eg solutions found a business in the back-office backlog

A customer can get through to a call centre and still get nowhere. Someone answers, takes the details and promises action. Then the real work joins a queue elsewhere: a lending task, an insurance query, a case waiting for the right person. That less visible part of customer service was the territory eg solutions chose to understand.

The Stafford company built workforce optimisation software for back offices, where work can move between teams, systems and locations before it is finished. Its proposition was practical: forecast demand, allocate tasks, see what is happening and help managers act. The customer’s experience depended on more than the conversation at the front desk.

There was a business in that observation. Founded by Elizabeth Gooch in 1988, eg became an AIM-listed software supplier and was acquired by Verint for approximately £26.3 million in 2017. Its history also contains an awkwardly appropriate subplot: a company selling operational improvement eventually had to confront shortcomings in its own sales operation.

The factory was full of paperwork

Gooch’s background included Forward Trust and Birmingham Midshires Building Society. Her later board biography describes her bringing industrial production-management methods into service businesses. The analogy is useful. An office has incoming work, limited capacity, different skills and deadlines, even if its output never travels down a conveyor belt.

That perspective placed eg between enterprise software and operational consulting. Its expertise concerned how people actually processed work. The product was designed to make service, quality, productivity and cost visible together, giving managers information for prioritisation and staffing decisions. A queue had a shape; someone needed to be able to see it.

Microsoft’s account of its work with eg identifies two flagship products, eg work manager and eg operational intelligence. The company took its reporting applications to Microsoft’s Services lab for performance and scalability testing. It is a telling detail: when operational decisions depend on reporting, the reporting system itself needs to keep up.

A software package with the training left in

Gooch later wrote that eg’s early work tried to improve performance without involving technology. Internal IT departments were already occupied with large programmes. Watching those projects exposed a familiar collection of problems: expanding budgets, incomplete requirements and staff training that slipped off the plan.

Customer workshops shaped a broader offering. Buyers wanted ready-to-use functionality, interfaces to existing systems, an implementation method, training and skills transfer. Software as a service joined that mix in 2012, according to Gooch’s retrospective. The intended purchase was a working operational capability, with help making it stick.

The business sold to organisations rather than individual app users. Its historical offering spanned on-premise software, cloud delivery and managed services, with professional services alongside licences and recurring business. A manager adopting it was also buying an approach to running the department. That made implementation part of the commercial proposition.

The 2016 release of eg work manager, version 8.1.0, shows the product at ground level. It added clearer visibility of service-level targets and progress, allocation filters based on characteristics such as skill and case status, and support for documents, images and video attached to cases. The company also promoted gamification and mobile working.

Find the spare minutes. Give them a job.

BGL Group’s Fusion operation supplies a concrete example. In 2016 it had more than 700 contact-centre advisers across Peterborough, Coventry and Sunderland, alongside 150 back-office employees. Call arrivals varied through the day. Some advisers had available capacity while back-office work still needed attention.

Fusion used eg work manager to support a blending strategy: bringing short, self-contained back-office tasks into the contact centre. The idea was to pool scattered capacity into useful time. Routing and monitoring controls familiar from telephone operations could then be applied to the paperwork too.

This was a specific organisational problem, with a specific fit. Tasks had to be suitable for the people receiving them and short enough to fit the available capacity. The published account explains the deployment and its rationale; it does not establish a universal savings percentage. The interesting part is the work design.

Nationwide illustrates another use. After upgrading its operational intelligence software between November 2007 and January 2008, the building society commissioned further implementation as it moved its specialist lending division into its Bournemouth operations centre. Real-time monitoring of business processes was the stated aim. A reorganisation needed visibility as well as a new destination.

The market extended beyond finance. In August 2016, eg announced that its partner Aspect had secured an initial US$1 million, three-year contract with an unnamed social-networking corporation, covering up to 4,000 licences. The software would help manage high-volume, changing and sensitive service requests. A proof of concept preceded selection.

The price was a project, not a checkout button

A February 2017 public-sector contract offers another view of the economics. Valued at £692,000, it came through eg’s partnership with managed-service provider GCI. Approximately £500,000 was expected to be recognised in the current financial year. GCI had provided eg’s managed cloud platform since 2012; distribution added another dimension to the relationship.

