Sometimes timing is everything, as it was for the initial acquisition of the domain phone.com — more than 15 years ago, as Senior Vice President/CCO, Joel Maloff, explained. What else could you do with that but create a phone company? And now that company has grown to over 100 employees, serving SMEs across the US and Canada with a range of cloud-based phone services.
Timing was also critical in terms of connecting with iotum a year ago, when Phone.com were starting to experiment with their own offering for video conferencing.
“We had developed in-house, and it was OK”, Maloff reflected. “But we had one of those decision points that comes to companies, where we needed to determine, are we a software development company? Are we an applications integrator, are we a phone company?” And looked at from the primary purpose perspective, the decision to buy in exactly what they need in terms of Callbridge’s programmable video product made complete sense.
The right pivot at the right time
Luckily the contractual and technical integrations went smoothly, and soon the three different packages of video conferencing that Phone.com chose to offer were embedded in their user dashboard and control panel in exactly the way they wanted — completely white-labelled, as a manifestly on-brand element of the overall functionality. They also had to ensure HIPAA compliance across the new platform as well, to offer the video conferencing function to all their customers, which include those operating in sensitive areas like health/mental health.
Clearly, this partnership, involving lots of journeys from one side of Florida to the other initially, got sorted out just in time — before the whole world discovered video conferencing in new ways early this year. Vital services, like the aforementioned mental health consultations, could pivot directly to robust and compliant video calling, ensuring continuity of service for vulnerable patients, to take one example of the kind of businesses Phone.com support with their VoIP communications services. This responsive service led to Phone.com winning the Cloud Communications 2020 Video Conferencing Excellence Award, for supporting their customers so effectively at this critical time.
Business continuity and the shift to remote
Not only were Phone.com able to keep their clients, and their client’s clients, connected and communicating through the crisis, the new video conferencing toolset was also crucial to their internal collaboration and business continuity.
This ability to work successfully together from anywhere has helped them evolve their own growth strategy, around long term distributed working and a truly remote-first mindset. “We’ve hired a VP of Sales and Support who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Two years ago we would not have hired him unless he’d agreed to relocate to San Diego.” As the lone long-distance member of the executive leadership team, Maloff had occasionally found himself out of the loop. “The fact that I am not in New Jersey, New York or San Diego could be somewhat of a disadvantage because there were times people would forget to tell me things. But guess what — we’re all in the same boat now!”
So, everything came together in the nick of time, for the partnership between iotum and Phone.com, and for their end-users too. And while no one would say it’s been an easy year, riding out the pandemic and its associated restrictions, Maloff concludes that “lots of things never would have happened without this. It’s made business learn how to communicate more effectively with the tools that we have available. And that’s not going to be temporary, people aren’t going to go back to doing all of the physical things they used to do in the same way as before.”
The partnership remains a close one, forged in the challenging days of 2020, for a durable future built around shared customer service values. “I will readily admit that we put a great deal of pressure on Cara and on their CTO and the rest of the [iotum] team to meet the needs of our clientele. And it has all been taken with the understanding that this is good for all of us.”
“If we can do these things better for you and for your customer, you bring more business to us. We work better together, and everybody is happy… This has been a winning relationship. And I’m fully confident that it will continue that way”
The Phone.com partnership is a great example of the close collaborations iotum are forming with their bespoke white-labelled programmable HD video solutions.
