A Look Back: 2014 in Review
By Mandy Reed, Marketing Manager (Global)
It seems like only yesterday that we were sharing our first blog posts of the year talking about trends for 2014 and announcing our 10th Anniversary celebrations. Looking back, it certainly has been a busy and exciting year both for Creative Virtual as a company and for the customer experience industry.
We kicked off the year with a 10th Anniversary celebration complete with cake, our #CV10Years blog series and lots of photos of Creative Virtual team members wearing our fleeces around the world. While we were celebrating, we were also hard at work and welcomed three new virtual assistants to our V-Person™ family in January. Before the month was out, we received word that Creative Virtual had been named as a finalist for two Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service as well. At the awards ceremony in Las Vegas, we were awarded Silver Stevie Awards in the categories of New IVR or Web Service Solution and Sales or Customer Service Solutions Technology Partner of the Year. We definitely started the year off right!
2014 saw the official launch of Creative Virtual in Australia at a very successful event in Sydney. We also participated in a variety of other events around the world, including Call Center World 2014 in Berlin, the FStech Omnichannel Banking Conference 2014 in London, Forrester’s 2014 Forum for Customer Experience Professionals East in New York City and the Middle East Banking Innovation Summit 2014 in Dubai. Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO, led a session on mobile and social customer engagement as part of London Technology Week at Internet World 2014 as well as presenting during the FStech conference, and Richard Simons, CEO of Creative Virtual USA, gave a presentation at NetFinance 2014 in Miami.
Throughout the year we took part in a number of webinars featuring industry analysts, customer experience experts and current Creative Virtual customers. These are great resources for anyone wanting to learn more about recent developments, trends and technologies in the customer experience space, and can still be viewed on-demand. We also released an assortment of other educational resources and new Customer Success Stories.
Industry analysts were taking note of our innovative technologies and solutions as well during 2014. Mitch Kramer, Senior Consultant at the Patricia Seybold Group, praised our knowledge management and personalised answer capabilities as part of his detailed report titled Creative Virtual V-Person: Delivering Personalized Answers to Customers’ Questions. Creative Virtual was also named as a key vendor in TechNavio’s Global Intelligent Virtual Assistant Market 2014-2018 report, with our V-Person technology receiving top marks in the head-to-head product comparison. And V-Portal™, our knowledge management, workflow management and business intelligence reporting platform, earned us recognition as a finalist for the 2014 KM Promise Award.
Another momentous event of 2014 occurred in August when we officially revealed our brand new website featuring our new logo and colour scheme! The new website and branding are helping us more accurately represent Creative Virtual’s solutions, experience and expertise to the world.
Even though we were busy this year launching new Smart Help tools, releasing new features for existing solutions and constantly working on additional, innovative functionality, the team still found time for a little fun. As part of our 10th Anniversary celebration, a 12-member team—Chris, Rachel, Lucy, Leah, Tracey, Jeff, David, Bj?rn, Maria, Sam, Chloe and Julie—completed the British 10k London Run in July and, with the help of many others at Creative Virtual, raised over £1700 for the RSPCA! Our teams in India and the USA took a little break for group picnics, and there were team dinners in London and Bristol for some of the UK-based people as well. During his trip to India, Founder & CEO Chris had the pleasure of taking part in the Diwali celebrations in the Mumbai office. We’ll be finishing out the year with our annual Christmas and Holiday parties.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so instead of making you read any more about our fabulous 2014, I invite you to take a look at our 2014 in Review photo album. Enjoy!
Image courtesy of Theeradech Sanin at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
