1Stream Wins Frost & Sullivan Award for Exceptional Entrepreneurship

Hosted contact centre technology firm 1Stream has been recognised as South Africa’s Entrepreneurial Company of the Year by global research firm Frost & Sullivan, as per their recent analysis of the hosted contact centre market.

Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company demonstrating excellence in growth strategy and growth implementation. The company is lauded for its customer value leadership and speed of response to market needs. A high degree of innovation in terms of products and technologies also underlie the award receipt.

1Stream directors Jed Hewson and Bruce von Maltitz have stated that they are extremely pleased with the award. “It’s an honour to receive an award from an international company such as Frost & Sullivan, especially because they are known as the premier industry analysts for the call centre and telephony industry,” says Hewson. “This recognition is a sure sign that we are on the right track and that the hard work by team 1Stream is paying off.”

Frost & Sullivan’s Information & Communication Technologies Industry Analyst, Ishe Zingoni, attributes 1Stream’s success to their flexibility, saying, “1Stream was able to deliver a robust and highly scalable cloud contact centre solution within a short span of time.”

The company won the award ahead of several leading companies, ranking 20% higher than their closest competitor.

“Our strategy is to be a specialist, niche provider of hosted call centre technology,” says Von Maltitz. “We have consistently beaten large corporates in this space because we’ve focused on our core business and made sure that we remained experts in the field. The award shows that our strategy is working.”

“Providing hosted contact centre services in not just a technology drop,” says Hewson. “To really succeed with providing hosted services a provider needs to deliver a combination of best of breed technology with first class support and consultancy.”

1Stream’s managed contact centre offering is based on Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Centre’s SIP-based IP platform, an all-in-one multichannel software platform. The company has a comprehensive portfolio spanning inbound routing systems, outbound dialers, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), IP telephony, multimedia, recording and quality management, and computer telephony integration.

Recently, 1Stream announced integration of its products with leading CRM provider, Salesforce.com. Rather than outright purchase, 1Stream was able to achieve quick and easy implementation by opting to deploy it in the cloud.

“1Stream was founded because, having worked in the corporate sector, we could see where the technology was going in South Africa and the rest of the world and realised that larger organisations were too large to deliver the niche services that were needed in the maturing hosted call centre market,” Hewson explains. “We decided to take the plunge and become the best hosted call centre service provider in Africa – maybe not the biggest, but the best.”