Voiceflex’s speed to market and ability to listen to partners will give it the upper hand as it looks to break into the IT MSP space, its CEO has claimed.
Counting Gamma, Vodafone and Colt among its competitors, the channel-focused voice applications specialist has doubled in size over the last four years.
Its revenue runrate now stands at £11m.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, CEO James Arnold-Roberts said the 60-employee outfit is looking to take the IT MSP space by storm as voice increasingly becomes an essential component of their offering.
“We’ve got 20 years’ worth of longevity, which in this market is unusual, and from day dot it’s always been about how we push the boundaries from an innovation perspective,” he said.
“We’re very well known in the traditional telco space.
“Our next area is that IT MSP.”
“Unloved child”
Voice was once regarded as an “unloved child” by IT MSPs, Arnold-Roberts acknowledged.
But that all changed with the Covid-fuelled boom of collaboration platforms such as Teams, and advent of AI, he said.
“AI is very much changing where voice sits in the value chain,” Arnold-Roberts explained.
“AI transcription with Microsoft Copilot shows where it’s going, and it’s then about how you integrate that into other services and having conversational AI at the front of the call from a CX perspective.
“It’s no longer just terminating a voice call; it actually has a real value wrap partners can talk to their end users about.”
“Where I see us winning”
Despite competing against market giants, Voiceflex can offer IT MSPs something its larger rivals can’t, Arnold-Roberts claimed.
“Where I see us winning is in our ability to listen to our partner community and being agile in deploying the new services they require,” he said.
“It’s that speed to market which is key for them.”
“Because we control the platform and development, we have 100% ownership and authority over what that development roadmap looks like,” Arnold-Roberts continued.
“If you’d said to me nine months ago that Zoom Contact Center would have been a big part of our deliverables for this financial year, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.
“But the Zoom proposition in the market is taking off. We’ve been asked by a number of our larger partners to do the integration piece. We’re looking to give them the BYOC [bring your own carrier] behind it.
“So to me, our biggest differentiator is our ability to be nimble and listen to our partners.”
“We don’t want to beat up Teams”
Voiceflex has had a reputation for innovation since it was founded in 2005, Arnold-Roberts said.
“It’s our 20th anniversary this year,” he said.
“Weirdly enough, it was an IT outsourcing company before that. Voiceflex was set up because one of the customers asked about this new-fangled thing called SIP, and Voiceflex did a piece of research and built their own network off the back of that.”
Today, Voiceflex characterises itself as a voice applications specialist.
“It’s all about how we provide our partners with that integration layer. We don’t want to build a UCaaS solution, or something that’s going to beat up Teams or Zoom,” Arnold-Roberts explained.
“Giving partners the ability to upsell”
Voiceflex provides its partners with answers to the questions they’re being asked by their customers, Arnold-Roberts said.
“Those questions are changing dramatically,” he said.
“Once we’ve got the number, or the solution, within our network, it’s then about giving partners that ability to upsell the services,” he said.
“We’re looking at layering on contact centre-lite for Teams. We see that as a massive growth market going forward.
“The ecosystem around management and cost management of licences is also becoming a bigger topic, especially with what Microsoft is doing with their licences.
“Once the voice is in there from a direct routing perspective, if that partner wants PCI, they can layer on PCI. If they want WhatsApp integration, they can integrate that into that.
“And if they’re looking at delivering a front-end conversational IVR [interactive voice response], we can put that in front of the numbers.”
“Huge addressable market”
Primarily serving SMEs with up to 500 seats, Voiceflex works via almost 3,000 partners.
But only 15% of these would classify themselves as IT MSPs, Arnold-Roberts estimated.
“I see a huge addressable market we don’t have a piece of,” he said.
“I also see that the voice piece is something a lot of IT MSPs didn’t do before.
“There probably wasn’t the requirement to do it.
“Now it’s becoming more of a necessity when they’re delivering a Microsoft solution.
“We can hold their hands and give them that comfort and the toolkit they need.”
With its competitors all offering a “similar wrap of services”, Voiceflex’s success will be determined by its customer excellence and ability to listen to partners, Arnold-Roberts said.
“Our Trustpilot score just rose to 4.8 and we’ve doubled the size of the business in the last four years. That shows we’re doing something right. What we’re doing around innovation is paying dividends,” he concluded.
This article was produced in association with Voiceflex and is classified as Partner Content. What is Partner Content? See more here.
