Yomdel is on an amazing journey, and in four years we have consistently doubled our revenue year-on-year and grown to become the leading provider of managed live chat services in the UK. Our acquisition this week of customer experience experts 360 Perspectives marks the next stage in our evolution.
This is tremendously exciting not just for me as the founder, but for all of us within the expanding Yomdel team. Yomdel is not just a company offering intelligent managed live chat, but is actually a genuine business growth partner to our many clients. The addition of 360 Perspectives – which uses mystery shopping and experiential research to generate deep customer insights that allow companies to optimise performance – fulfils another of our strategic goals, which is to extend the range and value of services we offer.
Since launching into the UK property sector in June 2014, Yomdel has grown to be recognised as one of the top suppliers to the sector when we won silver as best overall supplier to the industry at EA Masters last year. We’re now working with around 2,000 estate agents, among which are market leaders and many instantly recognisable brands such as Fine & Country, Andrews, Belvoir, EweMove and many more.
Beyond property, we are also active in many other sectors, including logistics, financial services, automotive and construction. Over the next few weeks we will have further announcements as more significant projects come to fruition – watch this space!
Created the market
When I founded Yomdel I had an idea for a market that did not exist. We had to not only fine-tune the proposition of using live chat to maximise conversion online, but also create a market which would be receptive to what may have sometimes appeared to be our outlandish positioning.
When people ask me where the ideas came from I somewhat self-deprecatingly say simply: “I made it up”. That covered the creation of the unique word Yomdel, and the concepts that we would then develop and hone. Of course, this couldn’t have been done alone and beyond asking favours of friends at the beginning (thanks to the creative genius Matt Garbutt for designing the Yomdel characters), once my business partner Tim Breden came on-board we have been able to establish a consistently fast-growing business.
As any entrepreneur will say, creating anything new is a high-risk game. But hard work, an innovative mind-set and the support of others that believe in what you are doing helps narrow the odds. Our early clients first started to trust Yomdel, then became our advocates, and then finally, they became our friends.
Andy & Tim discuss the acquisition
Competition is welcomed
But it’s not all plain sailing. When you create something new, and something that is also successful, you start to attract others and create competition. Competition is to be welcomed, as the more people promoting a new initiative the more demand is ultimately created.
At Yomdel we always invest heavily, both in terms of our people and financial resources, in ensuring we clearly demonstrate how we are head and shoulders above our competitors in terms of quality, process and service delivery.
We should be honoured by the lengths some other businesses have gone to in their attempts to replicate Yomdel’s quality and service, although it has to be said this honour is tempered slightly by the amount of time we’ve had to spend with our lawyers in preventing IP and copyright infringement.
There’s no short cut in building a great business and while we’re very active in protecting Yomdel from so-called copycats, Yomdel is keeping firmly focussed on further growth and expansion.
Our services are very competitively priced, but at the same time what we do for our clients should never be viewed as a cost. Rather, working with Yomdel is an investment that delivers a transparent and completely measurable return on investment.
Extended services
And this brings me back to our acquisition of 360 Perspectives, which like Yomdel has a really strong presence in the UK property market. 360 Perspectives works across multiple sectors, including property, retail and e-commerce and has conducted over 50,000 mystery shops to the estate and lettings agency sector this year alone. The synergies with our existing services are huge, and if companies can understand how their prospects, customers and employees think we can step in to offer significant new business growth opportunities.
The new offerings include benchmarking projects and competitor analysis as well as consumer behaviour studies and mystery phone calls. Importantly, 360 Perspectives founder Nick Meinhertzhagen is also joining Yomdel as our group head of customer experience.
The new expanded Yomdel is always looking for motivated and creative people to join us. Why not get in touch and discover whether there is a fit? Top of the list at the moment is sales, data analysts, and experts in customer acquisition.
