Content Guru is part of the Redwood Technologies group, which was founded in 1993 to provide mission-critical hardware solutions to governments and financial institutions. Content Guru was established in 2005 and was founded with the knowledge that customer premise activity was ripe to move to the cloud. The company developed its storm solution as one of the first successful cloud CX solutions. Content Guru now has large clients such as AXA, Rakuten, and the NHS and has expanded across Europe, APAC, and the US.
I was recently able to chat with Sean Taylor, CEO of Content Guru and Redwood Technologies Group to discuss the Content Guru journey and its plans for expansion.
“While the cloud is widely accepted today, if you look back to 2005-2006, there were a lot of concerns about security, reliability, and cost of ownership. We had some strong headwinds when our business started, but then started to get some tailwinds which became even stronger during the pandemic. So today we focus on CX and CCaaS, where we are one of the biggest players globally,” said Taylor. “We estimate we have 5%-10% of the cloud contact center seat base shifted on our storm cloud platform and consider Content Guru to be one of the top ten CCaaS providers in the world.”
Strong UK Presence, High Scalability and Availability, and Solid Support for Mission-Critical Applications
Content Guru is able to run storm in more than 100 countries worldwide but is particularly deeply embedded in the UK, which according to research the company has commissioned is the second biggest market for contact center spend in the world. A lot of this growth is due to the company’s strong presence in supporting mission-critical applications in public safety and health.
“In the UK, if you call an ambulance via 999 (equivalent of 911 in the US), every call goes through the storm cloud. We are the only blue light provider in Europe. With this type of service, you need 100% availability because those calls simply cannot fail. People’s lives are at stake. So, we have a solid reputation for strong mission criticality,” said Taylor.
The company also has strong success with scalability. Content Guru had to quickly scale up to 20,000 seats for a test and trace voice service during COVID. On the digital front, the company supported the biggest e-commerce provider in Japan, Rakuten, during Super Saturday and ran over 75,000 agents for digital chat sessions.
“This combination of high availability and high scalability has helped us capture quite a big base. We are typically landing thousands or tens of thousands of seats, which ramps up our seat count quickly,” said Taylor.
Deeper Expansion into the US
Content Guru says it is the largest contact center as a service (CCaaS) provider in Europe, is a top-five player in APAC, and considers the US a vital market, and one in which it has already made significant inroads.
“Within the US, we have had some significant US clients and two of them are our sponsors for FedRAMP. FedRAMP is incredibly important for us because US government spend on contact centers is over $20 billion, and the Biden administration is pushing to move to the cloud,” said Taylor. “We set off on this journey a few years ago, and we fully expect that those same mission-critical types of applications that we can do in Europe we will also be able to provide in the US, and at scale.”
Content Guru received the FedRAMP “In Process” designation at the highest impact level in August for the storm cloud contact center solution.
“This confluence of FedRAMP coming together, having some good US anchor clients in enterprise, and then seeing a groundswell come up through our partner program is giving us the solid credentials we need to crack the marketplace. There is still only a slice of the marketplace that has migrated from customer premise to cloud, and it’s mainly in the SMB area. There is lots of room for growth in large enterprise and that has always been our sweet spot,” said Taylor.
Content Guru recently announced the hire of a Senior VP of Enterprise Sales to help support this growth plan.
Four Pillars of the Company’s CX Journey
Content Guru’s next big journey is around CX, and the company looks at CX as resting on four pillars:
- Digital shift (voracious appetite for other channels such as social media)
- Omni data (bringing together everything into a single desktop environment)
- Digital customer (supporting IoT)
- Intelligent automation (which includes machine agents)
We dug into the intelligent automation topic a bit, and how AI is being used.
“One of the very popular things we’re seeing right now to monetize is what we call TAS or transcribe and summarize. We had one particular client in the contact center where sixty percent of the contact handler’s time was spent transcribing and summarizing the interaction. We can offer, in real-time, transcription and summary and now agents are only spending 5%-10% of their time checking for accuracy. This is freeing up massive amounts of time and is absolutely saving companies millions of dollars,” said Taylor.
Many of Content Guru’s clients have been able to automate 70% or more of their interactions. One very basic use case is using automation for FAQs. One customer was able to automate 93% of these inquiries.
“While the client still has 7% going to an agent, the customer gets their answer much more quickly which drives a good experience and it frees up agents, which drives down costs,” explained Taylor.
The company is happy to be applying AI for these practical applications, with low risk.
Said Taylor, “We’re happy at this point to be a bit boring and simply provide great technology that works well. Of course, we have incredible, game-changing transformation ideas such as with generative AI, but if you talk to our clients, the aspect that they are most happy about is Content Guru has absolutely, 100%, delivered on the business case they set out to achieve, with our technology.”
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Virtual CX Will Become a Mainstream Frontline Support Channel by 2028
Customer Wins for Adobe, Content Guru, IQVIA, Freshworks, and Mindtree
Alchemer, Content Guru, Medallia, Others Launch New Products, Enhancements
Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
She brings more than 20 years of experience in technology research and marketing; prior to her current role, she was a Research Analyst at Omdia, authoring market and ecosystem reports on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and User Interface technologies. Sherril was previously Manager of Market Research at Intrado Life and Safety, providing competitive analysis and intelligence, business development support, and analyst relations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
