Global Speech to tap booming hosted call centre market

Exchange, Vol 20, No 2, 25 January 2008

With the market for hosted call centre services tipped to grow 53 percent this year, one of the first providers of these services in Australia, Global Speech Networks, says it is well-placed to exploit this expanding market.

Global Speech Networks was founded in 2001 and claims to have been the first non-telco provider of hosted interactive voice response services - it would take incoming calls for organisations, provide the voice menu, and then hand the customer on the appropriate person in an organisation based on their response. From there the company expanded into voice recognition services, and online transaction processing for clients before getting into the hosted call centre business.

Managing director and founder, Nick Rodda, told Exchange that there were an estimated 120-130,000 call centre seats in Australia and about 12-15 percent of these were served by hosted systems. Market research firm, Frost & Sullivan has forecast that the market for hosted services will grow 53 percent in 2008. According to Rodda, major drivers of this growth are the increasing risks organisation face in implementing in-house solutions, the difficulties of finding and keeping the skilled staff and the difficulties of building in sufficient redundancy and diversity to ensure continuity. Global Speech operates dual PoPs in Sydney and Melbourne with full redundancy. He added that the fixed cost per seat per month fee Global Speech charges also offered a better RoI on in-house systems, especially over the longer term when, as is inevitable, the in-house system needs to be upgraded. The core of the Global Speech’s hosted services is the Genesys platform, with underlying switching functionality provided by the Asterisk open source software based PBX. Global was one of the first Genesys users to do this (Genesys announced in August 2007 that it would officially support Asterisk in response to growing demand from its customer base. Global Speech presently sells direct to its customers - Rodda says there is a great deal of consultancy involved both in the initial phase of a contract and ongoing. He said the company had been profitable for the past four years and did not envisage any need for additional funding in the near term as the market ramps up.