Cloud Telephony Experiments

Dialers are an integral part of an outbound call center . They improve the agent performance manifold and are an indispensable tool. There are many kinds of dialers and these include predictive, progressive and preview. And just like any thing, we have to be careful to pick the right tool for the job. At Ozonetel  we have deployed more than 500 call centers and deal with more than 20,000 agents on our cloud call center platform, Cloudagent . In most cases, supervisors, when asked to improve the agent performance by management, fall back on a tool and suggest to use a predictive dialer. And in many cases we have worked with the call center teams to understand the core problem and deduced that the problem can be solved by minor process changes instead of upgrading the dialer. So, when should you use a predictive dialer? To answer that, you should first understand your requirement. Do you make outbound calls to people who have subscribed in some means(event, website etc) or...

To be frank, when Hindustan Unilever approached us for Kan Khajura Tesan, we were a little doubtful of the idea. After all, who would give a missed call and listen to bollywood content. Now after 2 years and 34 million subscribers later, we have been proven wrong. By far, this has been one of the most successful campaigns ever carried out by HUL. The numbers are mind boggling. As has been reported, 35 million subscribers , 45 million ad impressions in last 15 months , 900 million minutes consumed . It has won every award that has to be won in marketing including the Golden Lion at Cannes. If this was a web site, this would have been one of the top web sites in India with regular visitors and MAUs. So hats of to the HUL team for pulling this off. And we are thankful that you let us be a part of this wonderful journey and proud that Ozonetel  powers this huge platform. In a way, I think this can be the future. At a time when the voice usage minutes are going down, KKT has...

Ozonetel, a Telco grade cloud communications platform enables businesses to run “Missed call campaigns” on its platform. Ozonetel has created a world record by handling a billion Missed calls in the last one year for its customers. Missed Call Service has become an effective way to engage and involve customers by any brand/business . The missed call service is targeted and a cost effective means for businesses to reach out to its target audience. The target audience could be in regions where internet penetration is low or when you want to give a call to action to an online customer who needs to engage with you offline. What can a business do with Missed call Service? Lead Capture –Marketers who advertise across mediums still find a challenge to judge ROI’s. Missed calls help to capture 100% of the leads coming from across different mediums which allow businesses to make strategic and cost effective decisions. Survey/Feedbacks – Businesses can get real time feedback ...

It’s  been an exciting week for  Ozonetel. Our 4+ years of hard work is finally paying off :) Soon after being selected as the only Asian Startup to be in the Unilevers’ Foundry 50 Startups list, Ozonetel has won the prestigious Frost & Sullivan ICT Award 2015 for “Technology Innovation Leadership in Cloud Telephony Solutions” The Crème of Indian ICT Industry was Recognized and Awarded at 2015 Frost & Sullivan India ICT Awards. Companies were felicitated in Enterprise Infrastructure, Emerging Software Products and IT Services, Enterprise Telecom Services, and Mobile & Wireless Categories We came under the Technology Innovation Leadership in Cloud Telephony Solutions category. The Technology Innovation Leadership in cloud telephony solutions category will be conferred to the ONE that has shown exemplary growth and performance in 2014 in India. The contenders of this award were evaluated based on the following key criteria: Market share Revenue ...

Last year, when we got the Kan Khajura Tesan project from Hindustan Unilever, we had no idea where it would take us. The journey that started there into the marketing domain space has now taken us into one of the top 50 marketing startups in the world as selected by Unilever Foundry50 . We are the only startup from India and also I think Asia and we are proud to represent Indian startups. We are going to Cannes! We are very thankful to Unilever for this recognition and hope we can achieve many more things. Since last year, once we entered the marketing space, we have been innovating on various new technologies. We have done more than 50 campaigns for brands and 2 mega projects. Almost every known brand has worked with us and we have also learnt a lot in the process. We have infact automated a lot of the campaign management rules and created a product called Brandagent which we sell internally to existing customers and brand agencies. A lot more announcements and achie...

Introducing Cloudagent Chat The next big leap for Ozonetel's communication platform. Cloudagent is already the platform of choice for cloud call centers with more than 1000 businesses using it to power their communications. From today, all these businesses and new ones too can use the same stable platform to power their web site chat communications too. In 2009-2010, we introduced cloud telephony in India through our KooKoo platform. What was new at that time has become the standard now with businesses adopting the cloud for their communication needs. Last year, we realized that the Cloudagent platform that we had built was one of a kind and its design would work for other communication channels too. We even rebranded our company messaging from Cloud Telephony to Cloud Communication . The first outcome of that thought process is Cloudagent Chat. Cloudagent chat contains all the robust features of Cloudagent. Skill assignments, Live agent monitoring, Queues, numerous...

Earlier, we did SaaS metrics for India B2B . Continuing in the same vein of transparency, in this blog post we are going to share our marketing metrics so that others who are starting up can use it for benchmarking purposes. Just to be clear, we do not have a dedicated marketing team(yet) and these metrics most probably are not the best that can be done. So the following are some of the numbers Paid versus Inbound marketing ratio: 50% Cost of lead: Rs.1000(Averaged out) CTR: 6-8% CPC: ~Rs.50 Conversion rate(Signups): 10% Its actually surprising how much of a machine paid marketing is. We can control the valve and increase or decrease leads based on the cost of the lead. I think this means we have not yet reached saturation point and can invest more in marketing right now. I will share learnings in another blog post. Wanted to use this post more as just a benchmarking tool. Please share your numbers in the comments below. Also let us know if we can improve our number...

Starting a new series of blog posts on sales gyan with inputs from our sales head, Rajiv Bharatan. Flickr The Hunters In sales parlance, hunting is simply going after new logos. The opportunity may arise due to An in-bound lead It could be a referral (referrals can be internal or external) It can be a cold-call (which seems to be completely out of fashion now). It can be a cold email It could be through a direct message on social media One reacts to such a lead, goes through the sales process, and either closes the deal, loses it or the lead goes cold, due to various reasons. Smart Hunters catch their prey(customer) no matter what. And just like in a real hunt, preparation is the key.  Some good hunting spots: Linkedin groups Facebook groups (Bangalore startups, Headstart Network, Hyderabad startups etc) Conferences (Unpluggd, Techcircle, Techsparks etc) Hunting tools: Twitter . A good hunter has patience. He builds a network and observes patterns ...