There are a lot of start-ups, businesses, companies, etc. in the world of business, offering innovative, breakthrough, and cutting-edge products and services, fighting right from the moment of inception to gain the top step, and achieve success and growth. Enterprises in their pursuit of achieving the top spot and dominating the market and the competition often forget or diverge from the reason that started the world of business, i.e., Customer.
If there were no demands or needs, products and services would not have any use, and it is the force of the consumer that drives these enterprises and enables them to achieve their goals and aspirations. Since the customer makes it, all happen, enterprises should take a step more than CRM, etc. to enhance user engagement and retain customers.
VOZIQ is a truly unique company, focusing on providing revenue risks, opportunities for individual customers, and much more via AI solutions. They aim to enable enterprises with solutions that not only help them with better customer retention but also helping them understand their customers in a better, highly effective, and different way, and create possibilities to not only enhance the user engagement but also plan the strategies, revenue, etc. in a more comprehensive and precise way.
VOZIQ delivers on its promises with its team of highly specialized personnel who are not only experts in their field but also thorough with industry trends and practices. They are not only leading the innovation curve but also dominating their position in the market as one of the best performing CEM solution providers.
In conversation with the Co-founder and CEO of VOZIQ, Vasudeva Akula. Let’s hear more about the company, its services, and the CEO’s professional journey.
Tell us about the company and the initial challenges faced.
VOZIQ provides an artificial intelligence solution to help enterprise recurring revenue brands improve customer lifetime value (CLV) by accurately predicting revenue risks and opportunities for every individual customer, and by converting every single customer touch into an opportunity to mitigate attrition risk or boost revenue.
VOZIQ’s AI delivers millions of predictions per day that allow its clients to optimize the key CLV levers such as recurring revenue, attrition risk, service costs, and NPS, and boost overall business profitability.
VOZIQ is based in Reston, VA, and has a Data Science and Engineering Center in Hyderabad, India. For more information, visit www.voziq.ai
Since VOZIQ is a bootstrapped technology business, its growth is entirely funded by its customers who have trusted us year after year. While this is a huge validation of the value we deliver, it also meant that we had to operate with limited resources, and real customer problems heavily influenced VOZIQ’s platform and solution roadmaps.
Tell us about the factors that pushed VOZIQ to explosive growth and the reasons that kept the long-standing success of the company.
In the early years, we focused on developing insights and some predictions from structured and unstructured data for our clients. While this generated value, we learned that without actions and scale, this intelligence is not sufficient to maximize the value for our clients.
At this point, we decided to shift focus to create more granular predictions with multiple predictive models (instead of a single, blanket predictive model), and on operationalizing the predictions to drive large-scale, last-mile actions. This shift created exponentially higher value on the scale of millions of dollars for our clients. This proved to be the turning point for us.
Today, most of the insights and actions are automated on our low-code, cloud-based AI/ML platform. This platform is allowing us to rapidly build and deploy transformative business solutions, not within quarters but months. This allowed us to accelerate the value we deliver and grow quickly.
It’s the combination of a strong foundation of AI/ML platforms, knowledgeable data science resources, and an unwavering focus on delivering real business results.
Tell us about the services offered by VOZIQ, new additions, and your plans to take these services ahead with the changing times and trends.
We help leading brands from industries such as telecom, warranty, retail energy, home services, etc. in maximizing customer lifetime value by reducing attrition risk and improving the recurring revenue.
There are a few areas that make VOZIQ a unique solution. First, it is specifically built for CLV uses cases in subscription recurring revenue businesses. Second, we offer not one but 10+ predictive models that allow driving proactive actions through contact centers. Third, unlike others, VOZIQ is not a generic solution where implementation and actions are up to the clients. With VOZIQ, our clients get an end-to-end solution that is tailored to their business needs.
Many businesses struggle to get started with artificial intelligence techniques because of the associated costs, complexity, and lack of skilled resources. To helps such business jumpstart their AI adaption, we are offering our AI software at zero cost in the first year. This will help such businesses test the effectiveness and business value of AI for their specific problems.
Another addition to our offerings is our free retention strategy assessment service. Our experts identify retention gaps and challenges of a company and help them create a roadmap to create millions of dollars in customer lifetime value by achieving retention breakthroughs.
To further accelerate the impact, we offer an AI Transformation Consulting service that reduces upfront costs, complexities, and risks for businesses that want to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) for their customer value problems.
Tell us about your professional journey and any achievements you would like to share.
Before bootstrapping VOZIQ together with our co-founder, I had the opportunity to deliver technology-enabled solutions through Convergys Corporation, and NICE Systems for some of the best contact centers in the US over a 15-year career. During the early days of my professional career, I was lucky to be able to work with multiple enterprise customers each year across BFSI, retail, technology, telecom and wireless, and utility industries, and help them realize multi-million dollar ROI.
After identifying opportunities within these contact centers, combined with my doctoral thesis focused on business-oriented performance management using customer behavior models, I wanted to take a shot at creating software solutions to address these opportunities and established VOZIQ back in 2012. With the maturity of cloud and AI/ML recently, our solutions are delivering much more value, with very fast time to value compared to what it used to take just 5 years ago.
I regularly write about these opportunities and present at conferences on topics such as customer and business analytics, workload characterization, benchmarking, and performance improvement of contact centers, self-service, and e-commerce solutions.
Deploying data-driven software solutions and ensuring customers see significant value from their investments has been the most satisfying part of the entrepreneurial journey. Among the recent achievements, we helped a leading home security and automation company close the year 2020 with over $100 million in customer lifetime value realized through VOZIQ’s solution and services. Another customer from the pest control industry is on a journey to realize over $10 million in value with AI/ML for specific use cases, including customer retention and life cycle management.
Tell us about your team and your take on employee relations.
All our employees share an entrepreneurial spirit and understand their respective roles in the organization’s broader goal. It has been instrumental to our success.
We maintain a professional and healthy work environment and adequate growth opportunities for every employee. At VOZIQ, we recognize every contribution and welcome every suggestion.
Your views on constant vigilance – a need or a strategy and your take on the rat race in the market.
I’ll say it is both. It is a strategy that is not optional. Business landscape, customer expectations, and competition – they are all growing and evolving continuously. To stay ahead, constant vigilance and continuous improvement are indispensable.
By focusing more on customer needs than competition. Let me back it up by yet another Jeff Bezos quote – “If you’re competitor focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.”
