Ten Questions with iovox CEO, Ryan Gallagher

Iovox is a company we have known and worked with for a long time. We know they're nice people who answer emails promptly, we know they throw a good party at PPW events. We know they work with big-name portals and we know they do something with phone call data but we also know it's a lot more than that.

So we sat down with co-founder and CEO, Ryan Gallagher (pictured below) to get to know the business a bit better and understand how iovox actually delivers value for real estate marketplaces...

Hi Ryan. You were recently a judge at our PPW Pitch Club contest and asked pitchers to summarise what they do very simply and succinctly. Can you explain iovox as though you were pitching it on stage?

Of course. Let’s try it this way.

You’ve heard the phrase “you can’t improve what you don’t measure”? That’s true when it comes to business conversations – especially phone calls. We help companies identify opportunities to grow revenue or improve efficiency by analyzing communications data and automating phone-based processes. How was that?

Our tagline is “Better Data. Better Results” and it’s true. Most businesses operate on assumptions about what’s going on in their company and we haven’t had a single customer who wasn’t shocked about something they discovered when we shined a light on their communications data.

The traditional approach of manually sampling less than 5% of calls creates an incomplete picture of what’s really happening inside a business, and iovox fixes that problem, permanently.

Is real estate the only industry iovox works in? And do you work with big agency groups as well as portals?

We got our start in real estate in the UK with Zoopla, helping them prove the value of the leads they were delivering to their customers. Real estate is an important vertical market for us, but we also serve the automotive market, restaurants and hospitality, veterinary care, and health care to name a few.

To your question about big agency groups, the answer is yes. We’re starting to see more and more interest directly from agencies, particularly around the evaluation of all their calls, not just leads.

Okay, can you name-drop a few real estate clients I might have heard of?

Which country!?

Yes, we’re proud of our global footprint in this industry and happy to call Zoopla, CoStar (On the Market), Idealista, REA Group, Subito, Immobiliarie, and many others as customers.

What’s your top product for portals? How exactly can it help them?

Our services fall into three categories;

1. Traditional call tracking
2.  AI analysis
3. AI automation

The portals have historically been big users of our traditional call tracking, which helps them understand the data around a home shopper, so when the phone lead is delivered to the estate agency, the portal has captured a lot of valuable information and can prove the value of their platform to advertisers.

This is the traditional use case and it’s all very compliant across Europe and other countries as it relates to privacy. We’re starting to see more and more interest from the portal community in the use of AI to help identify missed opportunities. We think this will be popular and as I mentioned earlier, it is something we’re also seeing from the estate agencies themselves, but for a slightly different reason.

How do you monetise? Is it a flat fee for each product’s usage or do you charge per call to an API or something similar? Do portals usually just pass the cost on to their subscribers?

Our model is usage-based and typically linked to the volume of calls evaluated. What’s great about our AI solution is that we can take any recorded call —regardless of the source —and turn it into something valuable for our customers.

As for whether our customers pass on the costs: yes, in many cases, we become part of an enhanced offering they use to upsell their advertisers.

There must be other companies out there doing somethingsimilar to what iovox does. What’s your USP?

No doubt there’s competition and it varies by country. I’m proud of many things we do at iovox, but several things set us apart...

1. We’re truly global which is highly valuable to multinational owners who have brands in other parts of the world, but want a consistent platform to work within each region,
2. In the AI realm, our industry-specific small language models are first-class, based on our specializations in key markets. Not to mention our proprietary tech stack gives us a huge advantage when it comes to being creative with customers.
3. While we don’t need to handle phone calls on our network to deliver AI services, we do operate as a Tier 1 telecom carrier in several countries, which gives us strategic advantages in bundling and pricing for customers.

Technology that comes between two people talking on the phone must be a legal (not to mention ethical) nightmare. How do you make sure that everything iovox does is above board and can never impact your customers?

We spend a lot of time on this topic internally to make sure we’re up to date on the privacy laws in the countries we operate and that we’re forward-thinking when it comes to data protection overall. We’ve always been a privacy-focused business since Belinda (my wife) and I started the company back in 2007.

Importantly, iovox has never sold redacted data—and never will—which helps us avoid a lot of potential problems in the first place.

What cool new things is iovox working on and where can we expect this type of technology to go?

Clearly AI is everywhere. The use cases are still evolving but two of the three primary product areas for iovox are AI automation and AI analysis. We’re seeing a lot of opportunity across all our vertical markets for AI automation of communications. Think about any keypress menu you encounter today and imagine those experiences and related tasks all being done through a natural voice interaction.

We’re starting to see interest in real estate for these kinds of solutions as well and that’s just a small glimpse of what’s going to be possible. A few years ago, even last year, some of the ROI metrics were hard to come by. That’s no longer the case —every one of our AI implementations delivers a clear-cut return for the customer. The future is here, and as a technologist, it’s incredibly exciting.

We like to ask interviewees for one statistic or fact that our readers wouldn’t know but would find interesting. Are there any figures from the world of real estate communications data that spring to mind?

Sure. Without disclosing any proprietary information, I can tell you that the executive management of one real estate company thought they were asking a specific set of questions, without fail, on 100% of their inbound calls.

When we applied our AI analysis to these calls and gave them the report, the reality was only 13% of the calls included this important question. That led to a retraining opportunity, which in turn led to millions in recaptured revenue. It’s easy to justify the investment in iovox when you make those kinds of discoveries in the call data! The list of stories is long—and rapidly growing.

Most businesses operate with a set of assumptions on what’s happening on their calls and the reality is they have no idea—because they’re only sampling less than 5% of the call volume. It’s impossible to have a true picture of what’s going on with those low sample rates. That’s why iovox’s ability to analyze calls at scale and provide instant feedback is a real game changer for customers.

Finally, we’ve been talking a lot about agentic search recently. Are you worried about the potential disruption we might see from things like OpenAI’s Operator? If these things can fill in forms and talk to other AIs, surely phone calls will die off soon, right?

Phone calls were supposed to be dead a decade or more ago—replaced by SMS. But the opposite happened.

There’s no question AI interactions via the phone are increasing and will continue to rise, but in real estate, when the purchase consideration can be in the millions, we think a human is likely to be on at least one side of that conversation for a long time to come. That call experience can absolutely be improved with AI and that’s what we’re aiming for at iovox.