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Showing posts from February, 2017

Launching a cloud call center in the US

So finally we are taking the plunge. After serving only Indian customers ever since we started up, we are going offshore. This month we have launched in the US with a new product, http://getkookoo.com For the US launch, we decided to come up with a new product instead of taking our current products to the new market. We made this decision mainly because our current products have been tuned to the Indian market conditions and many features will not make sense in the US market. Since we wanted to do a new product, we went ahead and came out with a very cool new UI/UX. Will do a blog post later on how we came up with the design. So why yet another cloud call center or cloud pbx? Isn't the market saturated? We had these same questions. So we came up with some USPs to differentiate ourselves from the crowd. We decided to charge only for call minutes. We are the only cloud call center with zero agent rentals. Pay for only what you use. Sort of like the Twilio for call cente

Call Center Quality Assurance

Just like anything worth its salt, call center performance should also be measured. Every call center should have a quality assurance manager whose job is to ensure that the agents are sticking to the quality standards set up. The QA manager will use a lot of tools like dashboards, live call barge in, scripts and feedback gathering through customer surveys. Inspite of all this, the most important tool at the QA's disposal is the call recording. Though it is an "after the fact" quality checking tool, it is an indispensable tool to analyze the individual performance of an agent. Its got only one problem. The QA supervisor has to listen to all the call recordings of the agent one by one. It is too time consuming and practically not feasible. So QA supervisors do sampling. They randomly pick some call recordings and listen for some keywords and mark the recording as compliant or not. Though it serves the purpose, it is not perfect. Enter Cloudagent QA. A simple

Gross margins for SaaS startups in India

Gross margin is a very important number for SaaS products as that gives an indication to how much money you will have left to innovate on hiring,discounts,marketing etc. What is a good gross margin for a SaaS startup in India? To get the answer to that,lets first see what is gross margin: "Gross margin is defined as the percent of revenue left over after the cost of servicing that revenue is taken into account" So it is not just the cost of goods, but also the cost involved in servicing and supporting your product. For Saas products the highest cost comes from hosting services. But thanks to cloud providers like AWS and Google cloud, hosting service costs have been coming down. And this in turn increases your gross margins. It is widely accepted that a gross margin above 80% indicates a good SaaS business. Such a business can command a valuation of 10x on revenue. But anything above 65% should be ok. You can then optimize and move the needle towards 80%. For us