The story of James

For many years Russell co-ran a specialist call centre, carrying out call campaigns for global manufacturers of scientific equipment.

The manufacturers didn’t have the in-house resource to run phone campaigns, but they knew it was the best way to reach the decision-makers in the labs.

Russell developed a bespoke system that gave callers all the details on a single screen in front of them, and enabled them to log the outcome on the same screen. He found that making more information visible with less navigation led to more efficient calling and high-performing campaigns.

The system also produced real-time reports showing which records were proving most fruitful, and which weren’t yielding results. Whoever was managing the campaign could look at the reports and change the focus of the campaign as it progressed.

“That can totally change the level of success of a campaign, because you can see where opportunities exist and redirect your resources,” Russell explains.

It also had another powerful feature: Account-Based Marketing. The system’s database was organised by accounts - institutions, companies etc - so a caller could view all the prospects within the same account, and make a more informed approach when choosing which records to call. Again, the system gave callers a very clear picture of the entire team and provided optimum ways to ‘navigate’ and engage that team to achieve successful outcomes quickly.

However, it wasn’t until Russell’s mentor, a professor of computer sciences, visited the office and pointed out the commercial possibilities of the system that he realised how important it was to the success of the business.

“Over 15 years, we’d constantly refined the process and design,” Russell recalls, “but we gave little credit to the system itself as a key ingredient of our success”.

With cloud technologies coming of age, Russell realised that the system he’d developed could be accessed by any business wanting to run their own call campaign

And Russell decided to push it a step further: the right algorithm could do the work of the campaign manager, dynamically analysing the results of a sample of calls to prioritise the most promising records. The campaign would reach its target faster, with significantly less time and money wasted on unsuccessful calls

A new, more intelligent way of doing phone-based marketing that targeted the right people with information relevant to them with fewer people receiving unwanted calls.

Russell left the business to concentrate on developing James full time.

As Russell was developing James, things were changing in the industry. The GDPR was on the horizon, and with it, a massively increased risk for organisations outsourcing their phone-based marketing. Under the GDPR, organisations remain responsible for any customer data they hand over to a call centre, so they could end up paying huge fines for a data breach or bad process they had no control over.

The GDPR was also creating huge problems for other kinds of direct marketing, especially email.

Meanwhile, Russell realised that the Account-Based Marketing model James used made it ideally suited to the GDPR, with data indexed by organisation rather than individuals.

The GDPR had made it the moment for James.

“James answers questions that are very current,” says Russell. “Businesses know they can win sales by talking to people over the phone, but there is a GDPR guy standing over their shoulder telling them it’s not allowed.

“That’s simply not the case. New regulation has actually made calling 1 a more viable channel for B2B marketing than other alternatives, and with James you can use that channel in a number of ways that are totally compliant with regulation.”

James takes advantage of the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations (PECR to make manual B2B calls with only TPS and Opt-out provisions. The considerations of processing personal data under the GDPR/DPA’18 are achieved by running ‘name-lists’ through the James compliance pathway to establish and document a legal basis. Functionalities also exist within James to accommodate B2B personal data pre-legal basis; i.e. using innovational encrypt-and-hash processes to on-board prospect data that can be used for calling those prospects lawfully, even for those records which are considered ‘cold’ data.

With James, any business can design, build and run a call campaign of any size themselves, confident that they’re within the law and that they’re in control of their data.

James means their calls are more likely to be welcome (which is good for their brand, and more likely to be successful (which is good for their budgets.

Ultimately, that’s good for business.

“I can certainly see the merits of what you are doing. Your timing is also pretty much spot on. The nature of outbound calling has been changing significantly over the last few years and moving away from the scatter- gun approach to highly targeted, well thought out campaigns. So what you are doing is very much in touch with the zeitgeist.”

– Danny Singer, Founder of Noetica