Voxpro chief commercial officer Brian Hannon at the Web Summit in Lisbon. Image: John Kennedy
Cork-headquartered BPO player Voxpro is planning to open new operations in Europe and Asia, meaning employment could double in the next three to four years.
Voxpro delivers customer contact solutions on behalf of more than 100 companies and organisations worldwide, including Google, Nest and Travelzoo, in addition to multinational corporations and international blue chip companies.
The company, which employs 1,700 people worldwide, was founded in Cork by Dan Kiely and his wife Linda more than 20 years ago.
In August, the company revealed plans to create 500 new jobs by 2020 at a new US centre of excellence in Athens, Georgia. It is the second such centre to be established in the US by the company – the first is in Sacramento, California, which serves the company’s Silicon Valley customer base.
At the Web Summit in Lisbon, the chief commercial officer of Voxpro, Brian Hannon, said that the company, which specialises in helping scaling companies to scale-up, is scaling up itself.
“We work with companies that are disruptive and need to scale fast,” Hannon told Siliconrepublic.com.
As well as hiring Hannon, the company has hired Christina Kenny as chief people officer and Brendan O’Driscoll as adviser to the company. O’Driscoll is the CEO of Soundwave which was acquired earlier this year by Spotify.
A culture of disruption
Hannon said that a strategic turning point for Voxpro came in 2009, when it signed Google on as a client. This had a transformative effect on how Voxpro saw itself as an agent of change and not just an outsourcing provider.
“We have a culture of disruption at Voxpro and the pace we are growing at is the pace of a disruptive scale-up. Our clients are growing at between 50pc to 100pc a year and we are growing at the same pace. It is the philosophy of Dan Kiely to improve everything we do.”
Hannon said that the company is planning to expand in Asia and mainland Europe in the next six to nine months.
“In Europe, we are looking at different locations such as Portugal as well as Germany, Poland and Bulgaria, and in Asia we are considering countries like the Philippines.”
He said the ultimate deciding factor will be people and it plans to hire staff across a variety of skills such as: data scientists, social media experts, software developers, engineers and content writers and capacity planners.
He said that over the next three to four years, the company is likely to double in size and could potentially employ between 4,000 and 5,000 people, if the present momentum is sustained.
“The key will be finding the calibre of staff with the right experience to deliver the experiences we want to deliver.
“We will put a lot of effort into ensuring we can hire the right people into the organisation but also keeping them.”
Hannon said that locally in Ireland, Voxpro would compete against Accenture. European competitors would include SellByTel and in the US, FCR and BPO-247.
Last year, Voxpro reported revenues of around €33m and is projecting revenues of €60m for 2016.
