From Scientist to a VoIP Business Owner
Dr. Kalyan Kumar Pasumarthy is the CEO and Co-founder of Moitele, where he runs around 2 million minutes each month. This case study is based on the VoIP Business Talks interview. Watch the full episode with Kalyan here.
If you wish to do business with Kalyan, you can connect on LinkedIn or contact him through the Moitele website.
Kalyan came to Finland as two people: wife and husband. He worked as a scientist and used to get short-term university contracts for 6 months or one year. Short-term contracts made Kalyan feel uncertain and indecisive because he couldn’t plan for the long term for a growing family.
Decision to Start a VoIP Business
From the job perspective, it was all smooth, but the income growth for a researcher was limited. Kalyan wanted to pursue something that could help him speed up his life and have more certainty and freedom. Even though Kalyan’s background was in research, he decided to start his own VoIP business, so he left his job in 2016 December.
€10k Loan From the Bank
Back then, Kalyan was using Dellmont / Betamax and Ring Central to call his family and friends in India. He wanted to open a company in Finland and offer similar VoIP services. Kalyan had 5,000 EUR and took another 10,000 EUR as a loan from the local bank in Finland. “I have fixed my mind that this is the money (15,000 EUR) I will be risking. Not more than that”, said Kalyan.
Kolmisoft Pilot project
Kalyan signed up for the Kolmisoft Pilot project and started experimenting with MOR softswitch. “It was an exciting experience because you lose nothing. You just pay a small fixed fee and get an opportunity to experience a VoIP business”, said Kalyan. ”I have to say thanks to the Kolmisoft team, who have been extremely patient with my questions and offering clarifications for all my concerns”, he added.
Developing a Customer Portal
At the same time, he started developing a customer portal. Back then, having a customer portal with mobile apps was not common. If somebody had a mobile app, they didn’t have a customer portal and vice versa.
Competition from WhatsApp
Unfortunately, WhatsApp created tough competition and nobody was in the mood to pay for these calling services. His 15,000 EUR were gone in one year and Kalyan decided to shut down his initial business idea to do residential VoIP through mobile apps.
Pivot to The B2B Sector
Kalyan decided to pivot from residential to the B2B sector and work with contact centres in India that were focused on lead generation. However, it was not so easy. When Kalyan pivoted into a new business niche, he could not acquire customers easily as he didn’t have prior experience or network in the VoIP or contact centre solutions.
Partnership With a Salesperson
Luckily, he partnered with a salesperson he knew from the past. During Kalyan’s visit to India, the salesperson introduced him to a couple of prospects. Kalyan explained what he could offer. Unfortunately, after the initial conversation with potential clients, there was no response for a few months. Moreover, during that time, the salesperson who helped Kalyan connect with these leads found another job.
First B2B Customer
Then, one day, one of the leads reached out to Kalyan and told him that they were rapidly growing their business and wanted to try a new vendor because they were having scalability concerns with their current supplier. Eventually, this lead became the first B2B customer for Kalyan and they have been working together until now.
“VoIP is a commodity business, so companies always compete in terms of pricing. Some of our customers tried to go away just because someone else was cheaper. However, the customers experienced a decrease in voice quality with the cheaper services. The typical call centre routes that were cheap just didn’t suit the customers because the agents (employees of our clients) who were manually making calls, complained about the voice quality. Eventually, our clients came back to us within two weeks. This created even more trust and confidence in our service's quality, " said Kalyan.
Self-service Portal for the Contact Centres
Kalyan has developed a self-service portal with two-factor authentication for the contact centres, where they can create role-based users, add IP restrictions, listen to the call recordings, see the audio transcripts, review vital statistics, check if their DID/CallerID is in the spam list, place calls directly from the web through WebRTC and much more.
Login Module
Moitele customer portal facilitates login access for Admins, agents (who make calls) and team members (with role-based access to the data)
Calls Module
The calls page is the portal's core, giving more profound insights. Users can view and download the calls list. Additionally, they can access recordings, understand the reasons for call failure with status codes and dispose of the calls with defined status of the calls.
Agent Management Module
In the agent management module, customers can create, edit, and activate/deactivate agent accounts. This offers a layer of security. Additionally, there's the SpamStatus™ feature for the agent's phone numbers.
Team Management Module
The team management module offers flexibility to create users with role-based access. Customers can create sub-users with access to specific functionalities and data. This way, the customer is secure in terms of privacy and data security.
Network Monitoring
The network monitoring tool is available freely to all Moitele customers. In just 30 seconds, you can diagnose your network and identify if there are any issues related to network congestion, like packet loss, jitter, and latency.
Calling Applications
There are the following apps available: Windows desktop app, Browser app and Chrome plugin are live. For mobile apps, Moitele recommends third-party applications. There's also the attendance module that gives insights into agent's working schedule.
ASR - 80%
“My customers are not typical contact centres. Every call is manually triggered; there’s no robocalling or automatic dialers. My customers have an answer-seizure ratio of 80% (ASR), which is much higher than the average ASR in VoIP”, said Kalyan.
Real-Time Call Quality Monitoring
Moreover, he recently introduced a Real-Time Call Quality Monitoring that enables users to swiftly identify and address network issues, minimizing downtime and elevating business productivity. It helps to troubleshoot common contact centre challenges, such as voice breakage, overlaps of conversation, and lag.
