Murthy Chintalapati, founder &
CEO, Ozonetel Systems speaks about Kookoo.in – India’s first hosted telephony
platform offering cloud services for SMBs and Call Centre Agents. Ozonetel is
also targeting revenues of Rs 100 crore in the next five years
Please tell us a little about
Ozonetel’s latest hosted telephony platform.
Ozonetel Systems flagship offering
-Kookoo.in’ is India’s
first hosted telephony platform. Kookoo.in enables existing
web/e-commerce portals to use telephony as a channel to service customers in an
innovative manner. Web programmers can easily develop applications using web
technologies like PHP and JAVA without understanding the complexities of
telephony, and enable their customers to access services over telephone, with
complete control on their data and its security. KooKoo.in allows entrepreneurs
to launch innovative services over the phone and leverage the platform with no
upfront investment.
We have created two applications on
this platform – YourPBX & CloudAgent. YourPBX enables SMBs to have Self
Configurable PBX in the cloud with wireless phones at their premise without
having to go through cumbersome installations.
CloudAgent is a plug & play Call
Center Agent which works in the cloud and enables the call centers to process
in-bound & out-bound calls in a distributed model allowing multiple agents
to answer calls from multiple locations without incurring expensive capex at
multiple locations.
How is Ozonetel’s cloud offering
different from that of other service providers?
Telcos today are offering some
hosted call center solutions, but those are purely on the internet. It doesn’t
provide the flexibility to distribute call agents and calls for quality
internet bandwidth which will be expensive. The agents they provide are not
plug & play. As far as other services like PBX/IVR is concerned, there is
none who is offering this service presently in India.
How has the uptake of cloud
telephony services in India
thus far?
India has 50 million internet users, but
there are 740 million telephone subscribers. This proves that internet users
make up only 10 percent of the telephone users in India. Cloud Telephony Services
(CTS) helps through a suite of voice products such as Anytime Anywhere Agent
call center software, Virtual PBX/IVR, Wireless PBX, voice loggers, payment
processing, and more. In future, it is predicted that the growth of cloud
telephony offerings will enable SMBs/SMEs/ large enterprises like FMCGs, and
financial services to use the telephone as a communication tool to service the
diverse customer base in India.
Some of the companies who have
signed in for it, include Trident Hyundai, Pratham Motors, IFB, Abhibus, Rural
BPOs , and Rocketalk, to name a few.
How exactly would cloud telephony
services be beneficial to (a) government officials (b) enterprises (c) rural
areas?
a)
Government officials- Government can setup call centers and automated IVRs to
offer citizen services leveraging the PSTN Cloud we have built. These Call
centers could be operated from rural/Tier-III/Tier-II cities. Automated IVRs
can register a complaint on 24 x 7 basis without human handling of the
call and store the information in a database and issue a ticket number against
the complaint. Back end team can work on the complaint and keep updating the
database with latest status. The citizen can retrieve the status of his call on
24 x 7 basis by dialing the IVR and submitting the ticket number on the IVR.
Citizens can also can make payments
of bills over IVR on 24 x 7 basis without having to stand in lines. They can
get reminders from various government departments on the due dates and other
important messages from government to citizen.
b)
Enterprises- Enterprises need a solution to handle in-bound and out-bound call
centers. They also need a virtual PBX/IVR to handle incoming and outgoing calls
with MIS/Analytics reports for management to get a view of what’s happening.
There is no other premise PBX that enables the management to get a view on how
the communication infrastructure is being used.
c)
Rural areas- Cloud telephony network helps to set up rural BPOs in smaller Tier
II & III cities and towns; an important requirement to make domestic call
centers a viable business opportunity. Companies have been unable to scale
their domestic call centers due to lack of good broadband and internet services
in smaller towns. Now with the presence of Cloud Telephony it is possible to
develop India’s
potential domestic call center market. Cloud Agent solution, based on the cloud
computing model help the companies to reduce capital expenditure by eliminating
physical brick and mortar workplaces. It helps in eliminating the geographical
restrictions on agent recruitment and introduces efficiencies unmatched by its
competitors.
How can you ensure high quality,
while also ensuring affordable pricing of an expensive service like cloud? How
secure would these offerings be?
Since we operate on Telco’s
infrastructure and from their data centers which have 24 x 7 power, we can
guarantee the quality of the telco’s service, if not more. In fact, Cloud will
work out cheaper, especially when it comes to Telephony as SMB/SMEs do not have
to invest in Capex to get similar services like virtual PBX, Virtual IVR or Virtual Call Center.
We have opened up APIs to our platform so that SMBs/SMEs who have IT skills
like PHP/JAV can develop their own applications and launch it in their network
without having to come to us. This addresses the security aspect of the
application and their data. We are also PCI-DSS certified and hence the
platform is secure enough to handle credit card transactions.
Are you looking at tying up with any
telco in India
to offer OTT or independent system operator offerings?
We are telco agnostic and work with
all telcos to make these services available in the cloud. We directly sell to
end users like businesses for our offerings.
What are the most popular verticals
for cloud telephony services in India,
and which vertical do you see yourself tapping?
We see Virtual PBX/IVR and Virtual Contact Center
as most popular service addressing the needs of various verticals like
manufacturing, travel, e-commerce, hospitality, distributors, auto sector,
hospitals, service industry per se.
How would cloud telephony services
help in 3G and social networking?
Ozonetel system has launched the
Voice Buzz application, a social networking voice application that allows
Facebook/Twitter users to post their status messages on the social networking
site through a landline or mobile phone. The USP of the application is that the
service is independent platform and does not restrict itself to users of one
particular telecom operator, making it more accessible and can be used without
having to pay any service fee for it. Now one can post messages in local
language be it Hindi, Marathi, Tamil or even Arabic that too using phone than
using the internet, in one’s own voice.
What are Ozonetel’s expansion plans
and growth strategy, as well as planned investment for the next two years in India?
Ozonetel systems has revenues of
around Rs three crore and is targeting Rs 15 crore next year. We are expecting
to achieve breakeven next fiscal year and our aim is to cross Rs 100 crore in
five years time period.
By Beryl M
