Expansys develops low-cost call centre solution for SMEs

Expansys Technologies, a home-grown content provider, has unveiled a product which will allow small businesses to provide call centre-like services to customers.

Expansys Technologies Managing Director Keeran Janin said the product, dubbed AskRobin.com, uses the short message service (SMS) to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) provide customer service support to clients.

AskRobin will pool businesses into one contact point for customers using web technology. "What we want to do is to offer SMEs a low-cost solution where we would pool together all the SME-level businesses, giving them a very easy, low-cost way to connect and also to provide a gateway for customers to connect to," he said.

By using the AskRobin service, he said, consumers could benefit from a universal number to contact all businesses and lower the cost by pooling together customer services into one resource, thus making it convenient for them to reach businesses in the country.

"How this works is that we're going to have one dedicated number which consumers can SMS to, say 3999. So let's say you want to ask a question 'I'd like to have dinner at a particular restaurant and I would like to book it'. You send that question via SMS to 3999, in a way as if you're asking Robin.

"Now imagine Robin as one of your best friends who seems to know everything because he has resources of information. And you ask your question just like how you ask any real people via SMS, because the first layer of AskRobin are actually real people who will receive and reply to your messages, just like an information concierge in a hotel.

"These team of people will then go to the database of businesses that are connected to the system, and they'll put you in touch with the businesses."

Based on observation and complaints, Keeran said direct customer services are out of reach of many SMEs in the country.

"The large corporations and the multinational organisations can afford these $10,000-$20,000 system, and sometimes these call centres can range up to $100,000. The SME-level businesses, however, do not have anything like this, and relied heavily on direct phone lines or email. They are unable to actually invest in these kind of services because call centres are quite costly, and also you need a specialist staff to run and operate a customer service call centre," he said.

"Ninety per cent of businesses in Brunei are small-medium enterprises. For one customer to keep track of every phone number of every businesses they've ever been to and trying to look back in order to get information from them is difficult," said Keeran.

He said that AskRobin.com will be up and running in January and is currently in the trial stage.

"At the moment, we're going to give free trials to as many companies as possible, such as restaurants, cinemas, all the small businesses, to try this service out and see whether it works for them," he told The Brunei Times.

For the next 12 months, Expansys plans to validate its business model within Brunei, before deploying the technology to Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam, among others.

"We actually designed this service for countries where poor business to customer relationships are very common. Unlike the western countries where a lot of the customers have easy access to the Internet, developing countries such as in the Southeast Asian region tend to have very high population but most of them have no Internet connectivity," said Keeran.

"However, a lot of them still use SMS, and SMS has been their communication channel because it is cheap. So we're really bringing customer service to these people through their favourite communication channel," he added.

The firm is looking for investments partners in order to expand its service to overseas markets and help develop its strategy.

"We're looking at not just angel investment funding, but also investment partners or just partners in general who have vast experience in these areas and the knowledge on how to deploy this product to those countries, and who are close with the telcos there who can get us up and running," he said.

The Brunei Times