Henrik Bang still shudders when he recalls his first task at Netcall.  The St Ives based communication firm was in serious financial strife and as the new chief executive Bang had the unenviable task of annoucning the company's interim results.

"What make me move from Copenhagen to Britain to take over a business which has no money left and has never produced a profit?"  Bang asks about his move to the company in 2004.  "It was the challenge, of course it was."

Netcall, which floated on AIM in 1996, had briefly ridden high on the dotcom boom, before crashing and barely surviving.  But Bang believed the firm had a product to turn its fortunes around.

That product was QueueBuster - a callback system, which essentially removes the frustration from ringing a call centre by queueing for the customers.

"QueueBuster is waiting on the consumer's behalf." Bang explains. "Last year we waited for than 150 years for the British public."

Bang had worked with international call centres for a number of years, and he kenew the product was a winner from the off.  "I knew it was something we could do a lot better with if we just packaged it right and marketed it right."

Within 12 months of Bang arriving, the company had posted its first profit.  Three years later the company continues to expand and it has clients such as Prudential, Halifax, Cigna and BT.  It's been hard work, but Bang says he has never regretted his decision to move to NetCall.

What exactly does QueueBuster do?

When you ring a call centre you almost always end up in a queue.  The typical thing that happens is they tell you all agents are busy, your call is important to, please wait, and you may get some advertising or music.

Globally, around 12 per cent of people abandon the call because they are tired of listening to the music or waiting.  And most people abandon within the first couple of minutes.

What QueueBuster does is instead of playing music or adverts, which we call dissatisfaction guarenteed, the consumer is offered a call-back.  We say: "Leave your name and we will call you back when an agent is free."

We wait, they when an agent becomes free, we tell them it is a QueueBuster and that they have a caller waiting.  While that is taking place we call the consumer.  So when the consumer picks up the phone he or she is being greeted by the agent and has the experience that the agent actually called them.

So agents' satisfaction goes through the roof and customer satisfaction is very high.  There is some market research out there that British consumers have about 10 billion conversations with call centres every year and if 12 per cent of those are abandoned because caller don't get through, that is sizeable.

How did you turn the business around?

The idea was to launch the Queuebuster service on a hosted service platform - so instead of selling the product as a license we were running our own service platorm.  Also, rather than just selling directly, we would sell on via distribution partners - people like BT, Cable&Wireless and Affiniti.  We also wanted to do some international deals, and of course we had to reorganise the entire business.  So in order to be able to do that we had to get some capital because the company was out of money.

We raised about £1m by issuing shares.  That ages us the breathing room.  Then the plan was to turn it profitable within 12 months and we did.  We did that by growing revenues, introducing our hosted service and by managing costs.  Those were really the key things.

How has the business gone since then?

Things had been basically going up from there.  We have had six reporting periods where we continued improving our results.  We have also had very strong growth across our service platform.  Margins have been improved, and costs have not increased.  When I joined three years ago we had very little money, but when we reported in our last results that we had in excess of £2m in cash.  That of course gives us a lot more freedom.

You have some high profile customers, how did you get them on board?

These are customers that we have built up over time.  Of course there were some customers that were with Netcall when I joined, but one of the tasks to grow revenue, was to broaden the customer base.  We had a very high dependancy on revenues from one or two clients from the early days.

What is the growth potential?

We believe that there is a very big growth opportunity in just Britain alone.  And there are organic growth opportunities in Europe and internationally.  We also have new products in the pipeline and in my view we will remain a niche player.  By having lucrative niches we can create a market that is big for us.

City AM

10 April 2007