Member Article

Growth in a business revolutionising online service searches

A new type of search engine which aims to revolutionise the way we buy services has doubled its growth in the last year as customers look for a more tailored approach to searching for services on the Internet.

Intently.co allows consumers and service providers to connect with each other directly without the need for long online searches through Google or other major search engines.

Neil Harris, who has developed the request-based service and is CEO of Intently.co explains more:

“I got the idea for Intently when I was looking for an optician with appointments available that day. I wished I could just shout ‘I need an optician, who can see me?’. That inspired me to create a technology that would allow people to do just that but in a virtual environment.

“Intently.co works on a simple principle – it cuts out the middleman. It sends your request directly to relevant sellers who then come back to you and tell you how they can help – it results in a very personal service for consumers. Since launching four years ago, we have grown year on year and demand is increasing all the time. This seems to me to signal a change in the way people want to use the Internet. It needs to do more to put the customer at the centre of interactions.

“For so long, the Internet has supported the ‘old model’ where vendors desperately try to reach customers via ads. It is such a waste of time and money for advertisers, when the very nature of Internet technology – a world wide web – means that we can start to connect people in new and more effective ways. And with the rise of ad-blocking software, if vendors can no longer reach customers through ads then it starts to make sense that customers will use new technologies to signal their purchasing intent to vendors. ‘Conversational Commerce’ is one of the buzzwords of 2016, and Intently fits into this space extremely well – to date we have facilitated 40,000 conversations between consumers and service providers.”

As part of their growth plans, Intently plans to trial videocalling and instant messaging between buyers and sellers over the coming months to make the user experience even quicker and easier.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by The Behaviour Expert Ltd .