As customer demands transform, and the marketplace for communication grows more competitive, businesses need more from their communications providers. Today's companies need solutions that support everything from back-end simplicity and better employee collaboration to front-end productivity and greater customer engagement.
What makes Vonage unique, is that in recent years, through a series of strategic acquisitions, as well as organic growth, the company has transformed and evolved from a home phone VoIP provider to a leading provider of business cloud communications. With a unique combination of unified communications, contact center and programmable communications via APIs, the organisation is the only provider to link together these capabilities to meet all the needs of the mid-market. This means that Vonage can offer a truly integrated solution to modern communication problems.
We caught up with Alan Masarek, the CEO of Vonage, to discover what it means to support the current mid-market customer.
What Has Vonage Become in 2019?
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Alan Masarek[/caption]
As mentioned above, Vonage has long been recognised as a communications leader. The brand has more than 2 million customers around the globe. However, the focus of Vonage is changing.
Alan told me that looking at it from a "macro perspective," the business has moved from a communications and connections company to a brand for customer experience. "We know a great experience is driven by great communications. We've brought together the assets relevant to driving a singular customer and employee experience and created a unique way to deliver them to our users - all from a single platform"
Vonage, like many industry leaders, believes that communication is essential to driving the best end-to-end customer engagement. In today’s experience economy, businesses are looking for solutions and providers that deliver a great experience for their customers. The environment that Vonage has been building, both with its own tools and through integrating its acquisition, are designed to support this CX world. "We have this full programmable stack which we refer to as One Vonage. It gives us a way to deliver everything from customer communication to employee communication. We own the entire stack, giving us the ability to control the experience for our customers - from the carrier to the application. Experience has become the key differentiator and businesses are taking note as they consider solutions to meet their employee and business needs."
How Close Are You to the "Single Vonage" Goal?
Creating a single and unified experience for an entire portfolio of products is no easy feat. Vonage has been through an excessive amount of work and has realised its One Vonage vision over the last year. Alan told me: "One Vonage is a micro-services communications platform. It comes with all the relevant services you would need for communication, such as video, SMS, audio and so on. What makes it special is that all of the services can be sold individually or built into the applications businesses are already using. Experience must include both the customer and the employee. Both are directly linked. Because we own the entire stack, we have the unique advantage of enabling our customers to connect with their own customers wherever they are - via their preferred channel - and, at the same time, stay connected with their mission-critical business apps and CRM."
"Everything lives on a single platform, providing businesses with a simpler solution and giving their customers a better, more streamlined experience”
Vonage isn't just linking employee, workflow, and customer tools, they're disrupting the market. Most companies simply cannot offer a full-stack solution under one roof. "We believe that this strategy will give resellers and providers a way to offer a truly unique customer and employee experience, and build solutions that address myriad use cases for the entire communications market."
