What's Up with Tech?

Pivoting to Cloud Communications: Dexatel's Secure Solutions, Global Reach, and Future Innovations

• Evan Kirstel

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How does a financial industry professional pivot to leading one of the pioneering companies in cloud communications? Learn from Lilia Yeghiazaryan, the CEO and co-founder of Dexatel, as she shares her transformative journey from the banking sector to steering a groundbreaking CPaaS company. Through personal experiences and a shared vision with her husband, Lilia reveals the creation and evolution of Dexatel—a platform committed to secure, reliable, and cost-efficient communication solutions for businesses around the globe.

Join us as we discuss the hurdles and successes of building Dexatel from scratch, including its impressive global expansion and a commitment to mutual success. Lilia delves into the unique value propositions that set Dexatel apart in a crowded marketplace, emphasizing their focus on security, cost efficiency, customization, and unparalleled customer experience. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone curious about the dynamic landscape of cloud communications and the innovative solutions that are transforming customer engagement today.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, really excited to dive into the world of messaging and cloud communications today with an innovator in the field from Estonia, dexita Lilia. How are you?

Speaker 2:

Hi Ivan, Thanks for having me today. I'm fine. How about you?

Speaker 1:

Well, thanks so much for being here, really intrigued by the work you're doing and, as many of us know, the CPAS, or communications landscape, is so exciting these days, so much going on. Can't wait to hear your perspective. Before that, maybe introduce yourself a little bit about your background and journey to Dexatel.

Speaker 2:

Sure sure journey to Dexatel, Sure, sure. Let me start with my personal background and then give you a brief overview of the background story of Dexatel. I'm Lili Yakazarian, the CEO and co-founder of Dexatel. We are representing a leading communication platform as a service short for CPaaS solution, offering omnichannel messaging solutions to our partners that are enterprise customers as well as small and medium businesses. In turn, we are offering secure environment for businesses to grow, secure environment for businesses to grow, and among our customers are big companies such as TikTok, tencent, alibaba, paysera and others. So this is a little bit of the company current status.

Speaker 2:

I personally, coming from financial background financial industry before establishing Dexatel, I used to work with various banks and financial institutions for around 15 years and then I went for a short break on maternity leave, and the inspiration of establishing the new company came during this period, when I had really a lot of time to think about the future and to think about where I want to see myself in the long run. The need for establishing this type of a company was identified. Together with my husband, we used to work in the telecom industry at that time and the need came from the importance of having communication secure, reliable communication solutions that will enable businesses to excel their engagement customer engagement. So this is about inspiration. A little bit about our company mission.

Speaker 2:

From the very start, we were committed to encourage businesses to excel their customer interactions. We are currently focusing on providing cost-efficient and, most importantly, secure communication solutions to all kinds of businesses from different verticals, from different industries, from different parts of the world. It was really difficult in the initial stage, as we had limited resources and we had us as the company pushers, but we were very much committed to the idea of establishing this type of company and helping businesses to excel their communication experience with their customers. The current status of the company is that we are a fully employee-owned company with offices in different parts of the world. I am currently in Estonia, but we have also offices in UAE, in Serbia, in Armenia and, yeah, basically that's it and one small slogan that we're using. So we believe our team believes in mutual success. When our customers win, we win.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's a slogan everyone can get behind. I go back to the early 90s in this space and definitely CPaaS was dominated by, let's say, a few 800-pound gorillas. In this space, it's great to see more you know, new and diverse entrants. So what sets you guys apart in this crowded field of you know? Sms messaging, cloud communications providers.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, sure, let me set the stage. We're offering all types of messaging, communication solutions to our partners, such as one-way SMS, two-way SMS, whatsapp, rcs and others. But what is really our unique value proposition? I would like to state four main topics, four main points for this. The first of all is security. That it's very important. It's a key responsibility for DexApto. Then, the second one I would like to emphasize is cost efficiency. We are considering cost efficiency as one of our most important competitive advantages when entering into partnerships with our partners, with our companies.

