Meet Mark Taylor, Founder and CEO at Yorkshire Based AI Company: Call360

Call360 is a Yorkshire based artificial intelligence company, operating in the £2.5bn UK data insights & analytics market. In short our A.I technology, which was developed in-house, improves the efficiency of client’s marketing spend by an average 20% and increases sales conversion by identifying shortcomings in the customer journey across online and offline sales channels. No other company can do this.

Our unique selling point is that only our A.I technology provides an end-to-end analysis, which records the full customer experience journey through the sales funnel from top-to-bottom both online and offline, back to the keyword that first triggered the enquiry. This data set enables customers to target their marketing spend on the most effective keywords and marketing channels, whilst also identify where sales are being lost, enabling corrective action to increase conversion.

There is a common misperception that customer journeys are now mainly conducted solely online, making them easy to track. Users are making purchases across a range of channels from the initial online research, with calls from Google search alone estimated by the Company to exceed 750,000 every day, as consumers often still require that human interaction before making purchases of goods and services. Until Call360 came along companies simply had no clue as to what was happening in this important sales channel.

Our A.I technology can analyse 10,000 customer calls in less than one second to 97% accuracy.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
My background is in marketing for consumer brands including Virgin Active, Halfords and Hilton Hotels.  The idea for Call360 came to me at a marketing forum with 150 fellow marketing directors, holed up on a boat moored off Guernsey.

A big topic for debate was  this very challenge of measuring marketing efficiency. Over a drink or two in the bar afterwards, I sketched out an idea to a friend and by the time I had reached the McDonalds at Newbury Services on the way home the next day I had decided to quit my job. I resigned the following week and my friend from the bar became an angel investor.
 

How has the company evolved through the pandemic?

 
2021 was a very big year for us. We raised our Series A round from Maven Equity Partners, part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund. We have used the funds alongside our positive cashflow to scale-up our business for growth, investing across our technology, business development and sales and marketing teams.  Over the last twelve months we have doubled the size of the team, which now stands at 25.

We have just won our largest contract to date, securing a five year deal with Dyna-Rod and this alongside other recent contract wins gives us confidence in delivering some 60% revenue growth in our current financial year to just shy of £4m, alongside a second year of profitability.

We also restructured the business in the year, breaking it down into each service offering; Call360, Talent Track (for the recruitment sector) and eSalesHub (lead generation software), all of which consolidate to form Automated Analytics Limited.
 

What can we hope to see from the business in the future?

 
We are still very much scratching the surface of the A.I opportunity. We continue to invest in enhancements to our existing A.I applications, which we do in partnership with the University of Sheffield, whilst also exploring the potential for new A.I services.

Our existing 250 plus clients, many of whom are household names, are signing up to larger service offerings and longer contracts and we are winning new clients. We are continuing to hire across the business as we look to realise the opportunities in the UK and over the next couple of years, overseas expansion.