30 Second Interview with Automated Analytics founder and CEO

An interview with our founder and CEO Mark Taylor that appeared on iNews.co.uk by Grace Gausden:

Mark Taylor founded Automated Analytics, which uses AI to analyze businesses’ incoming calls, increasing their sales from online marketing.

How did the business start?

I was at Halfords, working to drive sales through the website. We’d taken the site from doing £6m a year to over £18m. One night, in a bar – where all the best ideas are born – I realized we were still missing out on sales because we couldn’t see what happened to customers when their online search progressed to an offline call to the Halfords branch.

We had no idea whether we were converting these leads. I was inspired to try to ‘close-the-loop’ between web searches and sales made over the phone, providing a complete view of the sales funnel, both on and offline. I quit my job the next day.

What’s your USP?

Our AI analyzes calls without anyone having to listen to them. The speech analytics identifies the reason for the call, its outcome and, together with source tracking, the search term that triggered the call. It can analyze 10,000 calls in 0.2 secs. This lets clients optimize their to online marketing and generate more sales for the money.

HR has a similar problem as marketing: they don’t know how they’re generating the best candidates online. Our TalentTrack product tracks online applications through the hiring process, analyzing which job boards and online channels work best.

What are the challenges you face?

The Great Resignation highlighted organisations’ lack of recruitment analytics. Employers have been over-spending on channels that aren’t generating candidates and under-investing in channels delivering great hires.

One firm we spoke to was using 40 job boards – but only hiring 1 per cent of the resulting candidates. TalentTrack increased applicant numbers by 40 per cent, via only 8 jobs boards, and improved their hire ratio to 11 per cent.

The intense competition for skilled workers applies to us, too, though. We are based in Doncaster and need great people to grow the business (we plan to triple the size of the team within three years). But there’s a brain drain of brilliant people from Yorkshire heading for London.

What are your plans?

Call360 and TalentTrack are still only scratching the surface of the AI opportunity in the £2.5bn data insights market. We are working with the University of Sheffield to improve our machine learning and extend the application of our AI to other consumer-facing industries.

We have plans to expand overseas. We think we could transform hiring strategies with automated application source reporting, shortlisting and vetting.

We’re also looking to push our original business, eSalesHub, where we pay for Google and Facebook and our clients pay per lead. The idea is that we take the risk of an advertiser’s media spend and they only pay for leads using our platform.