Comms Business Magazine (CBM): What attracted you to the position at Magnetic North?
Enda (EK): The company’s track record as an early adopter in transitioning complex contact centre solutions to the cloud was a major factor. I was also impressed by its visionary approach and willingness to walk the talk regarding the significance of cloud for customers and the future of our industry.
Magnetic North’s acquisition by West, also makes this a hugely exciting time to join the team. Our future growth strategy is now underpinned by the financial stability of a global company, enabling the business to scale rapidly on an international basis to meet escalating market demand for cloud-based contact centres.
It means that Magnetic North now belongs to an elite group of global service providers with a portfolio that meets all of an organisation’s UC requirements, which further strengthens the global impact of our business and enhances our skillsets so that we can fulfil all our customers’ entire unified communications needs.
I was also really attracted by the opportunity to tangibly make a difference to the business. Magnetic North, or West Unified Communications Services as it will shortly be called, has an opportunity to lead the industry in making the transition to cloud-based contact centres. Our technology offering is truly leading-edge and our ability to scale has already been demonstrated by large-scale implementations for blue-chip customers. It is an exciting time to be taking the helm.
CBM: What are your principal challenges and what will be your key goals in your first 100 days?
EK: In the short term, the business is very much focused on the forthcoming rebranding activity and to ensure that our customers and partners are familiar with our new identity and product portfolio.
And of course, I am keen to understand our customers’ requirements, both in the short and long term. I have already begun the process by meeting as many customers as possible and spending some time getting up to speed with the main successes that we’ve already had and opportunities for improvement.
There are a number of attractive market opportunities for us at the moment and I am very much focused on how we achieve our growth potential. In the first 100 days I will be working closely with my management team to prioritise the actions we need to take to take advantage of the short, medium and long term opportunities for the business.
CBM: What changes do you anticipate making to MN channel strategy?
EK: Our go to market strategy will remain channel focused. We will leverage the channel partnerships and capabilities of West on an international basis while we drive our local growth through existing and new partnerships. We have already had tremendous success with our channel partners and we are looking forward to developing our channel and working with like-minded companies who share our vision for the market.
Our market opportunity spans small, medium and enterprise sectors delivering complex contact centre and UC cloud based solutions that transform customer experience, underpins digital deployment strategies and leverages the demand for every company to consume sophisticated technology according to their usage.
Speaking to customers it’s clear that contact centres face a number of challenges.
These include an inability to respond to customers’ demand for seamless communications across multiple channels; a lack of systems flexibility; financial and resourcing constraints; keeping up with the pace of regulatory requirements; and finally growing concerns about cloud resilience and security.
Our portfolio uniquely addresses these issues, to provide the most complete cloud-based contact centre available today. Many complex elements of Contact Centre solutions have historically been delivered via 3rd party providers ‘bolting on’ to the core Contact Centre solution, for example, outbound dialers, call recording and storage and PCI compliance capability.
We have developed all of these technologies as cloud based offerings alongside our core Contact Centre and UC capability which gives us a powerful, fully ntegrated cloud based solution.
CBM: A year from now what would success look like?
EK: In a year’s time I would like the company to be in an even more commanding position in the industry, recognised by our channel partners for delivering true partnership value and with a growing roster of blue-chip customers taking advantage of our communications solutions to grow profitable relationships with their own customers. My firm intention is that we will be widely-acknowledged as an industry leader, fulfilling the growing market need for a cloud-based contact centre solution that gives contact centre managers the operational control they need to respond to consumer demand for seamless multi-channel communication.