Tough Call - Work or Watch the Rugby World Cup Final Tuesday, November 06, 2007

More news on Spinvox's trouble with their South African call centre.

Their sub-contractor, Valldata, make local staff work local holidays with no extra pay - this has upset most staff and reflected in poor staff attendances on the recent 2-day public holiday.

Similarly, the South African service queue had over 1600 messages and 2 staff the day SA won the Rugby World Cup - lots of celebratory calls but most staff absent to watch the game! Apparently, they are struggling with this accent and the continued mix of other languages (Zulu etc).

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posted by John Wilson @ 4:06 PM Permanent Link ,

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Spinvox in a tailspin Tuesday, October 30, 2007

According to my reliable sources in the company, Spinvox is struggling to service its UK customers due to staff retention/coverage issues in one of the outsourced overseas transcription centres operated by Valldata Services Ltd, where low staff morale has been reported. It has resulted in some messages not being processed in the queues for over 90 minutes - not ideal message turnaround times for time critical messages.

This is causing considerable concern in Spinvox HQ, in part because they operate at arms length with the overseas centre and hence can't just quickly walk in and fix it - for starters, more staff have to be hired and trained. Where are those mechanical turks when you need them?

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posted by John Wilson @ 1:59 PM Permanent Link ,

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Spinvox - it's easy when you know how. Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Ordinarily I don't republish comments left on my blog posts, but I though this one was sufficiently interesting to highlight it. The original post was here.

Sadly the comment was left anonymously.

Predictive text within the application HUMAN agents use to transcribe all Spinvox messages makes this possible but I believe your 10 seconds is a little off, perhaps 30 seconds is closer to the mark. How do I know this? I used to transcribe Spinvox messages and I am definitely a human.

The application is called Tenzing and it uses predictive text to assist the operator during transcription. It is very clever and appears intuitive but can get things completely wrong occasionally. Messages are transcribed in various countries including India, Ireland and South Africa where the operation is run by the parents of the VP security and compliance for Spinvox, Sean Groenewald.

The amazing thing is for most of these agents, English is not their first or second language but you will note a lot of common English names are transcribed incorrectly whilst Indian names are usually perfect.


Spinvox continues to be a really useful service for me, and I haven't needed to listen to a voicemail in over 6 months as a result, so I am a fan. My only criticism has ever been that they should simply dump the hype about being a tech company, albeit I recognise that will hit their valuation multiple.

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posted by John Wilson @ 10:32 AM Permanent Link ,

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Spinvox makes Newsnight Monday, July 02, 2007

Marlow (UK) based Spinvox got an 8 minute slot on tonight's BBC Newsnight to provide an insight into Spinvox and their aim to be the next "billion dollar" company via a stock exchange "flip".

Christina Domecq, CEO, talked about a range of issues
- how hard it was to raise the first £500k
- that she felt it was hard raising money in the UK, but felt simple good ideas (like hers) would always find investors
- how operational delivery was the key to the company's success

Also featured was Julie Meyer, CEO of Ariadne Capital, who acted as their early investor/advisor. Julie was praising the fact the many investors have done trivial due diligence because they believed in the CEO.

Christina informed the viewers that presently they have 140,000 users and that 12 major network operators including Cincinatti Bell have signed up. She added that she expects to have 10 million users in a year's time.

They have now raised £30m from VCs and Christina, in response to a question, suggested saw Spinvox as being the next Skype.

Her final note was that she believes the next big thing will be voice posting of blogs, using Spinvox of course.

Funnily enough, Spinvox was one of my first blog posts and has been my highest read post.

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