For entrepreneurs starting their own company, they usually invest in furniture, office spaces, and a system called EPABX which manages business phone calls, and is often forgotten after setup. It neither has intelligence nor has insights, not to mention it is quite expensive. On the other hand, enter cloud telephony: This entire EPABX system is moved to the cloud, the phone system thus becoming smart by allowing the user to derive insights by tracking calls,recording them and intelligently routing them.
Exotel makes brilliant use of cloud telephony, and is a smart way to manage your business phone calls without having to invest heavily in hardware or infrastructure. The phone system interacts with the user’s ERP/CRM, makes personalized call flows, plays a professional IVR to their callers, record all calls, and even devises complex call flow logic to personalize the call center experience for their clients.
With an urge to startup on his own, Shivakumar Ganesan, a BITS Pilani CS graduate, worked with Yahoo! for some time before starting with the idea for Exotel. Along with Ishwar Sridharan (COO), Siddarth Ramesh (CFO) and Vijay Sharma, he launched Exotel in 2011 with a view of giving a helping hand to to businesses and startups in the phone sector.
Exotel currently operates only in India, and is on the verge of becoming the one stop solution for all voice and business communication for Indian SMEs. With about 2 million SMEs in India, the domestic market size is around $6 billion, opening huge doors for the company.
Exotel picked up a Rs. 25 million (approximately US$500,000) funding from Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures in March 2012. As of now, the company has more than 1000 clients and the client list is increasing at a steady pace.
“We understand that businesses rely heavily on their support lines to do business. Therefore, we take our reliability very seriously. Even a few mins downtime can cause a huge loss to a customer. And that is why we are transparent about our uptimes. Anyone can access this information at http://status.exotel.in.” says co-founder Shivakumar.
Businesses can measure and understand how their phone support works. Information about missed calls, call recordings, daily analytics, reports of calls & SMS are now easily available for daily analysis. Agent training also becomes much easier.
With such pace, Exotel has an uptime of 99.94% which is the best in business. Their clients have grown over the years effortlessly, and so have they. Custom phone calls, CRM integrations, IVR setup etc are managed easily, and are inexpensive compared to their manual counterparts.
As every other industry, the telecom industry also faces several challenges which need to be eliminated for the smooth flow. Cloud telephony is directly affected by these regulations as well. Exotel is throwing light on these areas, and they have seen tremendous promise and improvement in this regard over the past couple of years. They are growing rapidly, and are looking to expand to more markets in South Asia in the current year. Since more and more SMEs are now actively shifting to the cloud, cloud telephony is going through a very promising phase right now. Exotel makes its best efforts in seizing these opportunities to grow at a steady pace and expanding as efficiently as possible.