Speaker 2:

The third one is customization. We are always committed to have a customizable approach towards our customers and try to offer solutions that will ultimately meet their needs and that will take them to the successful outcome, to meet their goals. And another important part that I would like to emphasize is a customer experience. What really sets us apart is the dedication of helping the customers. We're not just providing solutions, we're not just providing support. We're focusing on the ultimate outcome, successful outcome for the businesses. Again, I will probably repeat that it's about winning. When we are committed to make our customers to win, if they win, this is already a success for us.

Speaker 1:

Wow, very, very nice proposition. So, as we've all seen, personalization you mentioned is becoming more important than ever for customer engagement and customer experiences, and AI and LLMs are really enabling a whole new level of personalization more important than ever for customer engagement and customer experiences, and AI and LLMs are really enabling a whole new level of personalization. How do you think about helping businesses with personalization and enhancing CX?

Speaker 2:

Exactly. Actually, personalization is a key point in our solutions and products we're offering, and it's kind of a different approach for different types of companies. For example, for large enterprises, the focus is on reliability, scalability and, most importantly, cost efficiency. Having large volumes, they are very sensitive to costs, to cutting their costs and, from this perspective, it's very important for us to strive for better global outreach, for better coverage from the supplier perspective, to be able to meet all their different types of needs. We're also offering for big enterprises the API connectivity opportunity to meet their complex requirements.

Speaker 2:

As far as small and medium businesses, it's mostly simplicity for them, accessibility and simplicity. We have established a possibility for them to access our services through web applications. That makes the setup easy within just a couple of minutes and easy to use services. Apart from this, we have dedicated departments. Apart from this, we have dedicated departments for product services, for customer success, for analytics and sales that are constantly working with all different types of customers, irrespective of their size, irrespective of their vertical, so that all of our customers feel they are valued, they are getting the support and they feel personally approached from our side, and this is very important, we believe.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. So you know, as many in the tech world know, estonia has been the sort of digital first society for a long time, sort of the first mover in that whole world. Maybe you can share some examples of how you're helping customers, you know, not just in Estonia but beyond.

Speaker 2:

Yes, sure, as I mentioned. So the initial goal for establishing customers, for establishing the business, is not just to focus on specific country or specific types of customers. The ultimate goal was to capturing both big enterprises as well as small and medium businesses, and they all have different needs and there are different use cases for different types of customers and it's very important from this perspective to again go in a personalized way and understand the specific needs and requirements for each customers. So, from this perspective, I would like to emphasize the cost efficiency. Why? Because we're very successful in Asian market. We have cooperating, partnering for a while with the most successful businesses there and having big logos, and they really have big volumes of traffics on a daily basis and this makes them very sensitive in respect to costs.

Speaker 2:

So we have been working very hard to fine tune and identify the right option, the right solution for this type of enterprises, where they could still enjoy the high quality of the services we are offering as well as reduce their costs from budget perspectives. So I could state that we are quite successful in this. These customers are enjoying working with us because we are always focusing on cutting the costs, on cost efficiency, at the same time maintaining the high quality of the service. There are a number of customers we helped with on the cost efficiency side, but there are a few customers that were onboarded by our teams last year and we have helped them to minimize the cost over 10% and if we multiply this with their big volumes, we can consider that we helped them to save really a lot of money, At the same time having the right quality, at the same time having the ability to improve their user experience and expand their coverage through different parts of the of the markets they were targeting to.

Speaker 1:

Nice. So you're obviously focused on all channels. You know Omnichannel, but certain channels have really been on fire WhatsApp for customer service, and RCS, now that Apple is supporting it. I imagine those have been a huge or will be a huge boost for your business and the different use cases. Tell me more business and the different use cases.

Speaker 2:

Tell me more. Yes, actually Early in September actually, apple already introduced this that they will be supporting RCS in their have already implemented the technology. But it's also increasing interest from the market side and we are currently working intensively to establish new partnerships with mobile network operators that support RBM services, because right now it's still relatively new. Not all of the mobile operators are supporting this type of service. But we believe this is just the start and, in our opinion, rbm rich business messaging solutions are going to be the future in messaging industry by replacing SMS. For this perspective, we're also focusing our attention to RBM as one of the newly developing and capturing the market solution.

