Posts Tagged ‘Call Centers’

Sale of Datasquirt approved by Shareholders

December 14, 2011

This morning I chaired a General Meeting of Datasquirt Limited, where the the shareholders voted to approve two resolutions relating to the sale of Datasquirt’s business to LiveOps Inc (a leading US-based cloud contact centre provider).

The first resolution approved the sale of the business to LiveOps for US $12.5M cash and the second resolution approved Datasquirt buying back 83.33% of its shares from Shareholders at NZ $0.499 per share (one share purchased for every 1.2 owned).

The sale transaction still remains conditional on a number of technical issues, but I’m confident that it will take place before the end of this year.

I believe this will be a great result for Datasquirt, LiveOps, their respective customers and the New Zealand IT industry, for the following reasons;

  • The sale brings together two world-class, complementary contact centre technology providers who share a common passion and purpose.
  • It means customers will be able to access all the communication channels they need to run a modern call centre – sms, email, fax, web chat, social media and voice – from one expert provider, LiveOps, via the ease of the cloud.
  • All of Datasquirt’s staff are being retained and will continue operating from their current locations in Auckland NZ and the United Kingdom.
  • The retention of Datasquirt’s development team in Auckland will undoubtedly lead to further investment and jobs within the local IT industry.
  • Datasquirt’s shareholders get the option of a return of their capital at a very fair price.

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Datasquirt UK Customer Wins #1 in Service over Email

October 5, 2011

Congratulations to Wokingham Borough Council for winning #1 in “Service Over Email”, at callcentre.co.uk‘s Call Centre Focus Awards, held in London recently.

Wokingham Borough Council’s contact centre uses Datasquirt‘s CONTACT cloud-based messaging console for managing and processing their email communications.

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Datasquirt AGM 2011 – Chairman’s Address

October 2, 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Chairman’s Address to Shareholders
Datasquirt Limited
Annual General Meeting
30 September 2011

FY11 has been a hard-working and productive year for Datasquirt, which has seen us increasingly selected as a best-of-breed provider by clients and channel partners internationally. We were delighted to achieve a profitable result for the last quarter of the year, and take the loss from ordinary activities for the year down to $NZ 599,000; a 51% improvement on the previous year’s loss of $NZ 1,233,000.

Our Cloud-based solution “CONTACT” is giving Corporate Contact Centres around the world the ability to communicate easily in real-time with their customers through increasingly popular channels, such as SMS, Web Chat, Email, Twitter and Fax.

Datasquirt is well positioned from a technology standpoint and is capitalizing on some major growth drivers in the marketplace, including;
• The growing preference for Cloud Computing and Software as a Service
• Rapid Smart Phone adoption
• The increasing use of Social Media by businesses
• The growing demand for faster, more immediate business communication.

This year saw continued growth in sales through reseller partners internationally, culminating in Q4 with an agreement to supply a leading North American call centre provider with CONTACT under their own branding; a deal worth over US $1M, which will see Datasquirt’s software deployed across the United States and Canada. The global technology search that preceded this organization selecting CONTACT illustrates the quality and differentiation of the Datasquirt product offering.

In October 2010 Datasquirt became one of the first software providers in the world to offer a call centre specific platform for managing Twitter interactions with customers. Datasquirt clients such as Royal Mail Group and Wokingham Borough Council in the UK are now using CONTACT to manage Twitter-based service delivery in their call centres.

Only this month (September 2011), we were delighted to be voted first in the “Top 25 Contact Centre Technologies” by readers of a leading UK Contact Centre Magazine called “Call Centre Helper”. This affirms that our product offering is in tune with the needs of our target market.

The company expects sales from both current and new clients to continue to increase and we anticipate on-going growth in the strength of our reseller channel. We will maintain a continued programme of product enhancement to deliver further social media and reporting functionality in line with client demand.

The directors remain confident in the success of Datasquirt and wish to thank our customers, staff, shareholders, suppliers and partners for their on-going support.

Mark Loveys
Chairman, Datasquirt Limited

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Datasquirt moves into Profit and Eliminates Cash-burn in Q4 FY11

May 31, 2011

The following is an extract from the Financial Statements that Datasquirt (ASX:DSQ) has lodged with the ASX this evening (for the full version, refer to the ASX site);

By the end of FY11 Datasquirt had eliminated cash burn as forecast and moved into profit for the fourth quarter. The company achieved this through growing revenue by 37%, excluding other revenue and foreign exchange gains and losses, making significant, strategic improvements in global distribution and by continuing to innovate, as well as through prudent cost management.

