“The days of companies exhausting internal development resources to setup, configure and maintain complex contact centers are behind us”, said Venky Balasubramanian, founder and CEO of Plivo. “They don’t need to. The standard out-of-the-box solutions provide the minimum viable functionality they need to keep the lights on. The catch is that ‘keeping the lights on’ won’t cut it anymore.”
While there’s no longer a need to reinvent the wheel with the base functionalities, the fast-growing contact center market remains in need of simplicity and interoperability. Customer service agents still spend too much time toggling between tools, doing research to find context on customer interactions, and manually working multiple cases at a time. And it all impacts the customer experience.
“It’s not sustainable for agent productivity amid the increasing and evolving technology needs of the modern consumer. Something has to change.” said Balasubramanian.
Plivo has spent the last decade establishing itself as a leader and trusted name in the CPaaS market and now has a customer base of thousands and a presence in 190 countries. The move into the contact center space was inspired by feedback from customers using Plivo communication APIs.
“The widespread usage and implementation of Plivo among technical personas over the last ten years inevitably sparked conversations between our teams and our API customers. What we heard was a clear desire for a packaged solution that addresses the most common use cases,” Balasubramanian told CX Today.
Too many plugs
From these conversations, Plivo identified a dichotomy in the contact center market. While many solutions offer quite a lot of functionality, businesses were looking for a simpler, yet powerful and customizable offering.
“We found it to be a growing-but-underserved market. While the contact center is seen as a critical revenue driver for most businesses, it’s often treated like a home electrical outlet, with too many plugs, extension cords and power strips coming out of it,” Balasubramanian said.
In particular, Plivo identified a need for a better customer service solution for B2C companies and – relying on its proven expertise in scaling the API platform – set about creating Contacto, “an omni-channel, contact center solution designed to deliver seamless customer experiences for mobile-first businesses.”
Contacto was built to scale with any organisation, ranging from small, ten-agent contact centers to enterprises with no theoretical upper limit. This flexible scale is represented within its functionality as well—beyond native voice and chat functionality, it supports social media channels and integrates with popular CRM solutions such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Kustomer, and Shopify.
Reducing complexity and building loyalty
The approach Plivo took to building Contacto focused on reducing complexity and helping its customers to build loyalty with their own customers, Balasubramanian explained. Our focus is on helping our customers reach and exceed their customer service KPIs, and Contacto was built with this at the forefront.
“We wanted to help our users exceed the needs of their customers by meeting them on the channels they require with the best possible agent experience. In addition, we wanted to build a scalable hub that integrates with the tools CX teams already use.”
A house built on rock
Aside from being designed from the ground-up to meet the specific needs of B2C businesses that need to deliver the best customer experience, what’s different about Contacto, said Venky, is that it is built on a widely used and enterprise-grade technology platform.
“Our premium communications network along with direct relationships with global telecom carriers give us a clear advantage. We cut out the middle-man in every sense of the word, allowing us to provide crystal clear call quality for our customers. We’ve also put a lot of focus on our flow builder that integrates Contacto’s powerful integrations with helpful automations.”
Used by many
One aspect of Plivo’s success Venky is particularly proud of is its “more-than-100 percent” net retention rate and 99.99% uptime SLAs. He feels that this, more than anything else, gives users peace of mind while using Plivo’s products.
“Not only do our API customers love us, but they also grow their usage significantly the longer they’re with us. To deliver a fantastic customer experience and increase usage, it takes relentless customer obsession and prolific engineering execution. A business is only as strong as the foundation upon which it’s built. Contacto is no exception.”
