Alistair Houghton meets GUY COOPER, chief executive of Qire

THE humble telephone call just got hi-tech.

Liverpool-based Qire is growing rapidly, thanks to its Intelligent Voice Messaging (IVM) software that automates phone conversations.

Qire’s software can make and receive phone calls and interact with callers. It can understand what they say and present them with options accordingly – all done using “human or human-like voices”.

This year, Qire has already launched software that can be used by call centres to end the problem of silent calls.

And later this year it will unveil a software package, called Qore, that Cooper believes will help it win business worldwide.

Today, Qire employs some 20 people and turns over £4.8m.

It works, says Cooper, with “anyone who has to talk to lots of people on a regular basis”, from banks to utility companies.

Its clients include Co-operative Financial Services, utility companies Severn Trent and Scottish & Southern, and debt collectors Direct Legal Collections.

Cooper believes Qore, which brings together IVM with other communications systems, will help Qire grow into a global business.

“It’s software that will act as a single software solution for a company’s communications needs,” he said. “That single piece of software will act as an interface for all kinds of electronic communications, including landline calls, SMS, email, even Facebook and Twitter.

“You can communicate with an organisation through whatever channel suits you best.”

The system can target those marketing calls more effectively so they suit the caller and the recipient.

Cooper said: “It might be that you’re always available by mobile phone, but your wife might be a teacher, so it is pointless trying to contact her at certain hours. We can look at all that information and work out the best way of contacting you.

“If you are a company making calls, you will be able to do things like, for example, asking the client ‘we will make a delivery at 4, will you be there’?

“You will be able to do the kind of things it would be lovely to do if you had infinite resources.”

Cooper, who studied electrical engineering at Imperial College, London, started his career at the Ministry of Defence. He said: “I used to design guided missiles.”

In 1993, he moved into the telecoms industry with Cable Northwest, which installed the cable television network in the region. Among his tasks was designing the cable network in Liverpool city centre.

As the company became part of Telewest and later NTL, Cooper moved through the ranks, designing cable installations for schools and hospitals throughout the country.

In 1999, he started working with then Liverpool marketing agency Paver Downes, leading its EBusiness digital marketing arm.

In 2003, Cooper moved on to research firm CACI, where he built a system to collect customers’ email addresses. But, after two years, he left CACI to co-found Origin, the company that became Qire.

It was backed by Merseyside Special Investment Fund and won several big-name clients.

But, in early 2008, the company was thrown into crisis by an Ofcom report on silent calls that suggested IVM services could become illegal.

As a result of the uncertainty, MSIF took what it said was the “painful decision” to end its support for Qire.

Facing the loss of its funding, Qire called in the administrators.

But Cooper and his team were determined that Qire’s software could succeed and would win Ofcom’s approval. So they formed a company, Direct Data Services, to buy Qire’s name and assets.

Later that year, Ofcom gave the green light to Qire’s services, setting the company on the path to growth.

“It (the administration) was annoying, to say the least,” says Cooper. “It was hard at the time.

“We managed to continue with the customers we had. But there was a bit of a hiatus with companies making the decision to go for it while they waited for Ofcom’s ruling to come through, particularly bigger organisations.”

It was, Cooper says, “difficult” at first for a start-up business to win the trust of big corporations.

“It takes a lot of resources before you get any benefit,” he said.

“The advantage that we have is that there are not a lot of options for customer. If you want this kind of system, you’ve got to buy it from a small company like us.”

The company has been backed by Manchester-based Maven Capital Partners, which made two investments in the company totalling £1m. That investment helped it develop the technology, which it could then take to market.

“It’s a utilisation-based service,” said Cooper. “Provided people like it and use it more and more, you get recurring revenue. The big advantage is that once we’ve sold it, we don’t have to sell it again month after month.

“We have recently become profitable. Hopefully we can continue to be profitable from now on.”

It was an Ofcom report on silent calls that caused Qire to wobble – but Cooper’s determination to keep developing technology means the company has now come up with a solution that he believes could solve the problem.

Call centres use automated dialling systems to make them more efficient, meaning they can make more calls than there are agents. But if the phone is answered and an agent is not available to answer it, then the line goes dead, creating a silent call.

One way to make a system more efficient was to use technology that cut off calls as soon as it recognised an answering machine. But because that software is not 100% accurate, many people still receive silent calls.

Cooper says Qire’s new system solves the problem by ensuring people hear an automated voice system as soon as they pick up the phone. They can then choose to speak to an operator.

Qire’s systems may be automated but they are, Cooper insists, far from robotic in their sound. He said: “It’s automated conversation. We use real voices. It’s not like speaking to a robot.

“A lot of other systems are done as text-to-speech – we only use that for things like numbers that aren’t available in advance. We try to make it as comfortable as possible.”

Qire records the voices for its clients itself, and can call on a stable of voice artists.

He said: “We can use different voices for different circumstances – a young female voice or a Scottish voice, for example – it depends what we’re trying to achieve.

“You’d be surprised what difference it makes.”

Liverpool is, says Cooper, a great base for a technology business.

He says: “One good thing about Merseyside is that there’s some really good technical people here who don’t have a really wide range of exciting companies to work for.

“There’s a great talent pool, and we’ve certainly found great people – people who’ve had firms like Google and Microsoft trying to poach them. We are having to fend off some big and glamorous names.”

Cooper still lives in London, commuting between Merseyside and his home office in the capital.

His ideal working week, he says, sees him in Liverpool from Tuesday to Thursday, giving him long weekends with his wife and two sons in London.

“Even if I lived in Liverpool,” he said, “I’d still need to spend two days a week in London.”

Outside work, Cooper enjoys playing football, as well as taking part in “adventure racing”. His next race this year will see him cross Scotland in a weekend by mountain-biking, running and kayaking.

“I do that sort of thing three or four times a year, to the detriment of my health,” he smiled.