Dean is the founder of Thumbspeak LLC and started the company in 2009. The company was acquired by Cint in January of 2011.
Thumbspeak empowers companies to gain rapid insights via Thumbspeak’s mobile network by asking targeted questions of on-the-go audiences. People using the Thumbspeak Mobile Application, answer quick questions on their smartphones sent specifically to them by companies and collect terrific rewards. Businesses are able to send questions to specific types of people in precise locations using the Thumbspeak Mobile Targeting Tool at the company website http://www.thumbspeak.com. Businesses get valuable, immediate feedback about the products and services they offer from people on their smartphone. Thumbspeak reaches people in the context of their daily lives in a personal way, their smartphone. Thumbspeak drives deeper engagement and is able to gather feedback from traditionally difficult types of people that will just not take traditional online or offline surveys; men, professional women, business travelers, trend setters, and the affluent.
In November of 2005 Dean identified and emerging market in enterprise feedback management (EFM) and partnered with VC firm (Austin Ventures) to acquire and integrate two companies into one entity which was re-branded as Vovici. Led team of 100+ and held full P&L accountability for $20 million business. Reported to Board of Directors and played a key role in financing efforts, raising investment dollars including private investments and bank debt financing. Grew SaaS revenues over 70% every year, increased average sale by 329% and established company as industry leader, doubling the value of the business in just 2 years. Verint (Nasdaq: VRNT) announced it would acquire Vovici for a $76 million cash deal.
July 19, 2011 (Melville, NY)
Combination Will Create Industry’s Most Comprehensive VoC Provider for Multichannel Analytics, Including Speech, Social Media, Email, Web Chat and Enterprise Feedback
Expanding on its Voice of the Customer (VoC) Analytics platform, Verint® Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: VRNT) today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire, upon closing, Vovici™, an industry leader in enterprise feedback management (EFM) solutions. This combination will create a new category leader in enterprise solutions designed for chief customer officers (CCOs), chief marketing officers (CMOs), chief experience officers (CXOs) and other VoC executives across organizations. As the market’s most comprehensive VoC Analytics platform available, the Verint-Vovici solution will enable organizations to implement a single-vendor solution for collecting, analyzing and acting on customer insights.
The acquisition will add Vovici’s powerful, scalable and easy-to-use enterprise feedback solutions to the Verint VoC Analytics platform, which is setting a new industry standard for helping forward-thinking organizations develop a single solution set for VoC initiatives across voice recordings, surveys, email, chat and social media. Combined with the industry’s leading speech and text analytics solutions and workforce optimization suite, the addition of Vovici will add market-leading VoC functionality, including advanced survey management, customer profile management, interactive dashboards and ad-hoc analysis across any customer touch point. Learn more about Vovici and its product line, by clicking here.
“This business combination will change the playing field in the market, advancing our customers around the globe through a solution designed to help them achieve their voice of the customer goals at all levels – from the contact center through the entire enterprise,” says Dan Bodner, CEO, Verint. “Combining Vovici’s deep domain expertise with our actionable intelligence vision will further position us to solidify our already strong market leadership position.”
“Further, the combination is a strategic move that will fill a void in the market by enabling customers to extract tremendous value from this emerging toolset for the chief customer officer,” adds Bodner. “It will offer our combined customers another means to extract critical information through sophisticated enterprise feedback and robust analytics to better anticipate, understand and act on the VoC – helping foster more loyal customers and drive more profitable business outcomes.”
Through solutions in Verint’s VoC Analytics platform, leading brands – including many from the Fortune 100 – trust Verint to deliver the actionable intelligence required to make better business decisions and improve enterprise performance. Similarly, Vovici solutions deliver measurable return on investment (ROI) across a variety of industries. For example, a leading manufacturer of outdoor equipment redesigned its product packaging based on customer feedback, which resulted in double-digit sales growth; and a U.S. nationwide retailer saved more than $4 million and enabled projects to be completed three to five times faster.
“Generating a unified view into the customer experience is a critical enabler for every business today,” says Greg Stock, CEO, Vovici. “Whether driving customer loyalty, optimizing operational performance or supporting broader business transformation initiatives, the addition of Vovici to Verint’s proven, market-leading solutions will greatly expand our ability to help unlock the value of customer experiences.”
Industry experts agree on the importance of tapping into these customer experiences to drive operational excellence. Notes Kathleen Peterson, chief vision officer, PowerHouse Consulting, “We are seeing C-level customer experience and associated positions take off. As a result, organizations need tools that will enrich their roles. When combined with the right strategic planning around the customer experience, the combination of Verint and Vovici will offer customers the technology to help bring these critical voice of the customer initiatives to life.”
Delivering on the Promise of VoC Analytics to Respond to Failing Customer Experiences
According to independent research company Forrester Research, Inc., “For roughly two-thirds of US brands, [the] customer experience ranges from just OK to downright bad.” 1 It adds that “Many customer experience initiatives don’t meet their full potential – or worse, fail completely – because neither employees nor partners have a complete picture of what the customer experience actually entails or the dynamics that go into creating it.” 2 Implementing a comprehensive VoC program that correlates customer touch points can optimize performance across all channels, so organizations can keep customers engaged with great experiences and loyal through great relationships.
