Welcoming NewVoiceMedia to the BVP Portfolio

Today we welcome NewVoiceMedia to the BVP portfolio. We’re pleased to join existing investors Highland Capital Europe, Notion Capital, Eden Ventures and MMC Ventures in the support and funding of this company by leading the $35 million round.

Why are we so excited to invest NewVoiceMedia?

Quite simply, NewVoiceMedia is the leading independent cloud contact center company. Cloud computing – or “the cloud” – is a big industry that continues to grow. And, contact center applications and infrastructure is a big software category. (Industry analysts estimate the market size to be anywhere from $4 to $10 billion.) But contact center software has traditionally been slow to move to the cloud with only ~5% of contact center spend allocated to cloud based applications. We expect to see a 20 million contact center seat market globally and upwards of 30% cloud penetration in the next five years, and we think that NewVoiceMedia will lead the charge.

There are a few key reasons for this market acceleration: Contact center applications have historically been unreliable. Few cloud vendors were able to deliver the type of 5-nines reliability required by mid-to-large enterprises. As a result, while cloud contact center offerings gained some mindshare among small businesses and work-from-home contact center agents, only recently have we begun to see more widespread adoption by mid-to-large enterprises. Through an innovative combination of technology and service delivery, NewVoiceMedia’s ContactWorld product is the first true single instance, multi-tenant cloud offering to deliver 5-nines reliability and record implementation time. In fact, the team rolls out a new version of its software every week without dropping a single call or agent. Jonathan and his team are so confident in their product and service that they publish their uptime metrics for current or prospective customers to review. We think that this is not only great for customers but also says a lot about the culture of customer service that Jonathan Gale and his team have built at NewVoiceMedia.

Second, contact center software is frequently tightly integrated with enterprise CRM applications which are rapidly moving to the cloud for both sales as well as customer support. In fact, Salesforce’s Service Cloud division is one of the fastest growing of its four business segments and is rumored to be closing in on $1 billion in revenue. Once a company makes the decision to move its CRM applications to the cloud it starts to make a lot of sense to move the contact center to the cloud as well. Tightly integrated sales and service applications make it easier for enterprises to monitor high call support volumes, enable a mobile support team, and make better decisions around workforce management. When you think about this in conjunction with the broader trend towards SaaS and cloud computing, it’s not hard to make the case that we’re at the early part of a once in a decade upgrade cycle as enterprises transition call center applications to the cloud.

It’s also exciting to think about the many opportunities that open up once contact center application becomes cloud-based. At one point during our diligence, a research analyst made the comment that customers in the contact center industry have been interested in all sorts of compelling features for decades but that these features either never materialized or were only available to the largest of customers at extremely high cost. That’s probably one reason why customer service remains so poor in areas ranging from wireless carriers to retail to travel. The beauty of moving the contact center application to the cloud is that enterprises can start to integrate with a wide range of other SaaS applications, APIs and data services to mesh together a solution that can deliver reliable and improved service to users without the need for expensive customization or custom application development. As a result, NewVoiceMedia can identify each customer by their phone number, dynamically query Salesforce or other cloud CRM applications to find prior interactions (social, web, email, phone, purchase history) and record the call if appropriate. All of this will help businesses to do a better job of knowing their customer and should help to improve customer service and satisfaction.

We look forward to working with Jonathan Gale and the team at NewVoiceMedia and to continuing to work with other leading European SaaS and cloud companies.

Alex Ferrara is a partner at BVP, a venture capital firm with an impressive history of betting on and building successful companies in the cloud. For more information on BVP’s cloud investment strategy please visit www.bvp.com/cloud