What is your name and your organisation?
Anthony Buxton, PromptVoice
What is your role in the at PromptVoice?
CEO
How long have you been working for PromptVoice/been in the industry?
I have been in the industry for 20+ years, as well as five years working with PromptVoice.
What is PromptVoice’s USP/key focus areas?
PromptVoice is an innovative white-label service that enables telecoms resellers to offer professional recordings and music on-hold under their own brand as part of their own solutions, generating substantial and incremental recurring revenues.
With 300 real voice artists and 200 Text to Speech characters from Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and a library of 10,000+ pre-recorded MOH messages, it is truly disruptive!
What achievement is PromptVoice most proud of?
Reinvigorating a part of the telecoms proposition that has hardly changed in 20 years by creating a truly disruptive service that won the Comms National Best Channel Portal Award against UC providers with tens of millions of development spend annually.
What are the key trends that you are experiencing currently in the market?
Convergence of features, especially UC & CC, meaning that its increasingly difficult to differentiate between different MSP propositions. This is causing price competition, and market consolidation in the race to drive corporate growth. However, that’s a strategy that will result in few long-term winners.
What do you see as the main industry challenges at present?
Speed of change. Every reseller has (and has always had) a roadmap of desired functionality, but that pace at which new features are added to the roadmap is increasing, especially with UC (as opposed to a siloed voice-only channel) adoption accelerating.
If there was one thing in the industry you would change or want to resolve, what would it be?
Knowing how the ‘work from home’ experiment is going to settle down in five years’ time. Will the pendulum swing back, or stick? Will staff be more, or less effective, and how will working from home affect staff mentally when there is a less clear distinction between work and home life.
What opportunities do you foresee for the sector?
We can conceptualise the ‘any device, any channel, anytime, anywhere’ panacea for customer contact, but it involves so many different elements to deliver, from support for any device; 5G; AI especially chat/voicebots; merging of consumer comms channels for business; better battery life; improved security and more.
Each of these require deep sector expertise so there has to be great opportunities to partner, overcome challenges and create some cool solutions that ultimately will merge to take us towards the promised land!
What benefits do you get out of Comms Council UK membership?
Comms Council UK is a great place to meet visionary comms industry leaders, and discuss in a non-competitive way common problems, challenges and opportunities for the greater good of the whole industry.
