Sabio hits the acquisition trail again with DVELP buy

Sabio is a firm that likes to make acquisitions, having sealed seven in the past three years, and the business is expanding again to bolster its position in the contact centre market.

The customer experience (CX) specialist has followed up on its most recent deal to pick up Team vision in January with the purchase of cloud software and consultancy company DVELP.

The latest target brings further expertise in the contact centre space and will help get Sabio in front of more of those firms with its customer experience message.

London-based DVELP has developed its own “Airline” product, which integrates Google Contact Center AI (CCAI) and Twilio application programming interfaces (APIs) to support the development of more automated responses to customers that means agents can concentrate on the more demanding calls.

The business has already established a customer base that includes the likes of Google and Marks and Spencer.

“CX-focused organisations have more technology choice than ever before. The contact centre [CC] and CRM [customer relationship management] spaces are rapidly evolving through the adoption of emerging technologies such as Google’s CCAI and Twilio Flex. Adding this capability and product set to our portfolio allows us to combine our partners’ solutions and our own IP to deliver greater flexibility and innovation,” said Sabio Group CEO Jonathan Gale.

“We anticipate a significant migration of CX and CC technology to the cloud over the coming years and believe that DVELP will be instrumental in helping Sabio clients to benefit from the democratisation of world-class NLU and AI [artificial intelligence] technologies,” he added.

This is Gale’s third acquisition since becoming CEO of Sabio in December 2019. The former NewVoiceMedia CEO, Mimecast and Symantec executive was tasked with ramping up inorganic growth and spearheading the next chapter of the firm’s story, as former boss Andy Roberts moved into a vice-chairman role.

“The CX industry is on the precipice of a customer service revolution,” said Tom Mullen, DVELP’s founder and CEO. “We are confident that being part of the Sabio Group will allow us to reach more clients and guide them through their customer experience transformation.”

The tie-up got the thumbs up from Glenn Weinstein, chief customer officer at Twilio, who viewed it as an opportunity for its contact centre proposition to continue to get pitched to the growing number of customers operating in that market.

“This acquisition by Sabio underscores the Twilio partner momentum in the contact centre market, and we look forward to continuing to work with the team to help our customers transform customer experience,” he said.

Since Horizon Capital backed Sabio in 2016, the CX specialist has sealed eight deals, including Callware in February 2019, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions provider Rapport in March 2017, contact centre player DatapointEurope in July 2017, customer insight and contact centre benchmarking firm Bright UK in March 2018 and Singapore-based provider of virtual assistant products flexAnswer Solutions in January 2019.

With the volume of acquisitions over the past three years, the chances are that this will not be Sabio’s last deal in 2020.