Richard Manthorpe, Product Director, Content Guru
November marks the return of the UK IT Industry Awards. These awards are the largest and most well-known event in the technology industry calendar.
Owned and operated by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and Computing, the awards enjoy a level of professionalism and industry knowledge not seen at other shows.
This year's winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Wednesday 8th November in London.
Content Guru, one of the finalists, is in the running for the AI Innovation of the Year.
We talked to Richard Manthorpe, product director at Content Guru, to find out what makes his company different from other technology companies and what are they working on this year.
Richard is responsible for defining and executing the product roadmap, pricing, UI & UX, technical documentation and customer experience centres. He joined Content Guru in 2009 and worked in project management, before setting up and running the Product function in 2017.
Richard earned a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science and Cybernetics from the University of Reading. In his spare time, he enjoys golf, outdoor pursuits and volunteering as a Scout Leader.
Computing: Please provide some background on your company for our readers. What makes you different from other companies?
Richard Manthorpe: Content Guru helps organisations deliver outstanding customer experience at scale. Our cloud-based solution, Storm®, uses AI, omnichannel capabilities, deep integrations and data analysis to ensure that customers' requests and issues get quickly and accurately resolved. Thanks to Storm's peerless availability, security and scale, we are the only cloud provider trusted by emergency services across the globe to run their mission-critical communications.
Storm is used by over 1,000 enterprise-scale public and private organisations in over 50 countries. This success is by virtue of our unique approach to building lasting technology partnerships; tailoring our solution to each organisation's individual needs as they evolve and change over time. Our mission and product roadmap is customer-inspired: we run multiple sessions throughout the year to understand what our clients really want, as well as how we can improve our products for the millions of people who depend upon them every day.
What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?
Content Guru has always been a trusted technology partner in the public sector, and has expanded massively over the last 12 months. Most notably, we provide 999 and 101 end-to-end contact management, to which we are adding video and photo capability and precise location tracking. Our customer data platform allows emergency services organisations to orchestrate data between multiple specialised systems of record, enabling the seamless flow of high-priority information as needed.
Every 999 call for an ambulance in England, Wales and Scotland passes through Content Guru's Intelligent Routing Platform (IRP), which finds the best available call handler in the shortest time. This project has enabled Content Guru to play an important part in transforming the way urgent and emergency care is delivered to UK citizens.
What are you working on this year?
AI is a key theme our teams are continuing to work on - from blending ChatGPT into the contact centre, to using real-time transcription and instant machine translation. Our AI tools empower agents by listening in to calls and automatically filling in forms as needed. They provide helpful suggestions on what the agent should say, before rating the call and writing up the summary, saving time and providing real-time support.
Our hyper-intelligent machine agents now offer users effortless, high-speed self-service and accurate answers as part of a conversational experience through voice and digital channels. Machine agents give organisations the ability to go beyond the benefits of traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and chatbots, taking voice and digital interactions to the next level, while gaining the highest degree of control and visibility.
Why are events like the UK IT Awards important to the IT industry?
Some of the most important innovations in the IT industry have been developed in the UK, but are often overshadowed by the Hollywood image of Silicon Valley. As a UK founded and headquartered company, we have a unique view of the talent and hard work that goes in behind the scenes to make this technology possible. Computing's UK IT Industry Awards are a fantastic way to recognise and celebrate the achievements of the UK-based companies and employees who go above and beyond to innovate in the IT space.
The UK IT Industry Awards will take place on 8th November in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.
