or respond to a survey. The technology is particularly relevant for companies that need to deliver products and services to consumers or other businesses.

ContactEngine’s approach is to allow the customer to choose the way they want to interact with their supplier – either via SMS; automated phone-call; email, or other messaging type like video, that can be a call-to-action to provide feedback and potentially other up-sell opportunities. This light touch, non-invasive approach has very successful contact rates – typically over 90%.

There are also major cost drivers for adoption since ContactEngine’s technology automates appointment booking and customer feedback requests - a process that would otherwise be handled by a call centre agent. Call centre appointments themselves typically experience high failure rates because of the gaps in communication. Smith points out that this can really hit the bottom line, ranging from a few pounds, to many thousands.

It’s clearly a message that resonates well with the target audience, and has led to ContactEngine achieving rapid growth (with SaaS recurring revenue doubling since 2011). It is also profitable – unusual for a company in this stage of growth. ContactEngine provides a pragmatic solution to a clearly defined problem, which should ensure them more success to come.

Posted by John O'Brien at '07:19' - Tagged: saas   lbb   automation