“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.”