Through hardship to the stars. How we filled the bumps

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What began the virtual PBX RingCloud .

Of course with an idea. The idea was that you can create a project that will not be connected by a thousand wires, with complex technical settings. I wanted to make a product that was clear and simple for the user, with great growth and transformation opportunities.

Prior to the emergence of such ideas, we already had successfully implemented projects in the B2B telecommunications market. They began to search for a niche for the new project, made a detailed market analysis and decided to develop the concept of a cloud virtual PBX.

It would seem that there are many offers in this segment, but we set ourselves the task of making a “light” product.

What we see on the market are ancient and heavy dinosaurs. This means that the tasks that we set ourselves are: product maneuverability, which includes the ability to expand the number of users connected to the number, it is easy to change settings, take into account the wishes of customers, and based on these wishes, develop individual or introduce massive "chips" as nobody did before us.

Problems

Naturally, at the beginning of every business there is a moment of inspiration, a “spark” and it seems that your project is the best, you only need to realize and overcome all difficulties. The goals that we set for ourselves were and remain very noble and, at the same time, challenging the market, because we are fully aware that by spreading our plans and goals in the comments and articles, we gain observers (and not only in the face of competitors), who will closely monitor how promises are kept.

So, inspired by a new idea, we set about developing a virtual PBX. On October 15, they launched the project in production, but by the end of the year they did not get any special results. It so happened that the market wanted a little different. Many liked our PBX, but they wanted to buy it along with a direct Moscow number. So we realized that we just needed our own showcase of rooms. Otherwise, the client was uncomfortable, it is necessary that here and now, in a complex.

Another problem was that we ignored the function of recording calls at the output stage in production. It seemed to us that this function might be needed later, but it is not so much in demand.


As a result, we received sales at a level bordering 0 and rushed to solve these problems.

Decision

We also solved the problem with numbers quite abruptly: we simplified the functionality of purchasing a room by the end customer using the widespread “showcase” solution, but our solution allows working with several telecom operators, which makes it easy to select a number from a very large number of numbers. The user, having come to our site, sees the sorted numbers, and can select any one by clicking with the mouse several times. And at this time a bunch of legal entities interact, a lot of legal relations take place to transfer the rights to the user to the selected number. It turned out the way we wanted: easy and understandable for the client. Now, based on this decision, we have enabled our users to choose from more than 14,000 (!!!) numbers in codes 495 and 499. Next in line are numbers 8-800, but now they are not so much in demand among our potential customers (there are very few requests).

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Then things went uphill, immediately customers appeared and it all worked. But we, of course, did not want to stop there, we still have a lot of ideas and we need to implement them. Therefore, the next step was the development of integration with CRM. This is a fairly popular product on the market. A system that reflects tasks, goals, actions and plans, as well as statistics and timelines.

People who will use the CRM system in conjunction with telephony can be divided into two categories.

The first is companies that optimize costs and increase efficiency, as well as beginners. They often switch from landline to virtual telephony, and also think about using CRM systems, especially if they understand their benefit, expressed in financial terms. These are companies striving for progress. We will have options for them: you just want telephony, but want to grow and modernize your business, well, we have the resources for this!

The second category - companies that have already implemented a CRM system. These are advanced firms. They know for sure that a virtual telephone exchange is more profitable for the company. But they may be in search of the optimal solution and change the provider, which does not suit them for some reason. And if they are looking for something new in the field of virtual telephony, then only subject to the availability of integration with their CRM.

Based on this, we developed and launched the REST API (a special program code on which, taking into account the specifics of a particular CRM, an integration program with the system will be built.

For now, hopefully, it was interesting for you to read about those bumps that we typed in process, and those decisions that led us to understand the needs of the market, and our company to the beginning of growth.

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