Kindly share your feedback on how GoodFirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
We haven’t been actively reaching out to customers to solicit reviews, so we are looking to ramp up our efforts. We understand that positive reviews can make a big difference to get potential customers to your website and Good Firms is a great resource for companies to find partners.
Please introduce your product and give a brief about your role within the organization.
QuickBlox is a cloud-based platform that provides communication and collaboration features such as instant messaging, video and voice calls, push notifications, and file sharing for mobile and web applications. This communication functionality is accessible through ready-to-use Software Development Kits (SDKs) and APIs.
In addition, we recently launched a white-label chat & video consultation app–Q-Consultation– that can be customized and integrated into a company’s existing website or software system.
I founded the company with a business partner and became the sole owner and CEO in 2018. My original background was in SMS messaging so with the growth of communications we wanted to provide tools and solutions that make communications easier and cheaper.
What was the objective behind coming up with this software?
The objective behind this software is to help developers and businesses add real-time communication capabilities to their products and services with minimal effort and cost.
For example, Q-Consultation was built during the Covid-19 pandemic. It provides healthcare, schools, and other businesses with a quick and cost-efficient means to provide confidential video meetings with patients, students, and customers.
How is your software beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other software alternatives available in the market?
One of the advantages of QuickBlox is that we offer a range of pricing plans so that we can meet developers and companies wherever they are in their journey, from a small startup, just starting out, who can sign up for a free account to try out our software, to large enterprises that want a fully managed product. Our customers also have the freedom to host the software where they want.
Plus, unlike most of the alternatives on the market, we offer free open-source code for our ready-built Q-Consultation app. This means developers and businesses have access to a free teleconsultation solution.
What industries do you generally cater to? Which industries in general are highly benefiting by using your software?
Our software is used across multiple industries. We have customers in finance and fintech, e-commerce and retail, social networking and dating, and the education and coaching space. Our healthcare and health tech customers use our SDKs, APIs, and Q-Consultation to add secure (HIPAA) compliant chat and video calling both for internal communications and for remote consultation with patients.
What are the key features of your software that makes it stand apart from your competitor products in the market?
There are 3 features that make our software stand out. First, we can deploy our software wherever you need it. You are not restricted to hosting it within our own cloud infrastructure. For industries like healthcare and finance that have regulatory concerns over data privacy, our software is attractive because it can be deployed on-premise within the company’s own hosting environment or preferred cloud provider.
For businesses needing a ready-solution, Q-Consultation has great appeal as it is fully customizable and embeddable. The app saves companies and their development team a huge amount of time and resources. I’m unaware of any of our competitors offering a similar solution.
Finally, our pricing plans to access our SDKs, APIs, and communication platform remain competitive.
What is the customer satisfaction rate according to you? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?
We have a great customer success team who reach out to our customers for regular reviews and actively solicit feedback, which we take seriously. If customers are making a similar request for a new feature - this information is fed back to our product development team and taken into consideration when planning software updates. Our Q-Consultation app was a direct result of customers requesting a ready-made virtual meeting room app with video chat during the Covid pandemic.
Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what is the percentage of repeat customers that you have?
We are a CPaaS business (communication platform as a service), which means we offer a subscription model. Customers sign up for a subscription to use our services and once they integrate with our software, they often remain with us for several years. It’s always great when we get new customers who come to us via word-of-mouth.
Does your software product provide any resource or knowledge section for its users? If yes, what kind of material is provided to your users to help them get acquainted with your product?
I would like to think we do a great job providing resources and a knowledge base to get our customers acquainted with our product. We have rich documentation for each of our platforms and additional notes available in the GitHub repository. We provide a range of free sample apps, so developers can learn our code and integrate easily. We publish how-to-tutorials on a regular basis that cover a variety of topics and are working on producing more video tutorials. We have dedicated support pages where customers can access our FAQs and tutorials. We have also just launched a QuickBlox Developer Discord channel where developers can share knowledge and information, and we can post about useful resources and updates to products.
What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?
We offer a tiered level of support depending on which plan you purchase. On the free tier, we offer community support via Stack Overflow, Github, and Discord. On the paid shared cloud plans, we have a ticketing system to make support requests. For our Enterprise customers, we offer 24/7 support under SLA. We also have an active customer success team who consults regularly with customers to ensure they are getting the most out of our product.
What has been the revenue for your product for 2022?
Our revenues are greater than a million.
Where do you see your product in the next 10 years?
We are releasing a number of embeddable communication plugins. In 10 year's time, I imagine that in addition to our SDKs and APIs, we will be offering several embeddable apps/plug-ins like Q-Consultation covering a wide variety of common use cases that can be customized, integrated into other platforms and applications, and ready-to-go.
