As digital transformation continues in the communication landscape, we’ve noticed a gap between small and larger companies. While the larger organisations often struggle to move away from legacy and premises-based systems, smaller companies are much more open to agility.
VoIPstudio is one of the leading organisations in the cloud communications environment. Designed to support companies in becoming more productive, VoIPstudio specifically excels with smaller businesses that work through and on the cloud. We spoke to Rob Seymour, the Marketing Director at VoIPstudio, about the concept of agility in the small business.
What Kind of Trends Do You See in Your Customer?
As a forward-thinking provider delivering cloud communications solutions over the cloud, VoIPstudio sees a lot of their business coming from smaller companies. However, according to Rob, there are no obvious trends in the kind of verticals that find themselves moving towards this flexible environment. “Our customer base is so diverse. They tend to be small start-up and scale-up kinds of business, but they come from a huge variety of market segments.”
According to Seymour, VoIPstudio regularly works with clients that have dispersed and distributed teams. “We can offer a lot of value in those teams.” Additionally, it’s worth noting that in the last 5 years, expectations have begun to evolve. Rob has found that people are generally much more comfortable with the mobile and softphone approach.
“In the past, people expected to have a wired infrastructure and desk phone in place, but that’s all starting to change. We get fewer desk phone inquiries as the years go by”
Do You See a Lot of Customers with a DIY Attitude?
One trend that appears to be particularly common among smaller companies is the demand for a more DIY approach to building their communication strategy. “We try to make as much as we can available with a zero-touch approach. Last year, we made a lot of progress there, developing in-app walkthroughs to improve our onboarding procedure.”
Although VoIPstudio still gets some support calls from their customers, Seymour noted that most small companies are happy to just get on with their strategy. Ultimately, the in-app prompts help most users to streamline their initial set-up processes.
VoIPstudio is unique in their ability to offer customers a way to provision themselves from start to finish. Few companies take a similar approach in the market. “For the most part, you can set up without our help. It’s a huge difference to the days when everything required a huge amount of support and training.”
Even larger companies can benefit from VoIPstudio’s approach. Although the process of DIY deployment can become a little more time consuming for bigger teams, Rob explained that it isn’t necessarily more difficult.
Do You Think Your Approach and Agility Are the Future?
To some extent, it’s easy to see the VoIPstudio DIY approach as the future for small, cloud-based workforces.
“Our clients are very focused on UCaaS and cloud. They run their companies on a month-by-month basis, and they’re happy with this flexible cloud delivery”
The expectation for VoIPstudio’s clients is that they should be able to do most things themselves, and Rob says that the company is happy to support that. They’ll also be developing some additional features and solutions going forward.
“We’re always on the lookout for new ways to improve. We’ll be adding new collaborative tools into the environment, but we want to make sure there’s a need for them first. Our roadmap is built on top of the feedback that we get from our community. For instance, our collaboration solutions will integrate with cloud apps like Office 365 and G Suite, because that’s what our customers need.”
If You Lose Business, What’s Usually the Reason?
All companies lose business from time to time – even market leaders. When VoIPstudio loses a client, they send out surveys to find out why people leave. “Most of the time, it’s because someone’s gone out of business, or merged with another company. I don’t think I’m aware of a time when we lost someone because of a service issue.”
VoIPstudio receives a vast number of complimentary statements about their support team – even with their DIY approach. “Ultimately, if anyone does run into a problem, we’re still confident that they can access the support they need”
Because they’re so focused on delivering a great customer experience, it’s very rare for anyone in the VoIPstudio community to want to switch to a different provider.
