The new Clarity platform has been rebuilt from the ground up using the latest API REST architecture, and ConnectMeVoice expects that it will help attract customers beyond its traditional sub-250 customer base, as well as new partners that serve those new customers.
Chris Van Wagoner, ConnectMeVoice’s COO
Unified communications provider ConnectMeVoice has launched its new Clarity open UCaaS platform and management portal. The new platform is designed to simplify things for both customers and the MSPs who are ConnectMeVoice’s sole route to market. It was built from the ground up to provide a level of both transparency and intelligence that was not in the previous platform.
ConnectMeVoice has been in business for 25 years, starting out as a text messaging platform and evolving into a full-featured VoIP platform a decade ago. The UCaaS platform was a more recent addition, and dates from a year and a half ago. While they were originally based in New Jersey, and their main support centre is still there, the company’s main offices are now in Summerville South Carolina.
“Our route to market is MSPs throughout North America, and our market is any customers who are reachable in North America, including Canada as well as the U.S.,” said Chris Van Wagoner, ConnectMeVoice’s COO.
“We service, through our MSP partners, primarily small to medium-sized business customers,” Van Wagoner said. “Our sweet spot is about 250 employees and under, including lots of franchisees. We have between 100 and 200 partners in North America, and have been growing about 25-30% annually through COVID. Our partners don’t have the technical staff to do all the integrations between the services and the on prem systems. We can give them all the full-featured integrated service where they don’t have to have that expertise. We don’t charge by the user – just by what the customer is using. Another differentiation in our partnership with the MSPs is that we aren’t so big that they are just a number to us.”
The new Clarity platform will benefit both partners and customers
“When I joined ConnectMeVoice, it became very clear to me that there were two major shifts going on in the industry,” Van Wagoner said. “The way we had worked was to offer our product as a white label to MSPs. But what they increasingly needed was a place where they could use a single tool to do everything they could do, rather than use a tool for this and a tool for that. We needed to bring everything all together where partners and users could go do everything they needed during this process.”
The second thing was a reduction in complexity.
“I learned there were a lot of complexities,” Van Wagoner noted. “VoIP and UCaaS are not simple technologies. There are a lot of things in the background. We needed a simpler user experience to hide the complexity because people were getting overwhelmed. So we started from scratch and whiteboarded how it would feel and operate, and then we built this from scratch using the latest API REST architecture.” This was all done in collaboration with user experience [UX] experts, product management, IT service partners and end users.
Van Wagoner said the new platform has several major advantages
“We made extensive use of time and motion analysis to make complex tasks much easier, and are now able to link things in a consistent way,” he stated. “Because we built this with the latest technology, we can now offer strategic software vendor partners integrated communication capabilities right into their software. We also offer a whole host of transparency and intelligence that wasn’t there before. It gives people a better understanding of what’s going on without mucking it up with a lot of technology. That’s also the big takeaway for MSPs, that no longer do you have to be an expert to be able to do all this stuff.”
The CMV management portal also improves ease of use and transparency. The embedded Call Analytics provides increased visibility across call quality, call lifecycle, SIP history and call recordings. These allow partners and users to directly access call details, dramatically improving customer experience. The portal also incorporates the latest security strategies covering strict role-based security, two-factor authentication [2FA], and anti-phishing protocols.
Van Wagoner said that the Clarity platform should enhance both its partner and customer bases, and move both upmarket to some degree.
“It will allow us to continue to elevate the quality of partners that we attract because of the new capabilities,” he indicated. It also lets us address a market opportunity to upper mid -size companies.”
