Esendex offers employees days off work to do volunteering and charity work.  Katherine, our Management Accountant packed her rucksack and headed off to South Africa, to volunteer at a lion park near to Johannesburg.

In Katherine’s spare time she runs a Brownie pack.  They’ve recently been learning about animals so the opportunity was perfect for her to bring back first hand information as well as being a great experience for herself.

Katherine’s had a fantastic experience (returning to the office with only a few lion bite injuries).  Take a look at what she got up to below.

Our first job of each day was to clear up the lion cub enclosures before the public came in, these cubs were 1-6 months old, but were not as tiny as I was first expecting! We also had to play with them and teach them not to bite / scratch the public that came into the enclosure to pet them.

Other duties involved preparing food for the animals that were there, which included cheetahs, hyenas, wild dogs, porcupines, jackals, aardwolf, lions,  giraffe, meerkats and many more.   We had to go and collect termites from their mounds to feed the meerkats and aardwolf as a treat. (more…)

Esendex has been growing fast and has big plans for the future. But things were getting a little cramped in our head office in the Lace Market, Nottingham.  So we’ll soon be moving to new purpose built, larger offices across the city, in The Atrium on Wollaton Street.

We’ll be telling all our customers more about this nearer the time, but in the meantime here’s a photo of the building work currently in progress.

The offices are more than double the size of our current home and it’s going to be a great working environment.  We can’t wait to move in and look forward to welcoming some of you there too.

Our CTO Adam checking out the new office

We’ve put together a presentation on marketing consent and the law and hope you find the content interesting. It’s essential reading to help ensure you stay compliant when sending SMS messages.   If you’d like to discuss any of the content please leave us your comments below.

Last week our first ever Operations Director joined Esendex. He will be responsible for improving and driving the development of our operational changes and services, aligned with our global business growth strategy.  Bryan says;

“ I am very excited to be joining Esendex with their ambitious plans to be a global leader in business communications.  I spent 2 years in the USA, as VP for a software company, prior to joining Esendex. So, my experience working abroad will help me to understand how best to support and provide an excellent service to our global customers, whilst adding significant business value to both our client base and Esendex.”

Although Esendex has an excellent service level record for almost 10,000 clients, Bryan believes that there is room for further improvements. He also is aware that the infrastructure and associated operational services need to be strong and scalable in line with our global expansion plans.

“We need to ensure that all our clients experience “excellence” in our service and solution offerings. This means that all operational systems, services and associated activities need to be efficient and reliable.  Personally, I have been impressed since joining Esendex with  their approach to providing good service to their customers. One of  my goals will be to make it an exemplary service.”

Software Developer Gemma is taking part in the Goodwood Roller Marathon on the 8th of August. It’s the largest roller race in the UK.

Although Gemma doesn’t consider herself the sportiest person ever, she does love to skate and she is doing a full marathon…..that’s a whole 26.62 miles.

The charity that she will be supporting is Help for Heroes. They do a great job in helping wounded men and women of the armed forces.

Any donations would be really appreciated, You can donate via the Just Giving webpage.

Good Luck to Gemma!

We’ve been having fun in the office, creating videos and really getting back to our roots, learning about the history of SMS messaging.

Please have a good look and let us know what you think!

To help us achieve our ambitious growth plans, we have appointed our first ever Marketing Director – Geoff Love, formerly Customer Marketing Director of HomeServe plc.

Julian Hucker, Esendex CEO explains; “Geoff helped grow HomeServe from 1m to 3m customers and this is exactly the type of growth that we’re planning, so his experience will be vital.” 

Geoff will be responsible for setting and executing Esendex’s global marketing strategy and says;

“It’s great to be joining the company at such an exciting time. The new products and services we have in the pipeline, along with the launch in the US represent massive opportunities.  And of course, there’s still loads of potential in Europe and Australia.  So we need to work even closer with our existing clients, understand them better and see how we can help add even more value to their businesses.”

Whilst Esendex has almost 10,000 clients, Geoff points out that there are even more companies out there who still aren’t using SMS to talk to their customers and staff. 

 ”We need to help them understand how using SMS can grow their businesses, provide better customer service and cut costs  – particularly in the current economic climate, when everyone’s looking to make their business more efficient.”

Last week Esendex participated in the Nottingham Chamber of Commerce 5-a-side football tournament.

Plenty of promise was on show from the fledgling team, with many team members playing their first competitive football match! Esendex FC were undefeated in the group stages with four wins and a hard-fought draw against teams with a larger pool of players available (and a few ringers). The tournament came to a close in the knock-out final due to a series of bizarre refereeing decisions.

As group winners we may yet make the regional play-off’s later this month, if not we’ll continue to train and look to win next year’s event.

Man of the tournament was Neil ‘Schmeichel’ Kilbride, with a number of fine saves – but this really was a great team effort.

We have just released a new C# SMS SDK to help customers integrate with the new Esendex SMS API. The new C# SMS SDK is open source and is published on CodePlex under a LGPL license. By making the source code available free of charge we believe that developers can benefit greatly and that by consuming our services we can continue to evolve and enhance our C# SMS SDK.

The C# SMS SDK includes examples of integration with some of the key Esendex features, including; Messaging, Inbox, Contacts and Sent Items. These examples have associated unit tests, in line with the TDD (Test driven development) an approach used by the Esendex development team.

For those of you who wish to start sending messages straight away, there’s comprehensive documentation for the C# SMS  SDK  and a quick start guide within the developer area of our website which will explain all of the resources you can interact with in detail.

If you are an existing customer and would like to try the new C# SMS SDK simply log in to your account as usual and visit  http://esendex.codeplex.com/releases. If you don’t have an account then please sign-up for a free trial now – we’d love to hear what you think.

Well done to Leanne, Customer Support Assistant who is our Esendex Employee of the Month.  Paul Spencer, Commercial Manager Northern Europe Region, presented Leanne with the award at the end of last week.

Leanne’s put herself forward for extra work and completes her tasks and daily responsibilities effectively.  She’s also shown dedication and commitment outside of work by studying for a HNC in computing.  She will be learning how to programme in VB / ASP.net and also how to use SQL.

Congratulations once again to Leanne!