Talking Acquisitions, Growth and more with Vonage

Convergence has been one of the biggest trends in the UC marketplace in recent years. As companies continue to demand more from their communication experiences, vendors have realised that they may not be able to offer the full-stack solution that businesses need by themselves. Fortunately, companies like Vonage aren’t afraid of looking into acquisitions and mergers to help them grow.

As a leading provider of business communications solutions in the UK, Vonage is a growing disruptor in the modern marketplace. The company has always been committed to delivering the best cloud experiences for their customers, and with the recent acquisition of NewVoiceMedia, Vonage now has even more to offer.

I caught up with the SVP of Customer Success for Vonage, Ken McMahon, to find out more about where the brand is going.

Tell Us About Yourself

Ken McMahon

Ken McMahon is the Senior Vice President for Customer Success with Vonage. He’s responsible for making sure that everything runs smoothly “post-sale” for a client. “My team includes everything from the professional services team to the support team, and customer success managers. We make sure customers get real value out of the solutions they’re getting from Vonage.”

Ken joined the company in February 2018 as Senior Vice President of Customer Success, responsible for all aspects of the customer experience for Vonage. Customer Success is crucial these days, and companies like Vonage are putting crucial customer moments first by combining the UCaaS and CCaaS stack.

“There are countless components that are vital to creating a memorable customer experience and our customer success team is committed to ensure we get each one of them right – every time,” said McMahon.

“From service delivery, account management, deployment and ongoing customer care – our global customer care organisation ensures an exceptional end-to-end customer journey at every touchpoint”

How Difficult Has it Been to Combine Vonage with NewVoiceMedia

According to McMahon, bringing Vonage and NewVoiceMedia together has been relatively simple. “The combination of NewVoiceMedia’s contact centre expertise and Vonage’s robust UCaaS offering gives us, as a unified company, flexible approach to creating the best customer experience. Together, we can offer a more comprehensive solution to our customers, with ongoing services and support to ensure a seamless transition and the best of both worlds.”

Vonage has just released its first combined product with NewVoiceMedia, which is the “CX Cloud Express” CRM-integrated Contact Centre solution. Designed as an expansion of Vonage’s cloud-native unified communications platform, Vonage Business Cloud, together this offering provides an end-to-end communications solution. “We also just launched Number Programmability, service, now branded Smart Numbers,  service which bring rich, programmable capabilities via communications APIs (such as chatbots, customised voice and messaging workflows and call routing) to any Vonage Business Cloud number, including those integrated with CX Cloud Express.”

The flexible services available from Vonage ensure that businesses can build the perfect customer service experience for end-users. For instance, if someone speaks to a chatbot and doesn’t get the answer they need, their information and call will be automatically sent through to the contact centre. “An agent can then handle the call with context, reducing the need for customers to repeat themselves.”

How Easy is it for Businesses to Get Set Up with Vonage?

For companies who want to start discovering the benefits of Vonage for themselves, getting started is simple. Ken told me that some aspects of the onboarding process can be self-service. “For instance, your number provisioning is as easy as going onto a site and ordering a number. However, when it comes to more complex things like building a great customer experience and integrating intelligent tools, we have engineers to assistyou.”

Vonage offers a combination of self-service support and white glove or “orange glove,” as they call it, solutions from their professional service teams. This approach to delivering excellent experiences will be particularly useful for Vonage as they continue to expand into wider markets. Since the acquisition of NewVoiceMedia, Vonage has gained more of a foothold in the mid-market and enterprise spaces.

“Bringing the two companies together has been a great thing in terms of people and global coverage. For instance, NewVoiceMedia already had a huge presence in APAC and Europe, but not so much in America, Vonage has the coverage in America. Together, we’re covering more of the world.”

How Are You Going to Continue Competing?

As exciting as Vonage’s offerings are, there’s still a lot of tough competition on the marketplace today. I was interested to find out how McMahon and his team plan on staying ahead of the curve.

“Integration with third party apps and CRM delivers amazing solutions for our customers, providing them with access to the same systems and productivity tools they are already using. This allows us to deliver their mission-critical business applications within the context of their communications systems, creating amazing customer experiences. We’re continuing to build on that with new CRM integrations too.”

According to Ken, it’s crucial for today’s companies to have the right data sets to know how to route calls using intelligent APIs and other tools.

“Vonage’s consumer days provides its business customers today with the advantage of its carrier-grade network, which terminates 15 billion minutes of global voice traffic annually, and Vonage has the support that businesses need for that”

Today, Vonage is a growing full-stack UCaaS solution, supported by the wealth of experience from their own background, and their new acquisitions. It’s going to be exciting to see what the company does next.