“The recession gave us our wave.”

10 May 2013

“The recession gave us our wave.”

Mark Forsyth, CTO and co-founder of BigEars, a Wellington-based voice feedback provider and finalist in the 2013 Wellington Gold Awards, tells how his business had been searching for a market when the global recession hit in 2008.

The company, which had its beginnings in the Karori home of Mark and his wife, co-founder Julia Forsyth, had been working through various iterations of its innovative voice technology software since 2004, but despite promising leads, it hadn’t got the uptake it deserved.

“As the recession deepened, companies realised they could no longer afford the luxury of ignoring their customers,” says Mark. “Suddenly we had our platform.”

“It was like a perfect storm,” adds Julia. “Our children had reached the age where I was able to devote more time to the business, the recession was digging its claws in, and other customer feedback tools available just weren’t delivering the insight that we could.”

BigEars seized the moment, aggressively marketing its ground-breaking voice feedback product, Customer Radio, to early-adopters in the multi-billion dollar customer experience market.

“The UK was an obvious market for us to target,” explains Julia, who is a native of Scotland. She and Mark met at Edinburgh University, where Mark completed a PHD in Speech Technology and Julia an MA in Linguistics.

Since then the company has gone from strength to strength; taking on six core staff in Wellington and employing a further thirty transcribers in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The home-office in Karori has been replaced with a cluster of desks in the BizDojo on Vivian Street – a creative, collaborative space that suits the BigEars culture of innovation and teamwork.

“We love being part of the Wellington business community. There’s a kind of eco-system where everybody helps each other and a cup of coffee is a currency. We’re very conscious that for many years we were the ones asking all the questions and now, more and more, we’re in a position to give advice to people starting out and we absolutely relish that.”

And the future looks bright. As the Gold Awards finalists were announced on Thursday night, Julia – who has recently stepped into the role of CEO – was boarding a flight to the UK, where she’ll attend the European Customer Experience World conference in London and work with her new UK Sales Director to grow BigEars in the UK market.

“We deliver the voice of the customer – direct, authentic, unscripted and in real time,” says Mark. “Customer-focussed companies really can’t afford not to listen.”

ends

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