Basingstoke, UK – 17th August 2011 – NewVoiceMedia has appointed Brian Galvin to the role of Chief Science Officer (CSO), to help drive the company’s strategy of disrupting the contact centre technology market by delivering innovative cloud-based offerings to large enterprises. As CSO Galvin will work closely with Ashley Unitt, NewVoiceMedia’s CTO and co-founder and will lead NVM Labs, the newly created research arm of NewVoiceMedia, as well as driving innovation he will also manage the company’s strategic and growing intellectual property/patent portfolio. Additionally, Galvin will also take a leading role in developing NewVoiceMedia’s business in the Americas.
Prior to joining NewVoiceMedia, Galvin held senior roles at Genesys and Nuance Communications where he was CTO, he was also CEO at Aria (a Canadian system integrator) where he drove a period of dramatic and profitable growth, addressing the needs of large contact centre clients. At Genesys and Nuance he was Chief Technology Officer of the two leading technology vendors in interaction management for contact centres and speech-related technologies, respectively. He has been a thought leader in the global contact centre industry for the last fifteen years. Galvin is also a prolific inventor, with ten issued and over two dozen pending US patents and a large number of international patents.
Jonathan Gale, NewVoiceMedia CEO, comments, “I am delighted to welcome Brian to the NewVoiceMedia team. Existing on-premise contact centre vendors are simply slugging it out on feature wars and attending to the needs of their very largest customers. Other hosted vendors are also falling into the same trap, trying to replicate the existing suite of applications within a data centre, rather than trying to use the inherent advantages of the cloud to drive innovation in a market that has seen no fundamental change in approach for decades. Our focus at NewVoiceMedia is simple; we want to give all companies, regardless of size or budget, the chance to give the best possible levels of customer service. We are doing this by leveraging the cloud and the multiple sources of data it contains, both what’s in the public domain and also the data that our clients hold about their customers, to route interactions in a much more sophisticated and intelligent way than is possible on premise. This means better outcomes for the caller and happier agents, which in turn drives the bottom line of our clients. Doing all of this from the cloud also means agents can work anywhere at anytime, all they need is a telephone and Internet access. Brian shares our vision and sees the opportunity for NewVoiceMedia to change the contact centre technology value proposition and he will be fundamental in helping us fulfil our plans to have the most advanced cloud contact centre offering in the market.”
Galvin explains: “All of the leading technology vendors since the late 1980s have focused on solving contact centre operational challenges by providing technology to enforce a command-and-control management style, typically driven by one or two key metrics. This has not worked, and in fact has made the situation worse. The range of technologies being delivered today has served to make the life of the contact centre agent very Hobbesian—nasty, brutish, and short (high turnover). The results are evident, even including large-scale industrial actions (at the UK Department of Works and Pensions) over the issue of draconian work rules enforced by technology.
I talked to many existing hosted providers in both in the US and further afield, but I could find none that was willing to break out from merely copying the sequence of command-and-control features introduced by mainstream technology vendors. But NewVoiceMedia—a company I have long admired from a distance for its creative approach to cloud-based contact centres—has a clear vision for the future that is based on the firm belief that, if agents are given the tools to work flexibly and intelligently, and with a high degree of autonomy, they will not only be more productive, but will also deliver far better customer service. Moreover, agent retention will improve directly as the Hobbesian aspects of their work are eliminated, and therefore enterprises will enjoy dramatic improvements in customer satisfaction, agent productivity, and contact centre revenues—simultaneously.
I am very excited to join the NewVoiceMedia team to focus on some of the technology and scientific challenges in realizing this vision, and to help drive a wave of disruptive, easy to use yet powerful, cloud-based capabilities that will lead a transformation in the way forward-thinking contact centres are run.”
