Martin also explains how the company’s global growth strategy has been affected, with major investments in the Eurozone as well as emergent economies such as India and south-east Asia.

Click here to hear Martin’s comments.

The article can be found here.

For more information on the storm solution for Progressive Building society, click here.

The article, entitled “Coping With Unstructured Demand on Customer Service”, is currently the Editor’s Choice on the homepage of Call Centre Focus. Call Centre Focus is the UK’s leading monthly call centre publication for call centre managers and customer service directors. It has a print circulation of 8,716, and contains information, advice, news and opinion for anyone who is involved in running a call centre in the UK. Its regular features include detailed case studies and interviews with leading figures in the industry.

“Market trends toward IT cloud delivery now place CCaaS at the forefront of IT decision makers’ minds,” write the Gartner analysts. “Businesses are increasingly wary of purchasing infrastructure and funding the associated capital expenditure (capex). Their financial preference is the ‘pay as you go’ opex model.” Meanwhile, some businesses are turning to CCaaS to deal with seasonal or one-time spikes in call volume without having to physically install extra capacity into their on-site infrastructure.

Previously, the perception that a cloud offering could not offer the customer the same level of control as a premise-based solution presented a barrier to mainstream adoption. However, Gartner’s paper explains that this has changed, “Today’s CCaaS offerings largely provide a base of features and functions equivalent to that offered on premises-based platforms.” In addition, the ability to layer CCaaS capabilities over legacy equipment means that solutions can start small and grow organically over time, instead of requiring a series of upgrades (with associated incremental capital payments) whenever new functionality is added.

“We are delighted to be part of such a buoyant market,” said Sean Taylor, Director of Content Guru, one of the application specialists named in the report. “However, we think the potential for revenue growth is even bigger than anticipated. Gartner’s forecasts account for seats and per-user licenses sold, but CCaaS is a radically different commercial proposition as well as a new technology. The old model of buying and operating premise-based equipment is not attractive to many customers in a straitened economic climate. CCaaS enables customers to pay according to successful use, rather than making a large, high-risk capital investment.”

Taylor noted, “The cloud model allows us to offer our customers flexible pricing options, making it easier for them to put together a compelling business case. From our perspective, this means there are many situations when the transactional element can be worth more than the hosting, something that might not be factored into forecast models. Once these are taken into account, we think the prospects for the CCaaS market are even more exciting.”

The project takes inspiration from highly successful consumer cloud platforms (e.g. Facebook), as well as enterprise equivalents (e.g. salesforce.com). G-Cloud will provide a platform for government organisations to share applications and best practices.

Between 2012 and 2015, the UK Government hopes to realise savings of £180 million through the re-use of applications in a centralised Application Store, as well as £160 million through data centre consolidation. A catalogue of services and suppliers will enable buyers to make clear comparisons to facilitate purchasing decisions.

The leading technology research firm Gartner positions ‘Government Cloud’ at the peak of inflated expectations in their “Hype Cycle for Government Transformation”, citing the potential for 15-20% reduction in total IT operating costs through ‘shared services’ and ‘consolidation’.

However, in the longer-term, the analysts highlight the opportunities for “consistent productivity improvements”, greater “customer focus” and elimination of “redundant hardware, software and business processes.”

Sean Taylor, Director of Content Guru, comments on the challenges the project faces:

“Government organisations all have their own local priorities, which they are unwilling to compromise – and rightly so. In order to get these organisations to work together more efficiently, G-Cloud will have to provide the central platform that will help to rationalise cost-bases, while still retaining the individual sovereignty of each participating organisation.

Sean continues, “Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of communications. How citizens communicate with the organisation, how colleagues within the organisation communicate with each other, and how different organisations communicate, affects every aspect of public service delivery.

“Even if different organisations do share common characteristics, it is unlikely that all the stakeholders will embrace integration willingly. Therefore the success of a G-Cloud communications platform will hinge on the ability to customise services for local requirements.

