Neil Hammerton and the three-minute contact centre

Neil Hammerton had three minutes to turn a roomful of strangers into a contact centre. At Salesforce’s World Tour in London in May 2017, he asked volunteers to text their first names from their mobile phones. Their details became records in Salesforce. He made them agents, provisioned a London number and invited a customer to call. The system sent the call out to the volunteers, greeting them by name. The first to answer won a bottle of wine.

Natterbox won the Demo Jam. The wine was a pleasant inducement; the more interesting prize was an explanation anyone could follow. Here was a business telephone system assembled in front of its prospective users, with the audience doing the work. A subject that can make perfectly alert people reach for their coffee had become a small piece of participatory theatre.

The performance suits Hammerton’s public story. He has spent years asking why calling a business should involve so much unnecessary effort. He is also willing to put himself at the controls, whether demonstrating software or taking guests up in a microlight. His preferred way of explaining a possibility often seems to be to let somebody experience it.

The telephone had forgotten its manners

The idea behind Natterbox began with an irritation: a company Hammerton worked with handled incoming calls poorly. He had worked in technology for years, beginning in British Telecom’s research laboratories and later moving into security software. Customer service was a familiar concern. Telecommunications, as a business to build from scratch, was less familiar territory.

His response was to learn. He read about the industry and sought instruction from an experienced telecoms practitioner. With his co-founders, he spent eighteen months preparing the venture. There is something reassuringly unglamorous about that interval. The origin contains an annoyance and an idea, certainly, but also the work of finding out how the equipment and the business actually functioned.

Natterbox was founded in 2009 and launched services in 2010. By March 2011, Hammerton was describing a hosted voice service that used information in customer relationship management systems to control and route calls. A caller’s existing relationship with a business could help determine what happened when the phone rang. The telephone would have access to some of the knowledge the business already possessed.

For the customer, the appeal required very little technical explanation. Having supplied a company with your details, you might reasonably hope it would remember you. Nobody expects a favourite restaurant to greet every returning diner with an application form. Large businesses had somehow made the equivalent procedure seem routine.

Before voice, a different kind of inbox

Hammerton’s previous business, Email Systems, dealt with communications from another direction: keeping unwanted material out. He worked with Jim Page and Neil Burgess, who would also become Natterbox co-founders. The relationship predates the telephone venture, giving its founding group experience of building and delivering services together.

In 2007, Email Systems agreed to merge with Webroot. At the time, its services protected an estimated 2.5 million email boxes across 1,500 businesses worldwide. The terms were undisclosed. Hammerton, then chief executive, pointed to Webroot’s international support and reseller network as reasons for the deal.

That earlier chapter matters because Natterbox’s delivery model had a history. Email security could be supplied as a managed service rather than another box for a customer to maintain. Voice could follow a similar approach. Changing the subject from email to telephone calls still left a recognisable commercial question: how much complexity should the customer have to take on?

The founders brought different experience. Burgess had held senior technology roles, including at Clearswift, before becoming CTO at Email Systems. Page’s background included software and engineering. Hammerton’s own account places listening to customers near the centre of his work. This was a group with an existing working relationship, approaching a fresh set of inconveniences.

“Nothing is impossible, some things just may take a very long time to complete.”

Jim Page’s advice, recalled by Neil Hammerton in 2011

A business learns to change direction

The route to that London demonstration was uneven. Mobile voice recording had been an important part of Natterbox’s early business, serving firms that needed to capture calls. An investment announcement looking ahead to 2014 described both recording for financial institutions and connections between mobile call activity and CRM systems. There were several possible markets for the technology.

Hammerton later described a difficult period when anticipated demand connected with financial-market rules failed to arrive on the timetable the business expected. The company redirected its attention toward CRM telephony. In his 2021 account, mobile recording had fallen from 60% of revenue to 10%, while CRM telephony represented the other 90%.

Those figures describe a change in the composition of the business, rather than a current revenue breakdown. They also give substance to the advice Hammerton had offered a decade earlier: recognise when an approach is failing and be prepared to adapt. That sounds inexpensive until adaptation involves moving the centre of a company you have already built.

By July 2017, he was publicly discussing Natterbox’s commitment to Advanced Voice Services inside Salesforce. The company added data centres in Singapore and Hong Kong and a second international support operation in Sydney. The stage demonstration had made setup look simple. Behind it sat the less photogenic work of running communications across locations and time zones.

What recognition sounded like

Asked about a memorable achievement in 2021, Hammerton chose landing Natterbox’s first major brand. He explained the significance as reassurance: an established business had trusted the team’s decisions and work. The account is more personal than a funding total. Someone outside the company had looked at what they had made and decided to depend on it.

Funding nevertheless helped widen the operation. Octopus Investments backed Natterbox’s Series A in 2018; the round was subsequently reported as £5 million. In April 2020, the company secured another £7.5 million in growth equity from the existing investor. Between those rounds, it had opened offices in Chicago and Sydney and doubled its customer portfolio.

Its Freedom interface allowed staff to work across devices, while a remote-worker offering was advertised as capable of setting up users in about fifteen minutes. These were practical selling points for teams whose work did not always happen at an office desk. The ambition travelled through a fairly ordinary object: a customer’s telephone call.

Hammerton had described the underlying aim in 2018 as bringing the flexibility and personalisation of online service to telephone conversations. The proposition has remained recognisable as the software has changed. A business should use what it knows to make the next interaction easier. Whether the caller notices the machinery is largely beside the point.

A CEO with an unusual out-of-office reply

Flying has a place in Hammerton’s life beyond a convenient metaphor. His professional biography records that he represented Great Britain in hang-gliding in 2004. His other interests include paragliding, skiing, cycling and rowing. There are several ways to spend a weekend in that list, and relatively few involve sitting still.

At work, the interest became something colleagues and customers could share. Natterbox’s Summer Experience returned in 2022 as a three-day event, with separate days for customers, partners and employees. Activities included microlight flights with Hammerton, helicopter tours, paragliding lessons, rally cars and quad bikes. A partner event with an actual take-off is at least unlikely to be confused with the previous week’s webinar.

His approach to colleagues also appears in smaller decisions. In a 2018 discussion of hiring, he described valuing a candidate’s long service at a previous employer and participation in triathlons. He saw evidence of commitment and determination. Qualifications alone did not settle the question for him.

In 2021, he put his management priority plainly: “for me happiness comes first”. He connected that with honest conversations about performance and aspirations, and feedback people could act on. It is an everyday form of attention, less spectacular than offering somebody a flight, and rather more relevant on a wet Tuesday.

The next person to train might be software

By March 2026, Hammerton was discussing voice AI with a familiar complaint in mind: customers still endure queues and phone menus despite improvements elsewhere in technology. His proposed approach included treating an AI agent like a new employee. Give it appropriate information, teach it how the organisation works and decide when a person should take over.

He advocated starting with bounded tasks and building confidence through smaller deployments. The ambition encompasses assistance outside office hours and during peaks in demand, alongside removing repetitive work from human agents. Successful implementation, in this account, requires attention to training and judgement about the work being assigned.

There is continuity here with the 2011 description of Natterbox. Then, customer records could help a telephone system decide where a call should go. Now, software can participate in the conversation. Both approaches depend on a business knowing something useful and making that knowledge available at the moment someone needs help.

The three-minute demonstration remains a pleasing way into Hammerton’s story because it ended with an answer. A number existed. A call travelled. A volunteer picked up. The technology had to complete an ordinary task in front of the people being asked to believe in it. For a founder who has spent years objecting to how businesses answer the telephone, that is a reasonable place to keep setting the test.