Tech, tech, and tech! How much is too much when it comes to defining the dependency on technology? When it comes to Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) or customer experience (CX), from virtual assistance for customer resolution to enabling AI voice chatbots for improved brand-customer engagement and making seamless conversations, technology has evolved in recent years.
Exotel, a connected customer conversation platform, posted a 1.6x rise in its revenue to Rs 318.27 crore in FY22 from Rs 119.03 crore in FY21, as per regulatory filings accessed by business intelligence platform, Tofler. The company posted a net loss of Rs 22.66 crore in FY22 from a net profit of Rs 14.68 crore in FY21. In a conversation with BrandWagon Online, Udit Agarwal, VP and head of global marketing, Exotel, talks about the company’s recent acquisitions, expansion plans, and growth trajectory, among others. (Edited Excerpts)
What strategies have been deployed by the company to narrow down its losses?
In 2021, our company experienced significant growth despite some challenges. We secured a $100 million investment and made strategic acquisitions, including Ameyo, a leading contact centre solutions company, and Cogno AI, a conversational AI company. These acquisitions were aimed at building a unified customer conversation platform, as we recognised the need to integrate various communication channels such as voice, messaging, and AI to provide a seamless experience for our customers.
Throughout the year, we focused on enhancing our technology and engineering efforts to achieve this integration and drive innovation in customer conversations. While our revenues increased, we also incurred wider losses due to investments in expanding into new markets, building our engineering capabilities, and investing in sales and marketing.
However, we achieved profitability in the current year, due to improved cost efficiencies and a strong focus on customer retention. Our expansion into the Middle East, particularly in the UAE through partnerships with telecom operators Etisalat and du, has been particularly successful. This international expansion has contributed significantly to our profitability and has positioned us well for future growth.
How has the integration of AI facilitated your business growth and transformed your offerings, and what strategies are in place to achieve the targeted 50% revenue growth by 2025?
I believe generative AI is leading the way here. Recently we launched the ‘House of AI’, it is a comprehensive suite of AI solutions designed specifically for businesses to engage with their customers. We’re leveraging generative AI technology at the core, allowing us to facilitate communication through various channels such as contact centre services, voice, and messaging.
With the advent of generative AI, we’re able to bring all the conversations onto one platform and extract the right context. This enables contact centre agents or bots to engage with customers in real time, understanding their emotions and needs. We can also provide agents with a holistic view of the customer’s conversation history, including their current mood and intent.
For us, personalisation goes beyond knowing basic information like a customer’s name or birthday. It’s about understanding and responding to their needs in the moment. By integrating generative AI and natural language processing technology, we’re streamlining the use of large language models to achieve accuracy and speed in driving conversations.
We’ve been testing this approach with many customers, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We see the value, agents and bots are improving to have more meaningful and impactful customer conversations. This has also been validated by leading analyst firms, who predict significant growth of around 57-58% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in the conversational AI and virtual assistant sector, particularly in the contact centre and AI spaces. Given that, this is a very bullish arrowhead for us to grow the company’s revenue by 50% in the next 18 months.
How the acquisition of Cogno AI and the merger with Ameyo has helped the company? What kind of market did the company capture with it?
Exotel has been a dominant player in the voice communication space, especially in India. We’ve established ourselves as leaders in this field, offering a comprehensive communication platform as a service, encompassing voice, messaging, and various application programming interface (API) integrations.
Our recent acquisition of Ameyo was a strategic move to bolster our offerings in the contact centre software domain. With Ameyo on board, we now have a robust contact centre software solution tailored for enterprises. This acquisition fills a crucial gap in our portfolio, enabling us to provide end-to-end solutions for businesses seeking to enhance customer service operations.
Cogno AI, is another key component of our strategy. It, brings advanced AI-led technologies to the table, particularly in the realm of chatbots and voice bots. Cogno’s expertise, especially in the highly regulated BFSI(banking, financial services, and insurance) sector, adds significant value to our overall proposition.
Combining the strengths of Exotel, Ameyo, and Cogno has not only expanded our presence in India but has also opened up new opportunities in international markets. Ameyo’s strong foothold in global markets has facilitated our expansion into 62 countries, with a focus on regions like the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia Pacific.
In particular, Cogno’s specialisation in the BFSI sector has been instrumental in penetrating this highly regulated industry. By leveraging Cogno’s AI capabilities alongside Exotel’s established infrastructure, we’re able to offer comprehensive solutions tailored specifically for the BFSI sector.
There are other competitors in the market offering similar solutions, what is your USP?
Exotel stands out in the market because, unlike its competitors who may specialise in one area, we offer a comprehensive suite of solutions covering CPaaS, contact centre software, and conversational AI. While you can find competitors in each of these categories separately, Exotel is unique in providing all three on a single platform.
This holistic approach significantly reduces overhead for our customers, offering them a unified view of customer conversations across multiple channels. By integrating contact centre software, conversational AI, and communication APIs into a single platform, we enable real-time analytics and insights through generative AI, which we refer to as ‘context.’
Context is crucial in any conversation. Without it, there’s no meaningful interaction. By ensuring that 90% of the conversation revolves around context, we can offer a level of personalisation that sets us apart from our competitors.
This ability to provide personalised, context-rich conversations is what truly differentiates Exotel. It’s a level of service and insight that our competitors currently cannot match in the market.
The company is present in seven markets- what is the share of the Indian market and other geographies?
70-75% of our revenues come from the Indian market, while 20-25% of our revenues come from international markets. Interestingly, our international markets are growing at a much faster pace compared to the Indian market.
What are the key sectors, the company eyes for?
We have significant expertise in serving digital natives, which encompasses companies born in the cloud, including e-commerce and technology-driven commerce firms. Additionally, we are strong in the BFSI sector and have a robust industry practice in retail and distribution. Education technology (ed-tech) has also been a key vertical for us, despite facing some challenges recently. Overall, our top verticals include digital natives, BFSI, retail and distribution, and transportation and logistics.
How relevant is AI voice chats in customer conversation?
AI voice chat is gaining traction, offering the flexibility to adopt various avatars. Consider this scenario, instead of typing, you’re conversing with an AI voice chat for resolving queries or even making a sale. The potential is vast; anything achievable through text chat can be replicated through voice bots. This technology employs speech-to-text and text-to-speech mechanisms, seamlessly translating spoken words into text prompts and vice versa in real-time. This ensures a seamless user experience, blurring the lines between traditional text-based chatbots and voice bots. The applications span across different domains, providing users with real-time responses in a conversational and human-like manner. As conversation is much more intuitive for humans, creating an intuitiveness into the text conversation is something that would add to matters.
Are there any plans for expansion, acquisitions, and mergers?
Currently, acquisitions and mergers aren’t on our radar, but expansion certainly is. We’re making significant strides in the Middle East market, particularly gearing up for a major launch in Saudi Arabia. With already 55 customers in the region, we’re poised for a full-scale expansion. Additionally, we’re set to enter the US market this year, marking a significant milestone in our international expansion journey. Moreover, we’re doubling down on serving Indian enterprises, driven by the trust and confidence our customers have placed in us. These three expansion initiatives are our primary focus for the year ahead.