“Greater integration may follow in due course as a consequence of different organisations working more closely together, as sharing the same technology will tend towards the convergence of business processes. But in the first instance, organisations will need to have the choice to migrate at their own pace.”

Last month, Liam Maxwell, the Cabinet Office’s director of ICT futures, told the Cloud Expo in London that government contracts for cloud services will move away from the traditional model of long-term tie-ins, with new contractual agreements being signed after brief consultation and lasting as little as 12 months. He predicted that these services will soon be purchased in much the same way as a high-turnover commodity like office stationery.

Building from its origins in magazine publishing, Trader Media Group (TMG) now encompasses a range of international online brands including Van Trader, Truck Trader and Farmers Trader, but the flagship Auto Trader remains its best-known property. With approximately 10 million unique visitors per month to its UK site alone (sixteen times the volume of any competitor), Auto Trader is the natural first port of call for a buyer, before making telephone enquiries and ultimately going to a dealer’s showroom for a test drive.

Picking up the phone is a key point in this process. It’s the moment when passing interest becomes pro-active curiosity. It’s the point at which an online visitor becomes a lead. For TMG’s customers, the car dealers, the number enquiries generated by their advert on Auto Trader is therefore a fundamental performance indicator. Furthermore, interpreting the contextual data associated with those calls, such as the origin, duration and call volumes, can provide a dealer with real insight into how they are performing.

That’s why TMG decided to adopt storm as its real-time number management, quality monitoring and call data analysis platform for dealers, providing the basis of the ‘Call Tracker’ product within Auto Trader’s Dealer Portal. This tool enables dealers to see the flow of calls they’re receiving to any allocated tracking numbers. They can use this information to compare the performance of their non-geographic numbers (08-) displayed on Auto Trader against the geographic (01-/02-) numbers used for local advertising campaigns. The distribution of leads in a given area can also be viewed on a map, enabling dealers to measure which local campaigns are proving most effective.

TMG’s Annual Report for 2011 highlights the strategic importance of the Dealer Portal as part of Auto Trader’s service portfolio:

“Around 90% of the UK’s dealers do business with us, and about 74% of them use our Dealer Portal. This portal uses Trader Digital’s analytics to provide meaningful sales data that none of our competitors can match. It is a dedicated trade resource that provides a gateway to essential tools, research and a portfolio of solutions helping dealers to manage their stock, view advertising performance, track leads and convert those leads into sales for a convincing return on investment.”

Polly Littlewood, the Product Manager for Call Tracker within TMG, comments on the importance of capturing the first crucial telephone interaction:
“When a user is browsing the website, they may be looking through any number of different dealer’s vehicles in a single sitting, located anywhere in the UK. For all we know, a web user could just be a car enthusiast who enjoys browsing for its own sake, with no intention of buying. When they make a call, the customer can see their return on investment clearly.”

Littlewood continues: “The detailed information that storm provides also helps our customers to improve their effectiveness. They can see which of their branches are performing best, and review the call recordings for quality optimisation purposes. If a call is missed, it is immediately flagged up to the branch via SMS, email and on their management dashboard. This ensures that all telephone leads are followed up as quickly as possible, since it’s a tried and tested truth that a speedy response results in higher conversion rates.”

Kalpesh Patel, a Senior Project Manager for Content Guru who led the TMG storm project, talks about some of the technology behind the solution:

“The TMG Call Tracker was a challenging project due to the highly bespoke nature of the portal we created. It’s a perfect example of the underlying open architecture on which storm is based, which has been developed and refined over the course of nearly 20 years here at Redwood, Content Guru’s sister company.

“The modular design of the core real-time technology gave us the flexibility we needed to adapt the solution to TMG’s requirements. We had to design the Call Tracker module to be plugged into the existing Auto Trader Dealer Portal, with further integration into Google Maps to provide a tool for campaign evaluation.”

Patel explains further, “storm’s ability to treat geographic numbers just like non-geographics allows us to bring both dedicated TMG numbers and a dealer’s own numbers into the same manageable framework, so they can be analysed side by side. In combination with the mapping capability, these features enable car dealers to identify local advertising hotspots and compare campaign effectiveness against their online lead generation through Auto Trader.”

