The contact center software industry has been growing at an incredibly rapid pace, projected to increase almost 20% from 2020-2027. As a global concern, it’s expected to reach $72B in the next five years.
But when Convoso’s founders entered the market 15 years ago, it was a different landscape.
At that time telemarketing businesses relied on expensive on-premises systems and operated with much fewer regulations. This contrasts with today’s predominantly cloud based contact center software solutions and businesses operating sales and lead generation constrained by a highly regulated environment.
Any technology that wants to stay in the game has to adapt and innovate…continuously. And this innovation is at the fundamental core of Convoso’s success and growth.
What started as a favor to a family member has grown to be today’s leading outbound contact center software solution for sales and lead generation teams.
Convoso has always been, at its heart, a family business.
In 2006, a cousin of co-founders Nima and Bobby Hakimi came to them with a challenge. He owned a mortgage company and had sales people manually dialing leads. He wondered if they could help figured out a way to automate the dialing process. Bobby used his engineering know-how to develop a solution for the cousin.
Bobby and Nima realized that they were on the cusp of a new technology trend with VOIP, making calls through a computer.
On-premise, hardware-based call center software was the most common technology as the millennium rolled over. This legacy tech often required (and still requires) huge upfront investments in infrastructure and installation.
Businesses were waking up to an emergence of cloud-based technology around this time. With reach of the internet expanding in the 1990’s, SaaS (Software as a Service) rapidly grew as a burgeoning technology. In 1999, Salesforce appeared on the scene with their cloud-based CRM system.
From there, cloud-based solutions for contact centers slowly but surely began to materialize. That said, the on-premise approach would remain predominant for some time. In fact, a 2011 poll found that 71% of contact centers had no plans to move to the cloud.
Still, innovations through these years were pointing the way toward a brighter future for call center teams—even if it took many companies a while to see the light.
The first iteration of the Hakimi brothers’ product was part of this rising wave of innovation—one that focused on delivering leaner, more agile, and more affordable access to call center software.
Building on a foundation of the open source software VICIdial, the brothers developed a cloud-based product that delivered results for over 10 years for a wide range of businesses far beyond the Hakimi family.
Over the course of that first decade, the needs of call centers and sales teams evolved drastically. In 2005, 9 in 10 American households owned a landline phone. By 2015, that number was down to about half of households (let alone the fact that many of these phones already weren’t seeing much use).
As consumers shifted toward digital, call center technology providers responded in kind, beginning to develop omnichannel contact center solutions that could reach customers via text and email.
Advances in call center data analytics capabilities as well as artificial intelligence solutions for call centers began to impact the ways that managers and agents carried out their jobs.
The evolution of call center technology has also demanded a response to a significant rise in laws meant to protect consumers and curtail bad telemarketing practices.
From 2000-2010s, more accessible automated dialing enabled outreach to massive databases from many sources, and caused robocalling to explode while creating headaches for US consumers. In response to an outcry, government regulations grew tighter, which lead to greater compliance hurdles for call centers that persist to this day.
While trying to keep up with these seismic shifts in the marketplace, something became clear about the Hakimi brother’s solution: The open source code that had helped deliver innovation in the previous decade was no longer fit for the task. Due to the basic structure and a number of bugs in the original open source code, the call center software would crash when new features were added or call volumes reached a certain level.
Ultimately, the Hakimi’s—and their significantly expanded team—knew that something had to give. If they weren’t able to help the customers the software was built to support, they would have to shut down. Or… they could scrap the whole thing and build their own proprietary code from scratch.
And that’s the tough choice they made.
To develop the right software to meet the needs of their customers, they interviewed a multitude of call center owners and managers to understand their pain points.
After a three-year development process, in 2017 the new dialer software launched, rebranded as Convoso. With a solid platform capable of responding to updates and expanded features, the company set a course toward providing the best technology available for outbound contact centers, supporting the compliance needs of today’s call center operations.
Building the best technology and continuously innovating is possible because of the people who make that happen, at every level.
That’s why building the company is more than code. It goes back to that family beginning.
We believe in taking care of each other, collaborating on solutions, supporting individual growth.
Every week the company meets in a “huddle” with team members across the globe to recognize the ways in which individuals exemplify the company’s core values.
Convoso has a strong leadership team guiding a long term growth plan. We have the passion of a start up, but we now have the perspective of experience. With 15 years of innovation as a foundation, the future looks exceptionally bright!
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Convoso is a leading CCaaS contact center software provider for sales and lead generation teams. Since 2006, Convoso has remained at the forefront of innovation, consistently developing solutions to foster customer growth while supporting adherence to regulatory standards. Its omnichannel capabilities include conversational AI game-changer Voso.ai to scale sales and revenue further.
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