Speaker 2:

But apart from them, we have also introduced new features, new solutions, that's, I think. I would like to say a couple of words about them. One is phone number verification service that enables the customers to verify the user's phone numbers, their statuses, enhance their security from frauds and spamming and also again optimize the cost efficiency, because by cleaning their customer data, especially for marketing purposes, they are doing the more targeted marketing campaign and ultimately resulting in cost efficiency. We used to have similar feature some time ago previously marketing campaign and ultimately resulting in cost efficiency. We used to have similar feature some time ago previously, but it was mostly designed for SMBs, where small and medium businesses could check phone numbers of their customers just a few numbers at a time. Now, with this new solution numbers at a time Now. With this new solution, we have implemented the ability to do a number check with unlimited opportunities at the same time. So this is more targeted for big enterprises and they have the ability, through using the solutions, to check the phone numbers of the customers in a bulk without any limitations.

Speaker 2:

And another new thing that we have recently introduced. This is SDK Software Development Kit solutions. This is basically a simple tool enabling small and medium businesses to verify their users. It's a plug-and-play solution which minimizes the efforts and time for new integrations. As we know, big companies they have their in-house development teams that are ready to build all the types of different options for them how to verify their users, and mostly big enterprises are keen to use CPaaS providers, mostly from the supplier perspective rather than deep solution perspective, while for small and medium businesses, they have limited resources. They lack these complicated, sophisticated development teams, and this particular solution will help them to easily, without any unnecessary integrations, to verify their users using the most efficient channel in terms of quality, in terms of cost and in terms of efficiency for a specific market.

Speaker 1:

Wow, well done, very exciting. So it looks like you're operating on a global scale. Maybe talk about your go-to-market when do you have points of presence? If I'm a developer in the US, for example, how would I engage and what is your model? Is it working with enterprises directly and partnering with service providers, or how do you see that over time?

Speaker 2:

We are using a mixed model. There is no specific separate model that we're using. We are going directly to enterprises. From this perspective, we have many customers where we established direct partnerships, but we are also working with other mobile service providers, messaging providers, other CPaaS industry players and with some that we're not directly connected, where we're using them as a channel that can direct their traffic to us. So it's kind of different. There is no specific approach here. We are very flexible. Here. We want to capture as many customers as possible. We, as I mentioned, are quite successful in the Asian market, where the market goes more and more digital and businesses expand quite aggressively, and this has become already a success story for us. Now we're targeting more Middle East, where we have office in Dubai, and Middle East is also a very important part of this market and we're pursuing it. Europe is already where we're well established ourselves because we're our origins. Our roots are coming from, from Europe and, yeah, that's it.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful Well. Congratulations on all the success. What's on your radar for the rest of the year? Any events or meetings, get-togethers? What's on your itinerary?

Speaker 2:

I personally will be in Sweden next week. It's more of a founder-related event, but we are very much actively participating in the industry-specific events, including me Our team is part of. The team is currently in Africa working with establishing new partnerships with some African enterprises as well as mobile operators and service providers. We are preparing, with the whole team, to visit Madrid next week. It's again happening. It's a big event dedicated for the SIPA solution providers. The next one is going to happen in London and every year we are also visiting Mobile World Congress where it gathers all the industry players, from technology perspective, from mobile service provider perspectives, from CIFAS perspective, from all kinds of perspectives. So this is for the coming months and until February. All in all, we are very much focusing also on our December event that will take place in Singapore, again targeted to Asian customers, to Asian market, probably is what a great schedule.

Speaker 1:

you have A lot of plane travel, as always, but exciting times in the CPAS and messaging space in particular. Congratulations on all the success, onwards and upwards.

Speaker 2:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much for joining and thanks everyone for listening and watching and we'll catch you next time. Take care.

Speaker 2:

Thank you.