If you would have told me 12 months ago when I accepted the CEO position at Akixi we were about to change the way cloud services are sold, I would have been sceptical to say the least. But with 12 months passed, Akixi is about to launch the Intelligence Hub, the first tool of its kind to assist service providers in identifying upsell opportunities in the business voice market. It has been quite a journey to arrive at this point which I’d like to share.
Going back in time
Let’s roll back the months to March 2022. When I arrived, Akixi was known for producing high quality analytics for cloud voice services to the business market. Sold and delivered via some of the most well-known cloud communication providers, Akixi provides services to hundreds of thousands of users every day ensuring they know vital information about their customer engagement.
So far so good, but what next?
Although sizable, Akixi’s installed base was still a small fraction of the cloud communications market but the capabilities it provides were needed by all cloud users. How to create greater attachment? We started a project codenamed “Light Up the Base” which aimed to attach Akixi to as many cloud communication seats as possible. We knew we could take our product to many more segments of the market but performing the upsell is a notoriously challenging aspect of cloud communications.
The “moment”
We devised processes, go to market programs and linked it together with a system for trialling Akixi products. That system ingests large amounts of customer data to create snapshots for the sales channel to identify business benefits associated with Akixi and propose free trials. Then came what has been known internally as our “Viagra moment”. Viagra is probably the most famous product ever discovered by accident and I have to say so was our Intelligence Hub. Originally designed to run the upsell process and trialling we found our public preview partners were using Intelligence Hub to upsell way more than Akixi.
Which got us thinking, could we automate some of this to identify opportunities for both Akixi and third-party products? To cut a long story short, that is exactly what we did and now Intelligence Hub is being announced as the market’s first customer intelligence tool with automated upsell capability. I have to say it has been a wild ride these past few months but here we are with a game changer for the cloud communications industry. The era of Intelligence Hub is here.