Leveraging the Verint-Vovici solution, global customers can drive loyalty through actionable insights by standardizing on a single vendor VoC solution set across the full range of customer communications channels – voice, email, chat, web and IVR surveys, online communities and social media outlets – using:
For any initiative that requires insight into customer sentiment, these Verint solutions can help organizations gain deep understanding by leveraging unified customer data across communications channels for a singular view into experiences. The Verint VoC Analytics platform enables users to see all of the different interactions coming from the same customer in a defined time period sorted by interaction date. The result is the market’s most complete view into what’s really happening with customers, the drivers of issues and cross-channel patterns, and the ability to predict their needs, expectations and end behaviors.
For more information, please see Verint's Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today.
Software Magazine Ranks Vovici as one of the Fastest Growing Software Companies
Dulles, VA – September 23, 2009 – Vovici today announced its inclusion on the Software Magazine’s Software 500 ranking of the world’s largest software and service providers, now in its 27th year.
Vovici was ranked 378, with software revenue growth of more than 120 percent from 2007 to 2008.
"The 2009 Software 500 results show that revenue growth in the software and services industry was healthy, with total Software 500 revenue of $491.3 billion worldwide for 2008 representing 8.8% growth from the previous year," says John P. Desmond, editor of Software Magazine and Softwaremag.com.
"The Software 500 helps CIOs, senior IT managers and IT staff research and create the short list of business partners," Desmond says. "It is a quick reference of vendor viability. And the online version to be posted soon at www.Softwaremag.com is searchable by category, making it what we call the online catalog to enterprise software."
Vovici provides Oracle with a powerful, expandable platform to manage over 200,000 survey responses annually, while increasing response rates at a low total cost of ownership.
The Software 500 is a revenue-based ranking of the world’s largest software and services suppliers targeting medium to large enterprises, their IT professionals, software developers and business managers involved in software and services purchasing.
Some 44 percent of the 2009 Software 500 companies are privately held.
Go to www.Softwaremag.com and click on Subscribe to be among the first to see the 2009 Software 500. It is being released first in the digital publication to be distributed in mid-September.
The ranking is based on total worldwide software and services revenue for 2008. This includes revenues from software licenses, maintenance and support, training and software-related services and consulting. Suppliers are not ranked on their total corporate revenue, since many have other lines of business, such as hardware. The financial information was gathered by a survey prepared by King Content Co. and posted at www.Softwaremag.com, as well as from public documents.
Dean was the CEO of Greenfield Online from early in 2001 until September of 2005. Recruited to lead turnaround for struggling custom marketing research business with stagnant revenues and increasing financial losses. Led team that grew to 500 people in 3 years and reported to Board of Directors. Took company from multi-million dollar losses to successful IPO in just 3 years. Boosted revenues from $4.5 million to $90 million in 4 years. Improved EBITDA from $50 million loss in 2000 to $21 million profit in 2005.
July 12, 2004 - Internet survey company Greenfield Online Inc. of Wilton, Conn., has priced its initial public offering of 5 million shares of its common stock at $13 per share on the Nasdaq National Market and raised $58 million. The company's stock is trading under the ticker SRVY.
In the transaction, Greenfield Online sold 4 million common shares, with net proceeds of approximately $46 million after deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and estimated offering expenses; and stockholders sold 1 million common shares, with net proceeds of approximately $12 million.
The selling stockholders have granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase an additional 750,000 shares of common stock to cover over-allotments, if any.
In its initial filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Greenfield estimated a price of between $13 and $15 per share.
Greenfield has seen its headcount quadruple over the past two years. In February 2002, the company employed 54 people. By May 2004 that number had grown to 216.
The growth experienced by the company was organic from 2001 through the end of 2004. After Greenfield Online went public in July of 2004, Dean led the acquisitions of goZing and Ciao.
Greenfield Online Acquires goZing for $30 Million in February of 2005.
"With the addition of goZing, we now have one of the world's largest Internet only panels," stated Dean Wiltse, president and chief executive officer of Greenfield Online. "This transaction made sense for us given how well goZing and Greenfield Online fit together across panel, people, culture and business philosophy. We are immediately strengthening our domestic and international reach and further bolstering the capabilities of our sales and customer support staff. The combination of Greenfield Online's rapid organic growth and our recent acquisitions, have established Greenfield Online as one of the industry's fastest growing companies, capable of producing superior value for our shareholders, customers and employees."
goZing, headquartered in Encino, California, was founded in 1999. The company has 41 employees, substantially all of which are based in Encino. For the year 2004, the company recorded revenue of approximately $13 million, 80% of which was attributable to survey sample solutions. goZing recorded 2004 operating income of approximately $2.5 million. The goZing client base more than doubled in 2004 to 97 clients.
Greenfield Online Acquires CIAO AG for US$154 Million, Increases Share of European Survey Solutions Market
Greenfield Online, Inc (Nasdaq: SRVY), a leading provider of Internet survey solutions to marketing research and consulting companies, today announced it has completed the acquisition of Munich-based Ciao AG for aggregate consideration valued at approximately US$154 million USD. This acquisition brings together two leading providers of online survey solutions in North America and Europe and substantially speeds Greenfield Online's time to market in capturing a greater share of the European survey solutions market opportunity.
CIAO AG, headquartered in Munich, Germany, was founded in 1999. The company has 150 employees across six European offices in Munich, London, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam and Timisoara, Romania, as well as a small office with 5 employees in the US.
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