The adoption of Social Media channels as ‘business as usual’ for most corporations, the ongoing growth of SMS and web chat communication and the international interest in cloud-based technologies mean Datasquirt is well placed for FY12.

The company expects sales from both current and new clients to continue to increase. It also anticipates an ongoing growth in the strength of its reseller channel and has budgeted for an ongoing programme of product enhancement, to deliver further social media and reporting functionality in line with client demand.

September 2010 saw Datasquirt become one of the first companies in the world to offer corporations a call centre platform for managing their Twitter communications with customers. This created additional revenue streams from existing clients, such as Royal Mail Group (UK), as well as positioning Datasquirt as a future focussed provider and generating new business enquiries.

Demand from current clients during the 2011 financial year broadened from email and SMS to increased demand for the fax and web chat functionality in CONTACTTM, as well as social media. Corporate businesses increasingly recognise the commercial importance of integrated communications, while customer expectations for real-time replies and multi-channel communication are continually rising. Both these major trends are demand drivers for Datasquirt.

FY2011 saw continued growth in sales through reseller partners internationally, culminating in Q4 in the agreement to supply a leading North American call centre provider with CONTACTTM under their own branding; a deal worth over US$1million which will see Datasquirt’s software deployed across the US. The global technology search which preceded this organisation selecting CONTACT illustrates the quality and differentiation of the Datasquirt product set.

In a climate of ongoing economic uncertainty, corporate businesses are increasingly seeking pay-as-you go hosted (cloud-based) software solutions, such as CONTACT. They are increasingly driven by their customers to provide more sophisticated, integrated and real-time customer service, across multiple channels, and to be better than their competitors at responding to enquiries and complaints. In an environment where businesses want more efficiency, security and control, and are investing in products which offer a clear competitive advantage and good return on investment in the short to medium term,

Datasquirt is well placed for continued growth.

The Directors are very confident in the success of Datasquirt and will now be buying more shares.

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The Social Media Revolution for Corporate Contact Centers

September 18, 2010

Opportunities and demands on today’s Corporate Contact Centers have evolved extensively since the early days of the “Call Center”. Whereas the primary communication channel has always been the voice call, today we have the addition of SMS Text, Email, Faxes, Web Chat and now Social Media.

Social Media (such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) opens up new possibilities for corporates to interact with their customers and analyse what people are saying and thinking about them and their products.

With the addition of Social Media capability to Datasquirt‘s CONTACT messaging platform; Corporate Contact Centers now have a solution that enables them to leverage Social Media channels alongside SMS, Fax, Email and WebChat. This is ideal for enabling conversations with customers to span multiple channels without compromising the ability to holistically report and audit across the whole spectrum of channels.

Click here for a preview of “CONTACT Social”, Datasquirt’s new Social Media capability for its CONTACT messaging platform.

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Introducing Datasquirt

March 25, 2010

I have to be careful about what I say about Datasquirt because it’s a publicly listed company on the Australian stock exchange (ASX:DSQ) and being a non-executive director and chairman, there are strict rules about what I can and cannot say, without making an announcement to the ASX.

What I can say is as follows; 🙂

Firstly, I have to say that Datasquirt is a cool company, made up of people who are passionate about what they do. Datasquirt’s product is called CONTACT and it’s a SaaS, Web deployed Communications Console for Corporate Businesses to enable their Contact Centers (formerly Call Centers) to interact with their customers, suppliers or staff using SMS text, Instant Messaging, email, fax etc.

I was one of the founders of Datasquirt and so my involvement dates back to when the company started up in 2001. This was soon after I (and some of the other Datasquirt founders) sold our previous business, Exonet.

In the early days we did a lot of experimenting to see how SMS Texts could be used for business purposes. After several years of building custom SMS applications for various industry verticals, we started to see what common functionality everyone wanted and realized that all the big customers had Contact Centers – so we designed and built CONTACT as a product to satisfy this market need.

Being web deployed, CONTACT can be run from any browser on the Internet, so requires minimal effort by the customers’ IT departments to get it up and running. The product integrates with the customer’s internal databases such as CRM, ERP etc and has advanced logic algorithms to pre-process messages automatically and/or distribute them to applicable call center operators. Templates and automation facilitate a speedy response to incoming messages and advanced reporting functions enable all types of reports and analysis – including the types of reporting normally expected in corporate contact centers.

In today’s world of advanced and instant world-wide communications, it is more important than ever for businesses to engage with the new communication technologies and new social media types like Twitter, Linked-In, Facebook etc. Accordingly, these are exciting times for Datasquirt and its product CONTACT which empowers corporate business customers to communicate directly, instantly and intimately in the new communications age!

Watch this company this year!

www.datasquirt.com

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