Richard Manthorpe, also a Project Manager for Content Guru who has worked closely with TMG, outlines how TMG takes advantage of the hierarchical partition structure within storm. This allows all storm customers to ‘multi-tenant’ – to share the same platform – while using different services, each customised to their distinct needs:

“The huge advantage of delivering from the cloud is that storm can provide a central point of management for multiple layers of organisations.

“For a car dealer, this means they can assess the performance of their various branches both individually and as a whole, tracking the numbers of appointments booked in, conversion rates and other relevant KPIs. The facility for supervisors to monitor and score call recordings also provides a common benchmark for quality control across all branches.”

Manthorpe adds: “Meanwhile, TMG can then take a detailed view of the service they are providing to all their customers, gain insight into best practices and identify opportunities to improve their service.”

Richard Thwaites, Head of Intelligence Products for TMG, comments on the impact of the service: “storm has helped Auto Trader to consolidate its market leadership. Through the Call Tracker portal, we have a technical offering as compelling in the marketplace as our brand. It enables our customers to see that they’re getting more than just a label and an online showroom. They’re getting capabilities which are pivotal to their entire sales and marketing strategy. And the interfaces are deceptively simple to use, providing users with a lot of power and depth of control without requiring much training at all.”

The directors of Content Guru & Redwood Technologies, Sean Taylor and Martin Taylor, had the opportunity of speaking with two of the leading lights representing British business ideas. A range of topics was discussed, including the challenges of continuous innovation, proposed changes to patent law and the ins and outs of trademarking.

John Alty remarks on the company, “It’s excellent to see a business that’s really at the forefront of the British knowledge industry. In times of economic instability and uncertainty, we need businesses like Content Guru and Redwood to keep innovating, to keep growing and generating high-quality jobs for well-qualified people.

He adds, “It’s the intellectual property value created by entrepreneurs like these that’s going to help drive growth in the national economy.”

Martin Taylor also commented on the success of the visit:

“We were honoured to have the chance to sit down with John Alty and talk about some of the really tricky issues facing software developers today. At Redwood and Content Guru we’ve learnt, over nearly 20 years of experience, how to navigate the pitfalls of Intellectual Property and create real value.

“But for new technology companies starting up, it’s one of the big barriers to innovation. Will my software be protected? How do I make sure my competitors can’t simply throw their resources at producing the same thing? Am I even allowed to develop this product? What can I call it? These are all problems which aspiring entrepreneurs have to address.

“That’s why the IPO’s work is so important, in ensuring that the interests of both new and incumbent businesses are properly protected, and promoting responsible and sustainable commercial innovation.”

The event set a new record for the largest on-the-night sum ever raised for the charity, in excess of £26m, which will fund projects to support disadvantaged children all around the UK. With over £1m of these donations being taken through storm’s Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) accredited automated payment service, Content Guru was proud to be part of such a special occasion.

As the largest platform for phone-based payments in Europe, storm was able to support in processing the hundreds of thousands of calls which came flooding into the donation hotline. The platform has also been audited by the BBC’s Interactivity Technical Advice and Contracts Unit (ITACU) to guarantee compliance with the required standards of data security.

GFM, an agency specialising in mass interactive media response, used storm as a key element of their solution for BBC Children in Need. Rob McLaughlin, Technical Sales Support Manager for GFM, commented on the challenges of ensuring the smooth running of this unique event:

“With one-off live fundraising events such as BBC Children in Need, it is absolutely critical that everything goes off without technical issues. If the viewer is inconvenienced or delayed at all when they’re trying to donate, they can lose patience quickly. We need to be able to take payments automatically then and there.”

Louise Duffield, Head of Operations at BBC Children in Need praised the performance of the platform:

“The capability and simplicity of storm’s payment handling process, and the reliability of the platform even during massive peaks in demand, means we can make it as easy as possible for people to be generous.”