Knowlarity expands market reach with affordable telephony solution for SMEs in India, SE Asia, MENA regions

By Nandita Singh

BENGALURU: The ‘Big Boy’ of cloud telephony in India, Knowlarity Communications, is on an expansion plan that will fuel growth five-times over. The company has made Singapore its headquarters and is scouting private equity to support the market expansion.

Recently, Knowlarity extended its cloud telephony service (virtual PBX system) with a 'plug-and-play virtual call center', Super Receptionist, as a free app on Google Playstore. The app lets businesses add a virtual receptionist to handle phone queries, track leads and view call records. It has an integrated business phone number with allotted free credits to test the service and basic plans start at an affordable Rs 900, making a compelling business use case for this app.

However, driving adoption is far from cakewalk, even after demonstrated benefits.

Ambarish Gupta, the Founder-CEO at Knowlarity says, “Over 14 million SMBs in India are operating in tough conditions characterized by a chronic lack of infrastructure, funding and market opportunities. Owing to these conditions, the SME segment has traditionally remained shy of opting the automation route. Instead it trusts manual note-keeping and ledger-based systems. The biggest challenge so far has been in weaning these SMEs off manual systems and convincing them to shift to automated systems. Until now, there was little market awareness on the various benefits of cloud. Besides, Indian SMEs have to work with limited budgets, unlike their counterparts in developed markets. This makes new technology investments a tough proposition.”

And that’s not the end of challenges.

Internationalizing a company for market expansion both from product and workforce perspective in the diverse markets of Asia and MENA region is itself a humungous task. “We need to understand and bridge cultural differences to get a toehold in these markets. Right channel partners and our talent acquisition strategy will be key,” says Gupta adding that understanding the environment in which Knowlarity customers’ operate has led the company to make investments in areas that are crucial for its customers such as -- a large support team, a large in-house consulting team and investments in reliability and scalability.

Gupta is prepared to ride the emerging markets and invent on behalf of Knowlarity customers.

The company is set to close current fiscal with over Rs100 crore in revenue. “As leaders in cloud telephony in India, we are now looking at establishing our footprint in emerging markets especially in South-East Asia and the MENA region,” he says.

Barely six-year-old Knowlarity, has today expanded presence to Singapore, Philippines, Dubai and South Africa. “We have received a phenomenal initial response in these markets and will continue to offer services as per local market trends. We are also planning to expand the start-up ecosystem to larger geographies and partner with larger clients. The plan is to strengthen our R&D activities and expand marketing operations to newer geographies,” says Gupta.

In India, the company has its development centre at Gurgaon and offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru.

Knowlarity had raised $16 million in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital and Mayfield Advisors in mid-2014 for technology and international expansion via organic and inorganic routes. Also, last year it had acquired Unicom Techlabs’ technology and customer-base for an undisclosed sum.

The company had burst onto the nascent cloud telephony market in India in 2009 after Odisha Assembly elections when Gupta and his team delivered political leader Naveen Patnaik’s campaign to voters via voice calling. Knowlarity, a pioneer, in the cloud telephony segment in India hasn’t looked back since. It raised a $2-million angel fund five years ago, and about $6.5 million in Series-A from Sequoia Capital in January 2012 before going for Series B funding in 2014.

Today, with a customer base of 12,000, this startup is the largest cloud telephony provider in India. “We have been specifically targeting SMEs in emerging markets for our products,” says Gupta, an IIT-Kanpur graduate, whose brood of engineers at the company now stands at 120.

Gupta explains how he wants to use technology to help Indian SMEs improve their revenues and decrease costs, thus improving their bottom line. “We are currently working on improving our mobile platform and improving user experience. Our aim is to provide the power of a mini call centre in every smartphone,” he says adding that Knowlarity is already ten-times the size of its nearest competition and in the next three years Gupta aims to grow the business at least five-times the current size. The milestone that he has in view is -- a billion-dollar company.

According to a 2014 Forrester Research report, even as digital media increases in popularity, voice is still the preferred means of communication. Considering that 81% of the Indian population uses mobile phones to communicate, telephone calls could help reach a much larger population than any other medium.

Telephone communication helps marketers in several ways. For instance, toll-free numbers encourage customers to interact with a brand or store and call more frequently, which means more leads. Marketers can employ the services of a call centre with speech analysis software to understand nuances of voice and gauge customers’ interest levels. This helps agents respond accordingly, thus improving conversion rates.

Cloud telephony can add IVR systems to help customer self-service and provides personalized interactions through video conferencing and voice conversations. This reliable, flexible, customizable, cost-effective solution can be integrated with applications like CRM or chat. It facilitates seamless decision making, customer engagement and provides meaningful services, while keeping the CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) on the lower side.

And, cloud telephony service providers like Knowlarity very well understand that one-size-fits-all will no longer work in foreseeable future, so it offers customized plans based on the needs of an industry and its business elements. Therefore, there is a Knowlarity cloud telephony service for hospitality, healthcare, financial institutions and so on…

As with all disruptive technologies, cloud telephony is ushering in the next generation of solution providers. The notion of customer service center, of course, continues to be there, however, the look and feel is evolving as businesses adopt cloud technology to take their customer engagement processes to the next level. And Knowlarity is in the game, with significant lead.