Those contract values show the scale of particular enterprise purchases. Dividing the social-networking deal by its maximum licence count would produce a misleading seat price: the announcement described a multi-year deployment and professional services, while the actual rollout could vary. Scope, timing and implementation belong in any honest reading of the cost.

eg’s competitive position rested on its concentration on the back office and its accompanying management methods. Historical workforce-optimisation alternatives included NICE, Genesys and Verint; Aspect operated in that world while partnering with eg. Buyers could weigh a specialist’s operational experience against the breadth of a larger supplier’s suite.

Then eg had to fix its own operation

The company’s path was uneven. In a 2014 interview, Gooch described returning to executive leadership after a difficult boardroom period. Her account emphasised restoring daily cash-flow forecasting, improving departmental transparency and contacting customers. She also described testing the working relationship with a new chairman before his appointment. These were her reflections on a contested period, rather than a neutral verdict on everyone involved.

By 2016, the company’s own interim review identified a separate commercial weakness. The breadth and depth of sales resources and channels were insufficient for the board’s growth objectives. Revenue for the six months ended July was £2.50 million, down from £3.60 million a year earlier, with an adjusted pre-tax loss of £1.33 million.

Management restructured to concentrate on revenue generation and strengthen the skills supporting growth. That is the documented change of mind: the existing route to market was too limited for the ambition. Product development and implementation capacity alone could not supply the missing sales coverage.

The subsequent results showed recovery. Annual revenue reached £8.2 million for the year ended January 2017. International direct and partner business represented 37% of revenue, up from 24%. Three new partners were signed, and partner revenue rose to £1.45 million from £0.34 million.

For the six months ended July 2017, revenue reached £5.13 million and adjusted pre-tax profit was £0.4 million. The improvement supported management’s emphasis on distribution, although the results alone cannot isolate which decisions caused how much of the recovery. Enterprise contract timing also matters when reading a small software company’s half-year figures.

Partnerships brought uncertainty as well as reach. Aspect, which had agreed a £1.25 million equity subscription in 2013, sought bankruptcy protection in 2016. eg publicly reassured investors about the relationship. Business continued: its August announcement described new contracts secured during Aspect’s restructuring. A useful channel could still make its supplier nervous.

Hire someone who has sat in that chair

Gooch’s description of hiring offers a more personal explanation of eg’s approach. She said the company recruited most people from backgrounds like those of its customers, then trained them for their roles. Familiarity with the pressures of an operations department was valuable before a sales pitch or implementation plan entered the room.

“No one comes to work to do a bad job.”

Elizabeth Gooch, October 2017

In the same retrospective, she reported more than 150,000 people supported and over 2,000 implementations of software and best-practice principles. These are the founder’s historical totals, not present-day subscriptions. They show how she chose to describe the business: through people using it and work getting done.

The company formalised its culture as CAN DO: Customer Focus, Agility, No-Nonsense, Driven by Results and One Team. In February 2017 it reported a second consecutive two-star Best Companies employer accreditation. The practical lesson for another supplier is to make customer understanding a recruitment decision, then reinforce it through training.

112.5 pence, and a larger home

Verint’s offer put a price on the business: 112.5 pence per share, valuing the issued and to-be-issued share capital at approximately £26.3 million. Announced in September 2017, it represented a 53% premium to the preceding six-month volume-weighted average, yet an 11.1% discount to the previous closing price. The chosen comparison changed the story.

The acquisition became effective on 3 November 2017. The original company, subsequently named EG SOLUTIONS LIMITED, was dissolved on 5 February 2019. Much later, Thoma Bravo completed its acquisition of Verint on 26 November 2025 and announced its combination with Calabrio. Those are distinct events in the ownership history.

For a reader running service operations, eg leaves a usable sequence: understand the work, identify capacity, match tasks to skills and teach managers how to use the information. The Fusion example suggests a boundary too: spare minutes help only when suitable work can fit them. A better queue display cannot, by itself, make every task interchangeable.

eg’s subject was ordinary work that customers needed somebody to finish. The company gave that work a place in the software budget. For anyone still waiting on a case after a perfectly pleasant phone call, the distinction remains easy to appreciate.