RTDS: Cloud Telephony Prospers in WFH Environment

Vinay Chhabra, CEO, Real Time Data Services (RTDS) explains how cloud telephony is leveraging AI and NLP to become more relevant in the current times.

What are the solutions and services in the RTDS portfolio?

We have multiple platforms under the Real Time Data Services (RTDS) portfolio, with cloud being the common denominator in all our offerings. We have been in this area for over a decade now.

We have Ace Cloud Hosting which helps businesses host applications on the cloud. We are focused on the financial accounting services industry supporting products such as Quickbooks by Intuit and Sage. We are also further investing in infrastructure and security services as an additional vertical which is currently under development.

In addition we are also into the unified communications domain through our multiple companies namely The Real PBX which is a global provider of VoIP services and Servetel which provides cloud based telephony services to the Indian market. Recently, we have launched another VoIP telephony product called Acefone focused on the UK business users. We see quite a significant potential within the space.

What is the GTM strategy followed by RTDS?

What we have followed is a philosophy of a strong validation as per the product market fit. The RTDS team has always persevered to build a product which the market needs. Basis our industry analysis and interactions, we saw a lot of value in investing in cloud based solutions.

Since all our solutions are based on the cloud, including our hosting and telephony solutions, digital becomes the first choice channel of marketing for us. This helps us connect directly with the customers without any geographical or logistical barriers.

In terms of our marketing strategy, we lean towards an inbound strategy, which has helped us with customers with high intent of purchase. This has worked out well for the business so far although we are now exploring other channels also in order to target a larger segment of customers.

What are the verticals you are witnessing maximum traction and what are the specific use cases?

We are seeing traction across industries due to the ongoing pandemic. Essentially, the pressing need for businesses to be remotely functional and be available for their customers has pushed the need across industries.

In our cloud hosting business, we have seen most of the interest from the financial functions of multiple companies, due to the type of applications which we host on the cloud.

For our telephony business, it has been fairly industry agnostic with B2C companies as well as B2B companies both being our customers. In India we are now moving our focus on enterprise customers. Internationally our target segment at the moment is the small and medium sized businesses.

Our strongest use cases for telephony has been the number of integrations that we support  in addition to multiple CRM integrations which are already live, we also witness a number of requirements of integration with a legacy application that the customer has been using. Through our API based integration, we are able to facilitate all such requirements easily.

Personalization has been another requirement that our customers are looking for. So through Natural Language Processing (NLP) we have been able to deliver solutions such as speech to text / text to speech solutions and sentimental analysis which does not require human intervention. As we see further intelligence building in AI/ML, we expect more of such requirements coming from the customers.

Who are some of the marquee customers?

RTDS provides services to a wide range of sectors globally in areas like Accounting, Technology, Media, and Finance, to name a few. Our marquee customers are those whom we have provided customized solutions and have stayed with us for years. We have a long list of these clients with which we are enjoying long-term mutual benefits.

We have some esteemed customers in India such as Uber, Ola, Cipla, Cars 24, SAP, Honda and Michelin Tyres in our portfolio. Few of our enterprise customers are in the final stages of negotiation, and hence we will have more names added to this list soon.

With an increasing WFH environment in the current situation, what are the changing dynamics of collaboration and communication solutions?

Soon after the lockdown was announced, companies shifted to remote working overnight, and this unpredicted sudden shift changed how businesses used to run. Work -from-home culture has been adopted successfully, and now when everyone is working online from home, cloud usage is also increased. With us being in the midst of a new normal of working, where remote working has become essential for businesses to survive, we see that customers would not want to consider multiple solutions to solve their requirements.

They are preferring the same solution to solve for their messaging, video conferencing, file sharing, team collaboration as wekk whiteboarding requirements. Eventually the closer a solution is able to replicate a real time environment the better it is for businesses. The idea is to have the solution under one ecosystem, through either building internally or through integrations. We expect stronger integration with email and calendar also to happen sooner so that multiple modes of communication will not be needed.

Cloud bridges the gap between employees and management. Team collaboration and communication have become smooth, whereas, in offices, it required the physical presence of teams to discuss important tasks. The dynamics of collaboration and communication are completely shifted and the dependency on cloud-based tools and applications has increased due to remote working.

How is AI-powered cloud telephony becoming important?

AI is definitely leading the way across the next phase of technology through Natural Language Processing (NLP)/ Machine Learning (ML). At RTDS we have already been exposed to TTS/STT (text to speech and speech to text) use cases. AI-powered cloud telephony helps a lot by generating the transcripts of the customer calls. AI offers the features of voice-to-text, wherein you can review the entire conversation and never miss important points or feedback from the customers.

Though we have been able to convert voice transmission into bits and bytes, but we have only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to using AI. Technology can really help empower the customer experience moving it from an agent driven communication channel to a smart autonomous powerhouse which solves the customer pain points without any human intervention.

What are your differentiators from other cloud telephony players?

Our biggest strength has been the level of customisation basis our bespoke solutions that offer to our customers. Our dedicated unified communications developers have made our product very agile and modular in nature – we support a wide variety of integrations with the leading players in the market as well as the client’s own legacy platforms. Our support team is available round the clock in order to address any issues that may come forth. We ensure that we provide our users with 99.99 % uptime with the help of multi-level redundancy in the data centers.

In addition, while we are able to demonstrate the nimbleness and agility of a startup, we have the resources of a large organization. This helps us to balance both the speed of execution and the scalability of the solution. This deep focus on customer centricity has really helped us gain a good respect from our customers and our competitors alike.

Our customers are our priority, so we ensure the services do not get delayed from our side. As data security is the main issue, we do not compromise with the data centers. We choose the best. Our professionals work round the clock to ensure our customers get seamless support. Last but not least, we provide users with HD voice quality with low bandwidths.

How cloud computing-based communications is helping the business environment in the current situation?

Even before the pandemic, cloud as a platform has been seeing significant growth where all the big names – Google, Amazon and Microsoft were heavily investing within the space. The entire SaaS revolution has essentially been riding the cloud computing wave. The telephony industry is no exception and there has been a transition from pure play UC (Unified Communications) product has now moved to a service oriented Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offering. And in the current scenario, with physical offices being far from functional, cloud based communication is the only way forward.

Cloud computing has transformed the entire business landscape. Teams can share and access the data files remotely, even at this time of the pandemic outbreak, thanks to the cloud accessibility feature.Teams can work on the same projects simultaneously, anywhere across the world, without having to think about the physical presence.

With all your data stored in a secure cloud, the chances of cyber threats and data breaches have minimized. Communicating with your employees, colleagues, management, clients, and business owners with the help of smartphones and tablets has become as comfortable as ever.

Communication has become more comfortable at remote work than being physically present in the office when your teams were scattered from each other.