SalesTechStar Interview with Alexey Aylarov, Co-founder and CEO at Voximplant

With the increased need for voice and video based communications in marketing, sales and other business operations, the demands and expectations from communication platforms will evolve; Alexey Aylarov, Co-founder and CEO at Voximplant shares a few thoughts:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Alexey, tell us more about Voximplant and what inspired the platform? How has it evolved since the start?

I co-founded Voximplant in 2013 along with Sergey Poroshin (Head of Sales), and Andrey Kovalenko (CTO). I have been extensively involved with VoIP systems as a developer since 2005 and apparently, I realized that the frustration and difficulty I experienced while building communications tech was shared by other developers. 

Prior to Voximplant, I worked with Andrey and Sergey to cofound a SIP-based VOIP calling service Flashphone and Zingaya. Zingaya focused on providing click-to-call services using their proprietary VoIP technology. Later I realized there’s a larger opportunity in building a unified voice and audio communication platform, which turned into Voximplant. 

Now Voximplant caters to clients from all industries demanding mass communication, including banking, delivery and logistics, digital native startups, retail, and ecommerce. Its services are available in 190 countries and territories, and it has over 30,000 customers, including Hyundai, Burger King, KFC, Glovo, and Rappi. Voximplant’s platform processes more than 1 billion calls each year.

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What are some of the biggest game changing features that cloud communication platforms will evolve into in the near-future to enable key business processes? How have you seen these technologies grow over the years?

We will see more and more AI-empowered communication services, either it’s about improving the quality of communication or about automation and self-service via multiple communication channels

In addition to that, big companies are making big bet on metaverse concept in the future and it seems that communications in metaverse(s) will be as important as they are now in our daily life

We will see more complex communication apps and services tightly integrated with each other and CRMs/CDPs to help with personalization and CX improvements..

How are you now seeing key trends redefine client engagement and communication strategies in the B2B market?

More companies will turn to chatbots and voice bots to automate customer support: to satisfy customer expectations, teams need to come up with a way to offer something creative and innovative with a limited budget and bots become a perfect solution to do that.

Companies, especially D2C ones, will choose Net Promoter Score as the top indicator for measuring the performance of customer engagement.

Podcasts will become a great channel for acquiring new customers and engaging with existing ones. 

Hybrid events will dominate within the event industry as people still avoid large meetings and industry events until the pandemic is wholly gone.

Companies will invest even more in customer retention teams across customer support, customer success, sales, and marketing as it is much more cost-effective to retain existing customers than acquire completely new customers.

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How can operations/marketing-sales teams adapt better to newer processes and technologies to help drive customer experiences in today’s market? A few thoughts on the kind of technologies that will come to the front here?

I think that using CDPs together with omnichannel communications is one of things most businesses will adapt eventually to make customer experiences better. Some of them (smaller ones) may choose a ready-to-use SaaS that offers similar functionality out-of-the-box (integrated into business processes with less efforts), such SaaS companies will build their solutions on top of the platform players offerings (CPaaS, etc.)

A few thoughts on how you feel martech as a segment will move in 2022? Some last thoughts, takeaways, digital sales/customer communication tips and best practices before we wrap up!

Important things to remember about are security/privacy, personalization of CX, automation/prediction (powered by AI), new channels (real-time video), accelerated digitalization of everything (due to COVID-19). Please also keep in mind that reliability of these complex technology solutions is pretty important. We still see cases when parts of the AWS cloud are going down and many services and applications are affected. It’s important to keep your customers happy.

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