Welltel in €4m deal to boost its services

Welltel chief executive Ross Murray

Adrian Weckler Twitter Email

April 01 2021 02:30 AM

Dublin-based IT communications firm Welltel is to pay the Portuguese call centre technology firm, Talkdesk, €4m to offer Talkdesk’s services in the Irish market.

The deal will see Welltel switch on features such as speech enabled interactive voice response (IVR), bots, call recording and workforce management applications.

Welltel, co-founded by CEO Ross Murray and chairman John Quinn, employs 100 people and provides services to over 3,000 customers including Permanent TSB, Zurich and Specsavers.

“We are already seeing a wave of automation, robotics, analytics and artificial intelligence emerging,” said Ross Murray.

“The pandemic has only accelerated changes to the traditional retail channel and office environment. This is a solution to respond to a trend highlighted by the Irish Contact Centre Managers Association which forecast in June 2020 that 36pc of contact centres will be investing in new models to facilitate hybrid home and office working.”

Welltel was founded in 2007. Last year, it acquired a smaller firm, Novi, for €3m. It also bought Intellicom in 2020. It recently took investment from the UK private equity firm, Livingbridge.

The company says that its strategy is “to continue” to make acquisitions.

“We intend to continue to invest heavily in this area and work with strategic partners such as Talkdesk to migrate customers to the cloud and leverage the game changing capabilities offered by the next generation of customer experience solutions and services,” said Mr Murray. “We look forward to achieving very strong growth in the Irish market with Talkdesk.”

The deal will also see Welltel invest €750,000 in training and marketing Talkdesk’s cloud customer experience technologies, said Mr Murray.