Moneypenny on a social media mission
ED REEVES set up his firm, Moneypenny, in 2000 to provide a phone answering service for busy companies, but he is already planning for the day technology makes his original plan obsolete. Reeves says that within five years companies will not need his service to answer phones, but to respond to online and social media, and he is busy expanding that side of the operation.
Reeves launched the firm with his sister Rachel after his company lost a contract because he was on holiday. Wrexham-based Moneypenny now has a staff of 550, turns over £25 million and provides a phone answering service to 8,500 companies, including several FTSE 100 firms.
‘People speak to Moneypenny all the time, they just don’t realise it,’ Reeves said. But he expects that to change as many of those calls are converted to online web chat enquiries.
‘One of the biggest expanding areas of Moneypenny is providing staff to fulfil online web chat enquiries, live chat, Facebook, social media enquiries and that sort of thing.
‘We will be the largest player in that area within three years. People will use us to handle tech-based queries. It’s going to dominate Moneypenny.’
He added: ‘We are using partnerships run with IBM and Microsoft where we replace the need for a receptionist, or we support the receptionist using technology using speechrecognition and so on.’
Explaining how the idea for Moneypenny arose, Reeves said: ‘I was in the Canary Islands and a client rang me. He said, “Ed, I’ve just rung your office to tell them to put some paper in the fax machine, because I couldn’t get the fax order to go through.” I lost the order.’