Behind the rebrand

A note on our new brand

Voyc has a new look this week. The reason for it sits a long way from design, so let me start somewhere else.

We’re living in a world where new technology emerges every day, each new tool promising to save us time, and deliver more information, faster. But somehow, instead of feeling more relaxed and efficient, we are all busier and more overwhelmed than ever. 

The human brain was not built to take in this much information, and the effects are showing up everywhere. Across the world, crime, fraud, and mental health problems are on the rise. 

Lethabo and I started Voyc in 2018 because of our own bad experiences with customer service in financial services. We were students with decent resources - and yet the system still treated us badly. So picked a problem that we had lived with, and set out to solve it. Our vision was to create a world where customers actually felt that their voices were being heard. 

A group of early customers bought into that vision and partnered with us to build it. The stories arrived faster than we expected. An insurance company called a customer back, and the customer said, "now I remember why I signed up with you." I wasn't in the room to hear it but I heard about it anyway, and that’s how I knew things were changing.

Since then we have worked with over 100 companies. We have helped them hear more than 100 million conversations, and passed a million people supported at the start of this year. Voyc now reaches 10% of the UK financial services market. 

Building Voyc has also shown me how vast - and how close to home - the problems we solve are for all of us. I have immediate family members who have been defrauded. I have friends who have struggled with mental health issues and the consequences of that. If you'd asked me in 2018 how many people were vulnerable and needed support, or how many people out there are intentionally acting in bad faith, I'd have said 1%. I'd now put both closer to 10%. And with the emergence of AI, that number could increase substantially within just the next six months. We are committed to spotting fraud - AI and otherwise - before it harms the people we love. 

So. Let’s return to the promise of technology, now with the promise of AI stacked on top of it. I realized that instead of asking - how much longer do we keep the faith that these tools will really improve our lives? I should be asking - what can I do to make sure we leverage this technology for the betterment of humanity? 

It turns out that the answer was in front of us the whole time. To build technology that works for humans, we must put human relationships at the centre of it all. It is the quality of the relationships we build with the people we deal with day to day, our team and the customers we build alongside. This is what we value the most at Voyc. 

Our name - Voyc - stands for Voice of Your Customer. We’ve been committed to protecting and advocating for the wellbeing of the customer since day 1, and that philosophy has shaped how we behave ever since. It's why we're here today in our eighth year of operations, and how we thrived even before AI was cool. 

Better relationships are what will get us to the promise technology makes. So we're starting a new chapter at Voyc with three moves. First, we're putting that work on the shopfront and standing up as the company that solves for relationships first. Second: We're building a customer network where relationships compound so that we can all grow and benefit together. And third: We’re doing all of this in partnership with our customers to co-build the platform that truly meets their needs in a rapidly changing world. 

We believe in building  a world where earned trust compounds, where good customers attract good companies and both do better for it. If we can get 51% of the world's finance companies on board, we’ll set the tone. Our new brand is where that starts. The site, the name and the way we describe ourselves now say on the outside what we've been building on the inside since 2018. If this resonates with you, we hope you’ll help us achieve our mission.