Communication is the key! And it is true for businesses as well. Imagine you lose a lead just because of poor communication. Won’t it have a direct impact on the overall performance? To avoid anything like it, what you need is a service provider who assures you the best quality services, so that communication won’t be problem anymore!
Cloudonix is the world’s first contextual communications infrastructure as a service. Enabling voice, video and messaging to be embedded into existing mobile and web applications – provided at a highly disruptive pricing model and ease of use.
In this interview with The Enterprise World, Eric Klein, COO of Cloudonix tells us how Cloudonix is helping organizations in efficient communication systems.
Tell us about Cloudonix.
Cloudonix is Bridging the chasm between customer care, voice, data, AI and automation. This reduces time to sale and helps improves customer care by getting the customer to the right person with as much data as possible for frictionless interactions.
Which was that point that triggered the growth of Cloudonix?
Actually, our growth accelerated by two different events that worked as catalysts to each other. First in December 2019 we changed our value proposition from a cost mitigation tool for call centers (reduce agent time and toll free costs) to being a sales enhancement tool (quicker time from interest to speaking to a sales agent), this came from seeing how our customers were using Cloudonix.
Then with the advent of the Covid-19 lockdowns we were finding that many call centers were unable to properly maintain staff under the lockdowns. This was when we started to show them that the same tools that we have for the customer to contact them could be used for their work from home staff. No new training, no changes in the systems they were using, just a few minutes to set each of them up. Since then, we have had a 400% increase in sales inquiries and POCs.
How have Cloudonix graphs changed since the foundation? Can you share a few statistics?
For 60 years call centers have been working in much the same way, it took a worldwide pandemic to start the digital transformation and allow work from home/anywhere. For us that meant a 400% increase in sales inquires and POCs, and this indicates a major change in corporate activities.
Cloudonix is Bridging the chasm between customer care, voice, data, AI and automation.
What is the reason behind your company’s long-standing success?
We started with an understanding of the difficulties of bringing real-time voice to enterprises that are not in the telecom space, and the needs of developers for it to be easy to implement. This is both because two of our founders come from the telecom space, but also because we started with projects to help fund Cloudonix. This meant that we were getting real-world feedback and use cases from day one. Also, we listen to our customers and interns, they always seem to find a new way to use our product that can help others. This has helped us stay on trackand bring the features that help our customers succeed.
The Products/Services-
What are the products/services Cloudonix focuses on? How are your services different from those in the market?
Cloudonix offers tools to bridge the chasm between voice and data creates “service context” – enabling a personalized customer experience. We enable these without Mobile and Web SDKs. Without getting too technical, what differentiates us from the previous or other solutions is that existing solutions are designed as full replacements for existing systems.
They have fixed business rules, structures, and complex pricing. We have done away with all that. This lets our customers keep the systems that they have invested millions of dollars and man-hours in implementing. Thus, we are adding supplemental abilities without the need to change the systems or retrain employees.
Another key difference is the way that we work with technical partners. We have seen too many of these partnerships get destroyed when one of the players decides to compete with the other, and this is usually by poaching joint customers. The use of the standard API key enables this kind of poaching, we don’t use them. Our partner’s customers stay with them. We have no direct access or financial relationship that can lead to a better, more trusting relationship.
How do you decide to take Cloudonix a step further in terms of your products/services?
We add features by a combination of our vision of what is possible and what our customers are using and listening to their pain points. This was how we added the work from home solution. It is necessary to be in regular contact with the customer is doing and feeling. These kinds of solutions need to be a long term partnership where there is a feeling of win-win.
Is there any new addition to the list of products/services? Anything exciting you would like to share?
For 60 years call centers have been working in much the same way, it took a worldwide pandemic to start the digital transformation and allow work from home/anywhere. So, with the pandemic we found that many of our customers and prospects were having problems because they had to keep their staff out of their call centers.
That was when we realized that we could use the same secure tools that were helping customers connect to the call center to allow the call center agents to work from home. Thus, our work from anywhere solution was deployed – the first time was in under 30 minutes. Allowing the call center to continue to use their existing on premise systems and not needing to retrain their staff.
Can you please brief us about your professional experience?
My personal experience has been a flow from enterprise networking and communications to carrier networking and communications to tools supporting both of those. I have seen the full spectrum of needs and requirements from the customer’s to carrier’s point of views. Working in the compliance and business development aspects after having in the technical side of things. Combine this with the skills of my co-founders; we’ve seen customer’s suffer from bad service. We see that pain with 3 different points of view – making us the best team to cure that pain.
What are the key achievements of your entrepreneurial journey?
One advantage that I had on the way to being an entrepreneur was being in various roles at different companies, this both taught me what can be done, but more importantly what should not be done. Seeing how a Cloudonix where the president had a rule that sale people could not earn more in a month than he did is a perfect example. Talking to the sales team about this taught me that there are ways to disincentive sales from selling even when they are meeting their goals. This kills the respect they have for Cloudonix and encourages them to want to leave.
The hardest part was learning to trust my own gut instincts, to take ownership and responsory or aspects that belonged to higher management when working for an enterprise. Even though I knew what had to be done, in an enterprise I needed to get approval or signoff from someone higher before anything that was not already approved. This teaches a level dependence that an entrepreneur needs to unlearn. And identifying the habits and skills that you need to unlearn is the hardest part of starting to be an entrepreneur.
How do you look after your employees? What makes your team unique?
As (under normal circumstances) we spend more time together as a team than with our families it is necessary to make the workplace somewhere that people want to come to everyday. This means doing things like group lunches, sharing stories of videos over lunch, having a weekly happy hour. And we work in a more open situation where anyone can speak with the CEO or senior management at any time.
What makes the team unique is that we bring in a variety of skills, ages, and backgrounds to get the most diverse skills and viewpoints possible.
What makes the team unique is that we bring in a variety of skills, ages, and backgrounds to get the most diverse skills and viewpoints possible. Towards this we bring in international interns each summer who can give us a fresh point of view.
It’s a rat-race out there. How do you cope with that?
Taking time to relax, and do something physical helps remove stress and allows the mind to wander and find the solutions to problems that have been bothering me. So, this can be chopping the daily salad for Cloudonix lunch, or taking a long walking meeting around the block, or physical exercise. But you need to find a way to relax the mind and get the body moving.
