Skip to main content

US cloud contact center market on fire

Well, was planning on writing this blog for sometime and before I published, we have a new player, Amazon connect :)

We started designing our US product 8 months back and have been tracking the market closely for the right product fit. When we started we were following some of the established cloud players like Incontact, Five9,Interactive intelligence,8x8,Genesys Cloud,Mitel,Vocalcom etc

And there were the new ones like Talkdesk

Then there were CRM vendors integrationg third party API (Twilio mostly) to offer bundled services. Some examples were Zendesk,Freshdesk,Agile etc.

While in India we cater to medium to large enterprise, offering a full features multi channel contact center. But US with existing options for SME and enterprise, we wanted to cater to specific segment that is not served by contact center provider and rather use cloud PBX like ringcentral, grasshopper for the their business needs. 
We decided to go with SMBs which are a typical 2-10 people business. Build the product with a very intuitive UI to make it very easy for anyone to setup and use. With experience we know that while most of the contact center offered same set of features, but using and configuring them was very hard for an SMB users. With contact center terminology and standard configuration UI with configuration options and various set of drop drowns make people confused. And with typical DIY there is no realtime phone/chat support, leaving users stuck to fend for themselves.

We launched getkookoo.com last month, with unique wizard based UI for easy setup, offering all that an SMB needs bundled together (voice + chat + contact management with interaction tracking and customer journey). We came up with a new pricing model, where user pays a basic price of $49.99 (equivalent minutes included). No limit on number of agents. Customer just pays for minimum and for additional number of minutes used, certainly he can cap his max spend for peace of mind. Its like Twillio of contact center for SMB, with a twist.

Its not even a month and the there are new players in cloud communication space and some of the large ones:

Avaya Launched Zang.io (API services like Twliio). office.zang.io Unified communication on cloud
Cisco sparks : Unified communication on cloud. Cisco already bought Tropo for communication API
Latest one is Amazon launching Amazon connect
Freshcaller a contact center offering from Freshdesk

Twillio has become real enabler for third party to offer these service, Talkdesk, justcall.io and now Freshcaller all seem to be built using Twillio API each offering a niche set of features to end users.

With all the big players getting on the cloud this domain is going to get hot.

Popular posts from this blog

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...

Google business messages and chat agents-A match made in heaven

Google has launched Google business messages without much fanfare. It's just a small button that pops up when someone searches for your business on Google. But from the conversation industry perspective this is HUGE .   Do you know that the small call button drives millions of calls i n a year for pizza joints and other retailers in the US. Businesses spend more than a trillion dollars supporting billions of customer service calls each year. Now imagine how many chat conversations the "Message" button can drive.  Think of how customers interact with business. 1. Search on Google. 2. Click on web site link. 3. Web site shows chat pop up and tries to force the user to chat.(Annoying. I know :)) 4. User clicks on chat and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. This flow can now be completely changed. The new flow can be: 1. Search on Google. 2. User clicks on Message and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. What if you could design a customer experience that helps...

Telugu ASR speech data collection

Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures.  While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...