Customer engagement company Exotel is currently present in 60 countries, out of which it expects Southeast Asia and Middle East to contribute almost half of the company’s revenue in three years.
Some of the clients of Exotel include Ola, Swiggy, Flipkart, GoJek, Byju’s, Urban Company, HDFC Bank, Zomato, and Oyo among others. BusinessLine spoke to Shivakumar Ganesan (Shivku), CEO & Co-founder, Exotel, about the company’s plans for 2022.
The Covid-19 pandemic posed unique challenges to businesses to engage with customers. How has the business communications landscape changed?
In the last couple of years, the customer engagement segment witnessed major shifts, driven by the pandemic. The challenges broadly include; firstly, customer-facing teams working from homes overnight made on-premise communication systems outdated for business continuity and operating in a new normal. Secondly, procuring new scalable tools, channels and integrating with existing infra to meet consumers’ new preferences. Thirdly, working with limited human resources and low levels of communication automation.
Addressing these challenges, businesses embraced cloud solutions that scaled with remote operations. The cloud gave access to all the new channels including, WhatsApp and video. The move to the cloud also made automation easy with voice AI & speech technology powering intelligent bots and monitoring remote engagement at scale with sentiment and speech analytics. On-premise systems are out. Cloud and AI are in.
Does the company plan to make any merger and acquisition deals this year?
We merged with Ameyo last June and acquired Cogno AI two months back. These two events helped Exotel take a unique position in the market that no other company has to offer – all customer engagement solutions in one place. We have plans to acquire and we’re always talking to a bunch of companies that are in the same business and have a similar vision to build the best engagement tech for enterprises.
How will Exotel’s customer offerings change as the company moves towards a full-stack customer engagement platform?
Until recently, Exotel powered cloud communication to large distributed teams and small in-house teams leading to 15 million daily calls by over 4,000 businesses. After acquiring Cogno AI and merging with Ameyo, we power 50 million engagements every day for over 6,000 businesses globally. With Ameyo joining the stack, we now offer a powerful cloud-first omnichannel contact centre and Cogno AI adds intelligence to the entire stack with smart bots that automate customer service.
What are the ambitions for 2022 with the money raised in 2021?
We want to become the largest customer engagement technology company in emerging markets. Exotel, Ameyo, and Cogno AI have been profitable and are growing at a rate of 70 per cent every year. With a combined CAGR, we will be able to hit our target of 700 crore for the FY2022-23.
One way to achieve the desired growth is by bringing together the right team with exceptional talent to build more full-stack capabilities for the platform. We are currently a team of 1,000 and planning to increase by adding 700 new employees in the next 6-12 months. We are also investing in South East Asia and Middle Eastern geographies for international business growth.
What efforts will you take to achieve the target of ₹325 crore or more in the topline for FY22?
Exotel’s annual growth rate is 70 per cent and we’ll be closing FY22 in another two months with achieving revenue of ₹350 crore. With the current growth rate, we will likely hit ₹1,500 crore in three years. Southeast Asia and the Middle East will contribute close to half of our revenues in about three years.
Does the company plan to further expand internationally? Which other regions would it be looking for going further?
Our primary focus for the near future is going to be emerging markets as these are high-growth markets with huge potential and needs for an integrated communication stack. Currently, it is a greenfield when it comes to customer engagement technologies and we are the only full-stack company with local infra addressing this market. So we want to continue to focus and go deep into India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and others, and make the enterprises truly realise their full potential.