Deskforce implements Google Compute Engine on Google Cloud Platform to reduce client onboarding from days to minutes and enable rapid scaling, offering clients a faster and more stable service.
Google Cloud Results
- Reduces onboarding time for clients from days to minutes, helping the sales team to process clients faster
- Increases market reach by up to 20% by removing limits on scaling and geographical location of clients
- Improves service performance for clients by increasing system stability, thanks to rapid deployment
Client onboarding times
reduced from days to minutes
The quicker that center agents can make phone calls, the more customers and clients they can reach. Deskforce is a real-time communications platform provider, offering a range of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, including predictive dialing, and an integrated Public Branch Exchange (PBX) business phone network system that helps call centers function more efficiently. With offices in Jerusalem and Bulgaria, Deskforce was ranked amongst the fastest-growing tech companies in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in 2017, according to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA list.
“The voice, messaging, and video conferencing industry is a competitive one. A powerful cloud platform helps us rise to the challenges while allowing us to create a competitive advantage.”
—Dan Leubitz, CTO, Deskforce
“Our products enable call center workforces across sales, retention, and support departments to be more efficient, lowering costs while increasing performance,” says Dan Leubitz, CTO at Deskforce. “For example, our predictive dialer integrates with a company’s lead generation tools and pre-validates phone numbers, then automatically dials at the best moment so agents deal only with live calls. Because we’re supporting real-time communication for around 10,000 agents, our system has to be fast and always available.”
Because of its rapid growth, Deskforce needed an infrastructure that could scale easily and enable a more agile expansion of the business, all while keeping costs down. Migrating from hosted servers located in Europe to the cloud was the answer, and Compute Engine on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was the perfect fit.
“The voice, messaging, and video conferencing industry is a competitive one,” says Dan. “A powerful cloud platform helps us rise to the challenges while allowing us to create a competitive advantage.”
Working with WideOps for a more agile infrastructure
When a business is experiencing rapid growth, keeping pace with the growing number of incoming clients and making the most of new opportunities can be a challenge. As Deskforce expanded internationally, its infrastructure was struggling to keep up with demand. “In order to have enough capacity for our peak traffic, we had many servers that were underused at all other times, meaning we were wasting resources,” explains Dan. “We were buying servers far beyond capacity simply to ensure we didn’t have any downtime. Moreover, our onboarding time for new clients was three or four days.” Deskforce wanted to create an infrastructure that was more cost-efficient and could simplify client onboarding.
To do that, it migrated its infrastructure to virtual machines on Google Compute Engine. “We started looking at cloud solutions, and the GCP interface was the most intuitive and approachable,” says Dan. The Google Cloud team then introduced Deskforce to implementation partner WideOps, to support the migration.
“Thanks to Google Compute Engine, we’ve seen an increase in the quality of our communication services, with a reduction in latency. That means a net increase across the board for the number of calls our clients are able to make.”
—Dan Leubitz, CTO, Deskforce
“WideOps was the right partner for us, in terms of diligence and their ability to deliver in terms of performance,” Dan explains. “It was a learning curve for us, and we had a lot of productive conversations that we still refer back to today. It took two months from the beginning to the first server going into production.”
Deskforce took a phased approach, first migrating its dialing service and then its largest clients with the highest traffic demands in terms of peaks during the day. “It was important for Deskforce to have an infrastructure that was not just cloud-ready, but cloud-native,” explains Guy Shafir, CTO at WideOps. “That’s what creates a robust system that is ready to deploy as quickly as possible. The operating system that Deskforce uses had not previously been tested on GCP, but we created a custom deployment that is stable, highly secure, and scalable.”
“In terms of deploying a server, before, it would take a team of four or five people to carry out that task, whereas now one person can do it with a click. What was a lengthy and complex process is now as easy as logging in to my Gmail account,” says Dan.
Reducing onboarding times, from days to minutes
The provisioning process previously involved several different teams from across the company. “When a lead comes in, we look at their location and number of agents,” says Dan. “We calculate how fast they’re dialing and how many calls they’re processing to predict the load and provision the correct server. Before, it could have taken the procurement department up to a day to purchase a server, there would be a wait to get the server delivered, and then the job would be passed between our IT, Quality Assurance, and onboarding teams. That’s why the onboarding process was taking days.”
Not only did this mean the time to market was lengthy, but the manual process also created possibilities for human error at each stage, creating a stressful situation for the sales team. “Today, in comparison, once we have the specification, it is only passed on once, to the person who clicks and provisions the server,” says Dan. “The limit on the number of clients we can onboard within a day has been transformed, and the sales team is more confident and works more efficiently.”
“Our market reach is up by around 20 percent. We can now go to market in locations where previously it wouldn’t have been possible, both in terms of scaling up and achieving the required performance through the global network of Google Cloud.”
—Dan Leubitz, CTO, Deskforce
To speed up the process even more, the next step is to enable clients to order their own servers through the Deskforce system. “We are currently building an interface through which clients will be able to simply make a payment and order their own server, which is then immediately deployed,” Dan explains.
Growing globally and extending market reach
Since moving to GCP, Deskforce has improved the quality of the service it provides to its customers. “Thanks to Google Compute Engine, we’ve seen an increase in the quality of our communication services, with a reduction in latency,” says Dan. “That means a net increase across the board for the number of calls our clients are able to make. In turn, that translates into revenue growth for us as a company. Before, it took 25 minutes to reboot a server, whereas now we can immediately spin up a new one, so our clients experience less downtime.”
Since provisioning times have been reduced from three or four days to minutes, and the company now has the ability to scale immediately, its market reach has increased significantly. “Our market reach is up by around 20 percent. We can now go to market in locations where previously it wouldn’t have been possible, both in terms of scaling up and achieving the required performance through the global network of Google Cloud.”
Now, as well as automating its customer server provisioning, Deskforce is planning to explore the full range of services offered by GCP. “We already have a speech-to-text product as part of our services, so we’re definitely planning to look at switching to Cloud Speech-to-Text. We’re also really interested in big data, and what machine learning can offer. It would be fantastic if we could predict the best times for calling customers within particular industries, for example, using the data we have accumulated and Cloud AutoML.”
“We’re planning to continue our rapid geographical expansion, looking to the Philippines and the United States in 2019,” says Dan. “We see the GCP toolset as a guide for our roadmap from a technology perspective. The added value it offers fits synergistically with where we want to go.”
About Deskforce
Deskforce is an interactive communication platform including voice, sms, and video services that increase call center agent efficiency and enable companies to engage their customers more effectively.
Industry:
Technology
Location:
Israel
About Wide Ops LTD
WideOps is a Google Cloud Premier Partner with a proven track record of consistently delivering state of the art solutions to their customers.
Products
Google Cloud PlatformProfessional Services Organization