Wolken Aims Global Expansion by Democratizing Customer Service Solution

Rohan Joshi, Co-Founder & CEO, Wolken Software, shares his plans for alliances to make its platform usable across the industries. The strategy is in line with his plans to expand globally and in India.

Please talk about your journey so far.

I and Sudhir Prabhu (Co-founder and CTO) have known each other since 2004 as we have worked together. Around 2011, we decided to do something of our own. We tried on a few things, but ideas were not scaling up. Our board members suggested pivot towards something where the total addressable market is large. So, in 2017-18, we decided to get into enterprise customer service which has a market size of over $80 billion.

Over the last few years, we have expanded our presence globally with over 35 clients across semiconductor, electronic retail, banking, financial services and into E-commerce segments. In India, we are focused on E-commerce, general manufacturing and financial services.

How is Wolken aiding SME businesses with its service support offerings?

We are quite focused on SMEs as they help us enrich our product. Most of the SME customers have innovative practices and are not conservative in approach unlike large enterprises. Focusing on SMEs enable us to come up with certain features which makes our product leapfrog over the competition. Further, the entire SMB sector in India is largely self-driven. So, we’ve gone into the self-service mode, and launched a product called Wolken Cares, which is a self-service product.

Please talk about your recent business achievements in terms of revenue growth, customer acquisition, and market share.

We’ve grown about 40-50 percent over the last three years, and we expect to grow at about the same percentage. So, we are democratizing that complete layer. And there are open network projects which are going to be started by people who have worked with NPCI. We are also looking at alliances to make our platform usable for Kirana stores, cottage industry as well as the large corporates.

What is your GTM strategy?

Our go-to-market strategy is a combination of hyper-local and global. Hyper local is the way the delivery happens. In some countries, it’s direct to the customer whereas in some countries it’s through channels. On the other hand, in some countries it’s a part of a bouquet of offerings which go to a customer, which the system integrator puts together.

Please talk about the company’s focus areas.

Diversity and inclusion is an area that is very dear to our heart. We have almost 50 percent of our employees as females; we have women as head of sales, head of marketing, head of HR and admin, and head of quality. So that’s something which we are very proud of. We’d like to ensure that we do not lose out on the diversity and inclusion part of it.

Please talk about your expansion plans.

It’s a two-pronged strategy. The India strategy is to expand across the country; currently, majority of the development is happening in Bengaluru and Mumbai. On the other hand, we are expanding our footprint of clients into APAC, Japan, and Europe.