Exotel receives pan-India licence from DoT to offer cloud-based customer engagement solutions for remote working

Bengaluru-based cloud telephony platform Exotel has received a pan-India licence, called Virtual Network Operator (UL VNO), to serve businesses across India with cloud-based customer engagement solutions for remote working. 

Earlier this year, the company received the same licence for the Karnataka circle. Exotel powers communication for enterprises, start-ups and small and medium enterprises and has over 6000 clients across India, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa.

Ishwar Sridharan - Co-founder, and COO, of Exotel, told Business Today, “In India and other emerging markets, contact centres and calling tools are primarily hosted on-premise due to strict regulations. The licence represents a paradigm shift in the migration of business processes to the cloud in India. With this pan-India Unified Licence, we will be able to provide true blue cloud contact centers to businesses across India with our cloud-based customer engagement solutions.  It will enable us to provide businesses with work-from-home capabilities for their agents and to provide more employment opportunities to Tier 2 and 3 towns.”

Claiming to be the first and only company in India that provides cloud contact centers that are regulatorily compliant, riding on partner telecom networks, Exotel plans to now extend flexible, affordable, and fully compliant internet calling solutions to the entire country. With strategic alliances with Ameyo and Cogno AI and the UL VNO license,  Exotel now provides full-stack customer engagement solutions for enterprises on the cloud. These include monitoring customer sentiments, onboarding new customers, zero-contact resolutions for existing customers, and various digital sales and support use cases.

“Our clients are primarily internet-first startups like Flipkart and Gojek. We also serve clients in the EdTech, BFSI, retail and manufacturing space. BFSI clients which have been a bit slow to move to the cloud, are now recognising the benefits of the process and are becoming an emerging prominent client base for us,” adds Sridharan.

Speaking on the extension post receiving the pan-India license, Sridharan adds, “We have clients in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and we plan to increase their operations in Indonesia and Cambodia through strategic partnerships. We have been working in Indonesia for over five years. However, in the last two to three years, there have been some disruptions due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Our customisable full-stack suite of offerings is highly applicable to our Indonesian clientele since we offer them at a reasonable price that is conducive to the needs of businesses in emerging markets.”

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