IT Brief Australia - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
Story image
Exclusive: SecureCo continues to impress with IVP offering
Thu, 23rd Feb 2023
FYI, this story is more than a year old

SecureCo is a voice technology company that is focused on enabling organisations to innovate their customer experience by democratising corporate telephony. Its Intelligent Voice Platform reduces voice technology complexities with smart voice orchestration to help enable better customer experiences.

Every month, SecureCo's Intelligent Voice Platform (IVP) delivers millions of calls to world-leading systems integrators, software vendors, and enterprises. It provides secure and innovative voice services for many of Australia's most trusted brands. 

IVP acts as a hub connecting all of a company's calling, contact centre, unified communications and enterprise voice technologies with the services required to create the customer experience of the future, one that prioritises convenience and empathy. 

This means customers can now use real-time voice-based AI services and simplify their cloud migration while keeping existing investments. 

SecureCo was founded in Sydney in 2013 and now operates in Australia and New Zealand.

SecureCo is also expanding into North America, where it recently helped a local partner provide global coverage for their customer. SecureCo's capacity in the UK is also being developed.

As for the business itself, 90% of SecureCo's business is run through the channel.

With a heritage in delivering secure hosting and payments, SecureCo helps its customers de-risk their contact centres and achieve PCI-DSS compliance. Its' agent-assisted payment solutions enable organisations to protect their customers and confidently process payments over the phone.

SecureCo's PCI DSS solution now secures more than 60 brands and has contributed significantly towards the company's growth over the past decade.

"We're seeing a convergence of issues that is positively contributing to our growth trajectory. For example, the demand for cloud migration, the need to integrate new technology like AI and Analytics into voice services and the merging of UCaaS with CCaaS technologies have all meant SecureCo's offering is uniquely positioned to solve a number of business pain points," says Paul Bird, CEO & Founder, SecureCo.

"In response to these trends, our client base has seen strong growth over the past 12 months, with over 80+ enterprise and government customers. Also, our shift towards a partner-led strategy means we are building a resilient business and our recent expansion into Canada and the United States signals significant growth for us in the coming years."

SecureCo's Intelligent Voice Platform

SecureCo's Intelligent Voice Platform helps organisations accelerate their customer experience transformation by reducing voice technology complexities through smart voice orchestration. 

Unlike programmable communication tools, which require software developers and voice engineers to build and support the custom development, IVP is a turn-key solution that helps partners and customers focus on their customers, not managing telephony ecosystems.

The Intelligent Voice Platform is an all-in-one software platform that democratises enterprise telephony. The platform provides a no-code solution for supplying and managing corporate telephony and connecting contact centres with unified communications platforms. With the platform, businesses can easily record and transform the voice stream in real-time to facilitate speech intelligence, analytics, compliance automation, biometrics, and secure payments.

SecureCo enables AI speech intelligence (i.e. Intelligent Voice Agents/bots, etc.) for its customers by orchestrating and transforming the voice data stream in real-time. This means its partners can sell and support a best-in-class speech intelligence solution that works for their customer.

"We find we get quite a few 'jaw drop' moments when discussing our platform with prospective partners and end-customers. Mostly, they are shocked at just how easy we make enterprise voice. The biggest selling point in our favour is that we're a one-stop shop. Where end-customers and systems integrators, and MSPs might usually need to seek technologies from a number of vendors, SecureCo can provide everything required to deliver enterprise voice in one place. This creates cost efficiencies and a lot less headaches," continues Bird.

"We're also vendor-agnostic, meaning partners and customers have their choice between carriers and technologies, allowing them to continually keep up with new innovations. Due to the stickiness of our service quality and support, we also have very low customer churn rates."

SecureCo's Partners and Challenges

The pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic also hit SecureCo. During the pandemic, there was a surge in demand for digital services to meet the need to transition to remote work and deal with increased call volumes and customer inquiries related to COVID-19.

With hybrid work here to stay, SecureCo is seeing organisations accelerate their digital and customer experience transformation projects. Voice is essential for CX transformation. With less than 20% of contact centres globally in the cloud, SecureCo's partners have a massive opportunity to capitalise on cloud migration and unified communications adoption.

SecureCo's partners are systems integrators, managed service providers, telco operators, contact centres, and unified communication solutions providers working with SMBs, large enterprises and government organisations. They typically have specialised practices in digital transformation and customer experience.

In 2018 Pyrios, now known as Blackbox, was SecureCo's first partner, with NTT following closely behind. 

SecureCo has two different types of partners that they work with:

Platform Partners

Platform Partners are Systems Integrators and Managed Service Providers with expertise in digital transformation, customer experience, contact centre, and unified communications solutions. 

SecureCo works with vendors delivering Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS), Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) and operators of telecommunications networks. 

SecureCo has three tiers of Platform Partners, which are dependent upon their technology focus, service offerings, vendor alignment and resourcing/reach: Premier, Select and Affiliate Platform Partners.

Across Australia and New Zealand, SecureCo has 17 of these Platform Partners.

Connect Partners:

Connect Partners are Independent Software Vendors and developers of speech intelligence solutions of Speech Analytics, Intelligent Voice Agents, identity management & biometrics, compliance & payments. 

SecureCo's Connect partners integrate with our Intelligent Voice Platform to sell their solutions via the SecureCo Intelligent Voice Platform Marketplace.

SecureCo enables its partners to deliver faster DX/CX innovation by democratising voice. This is done through numerous means, including:

  • Creating New Market Opportunities: Capitalising on digital and CX transformation projects and the convergence of CCaaS and UCaaS.
  • Generating New Recurring Revenue: Creating profitable recurring revenue streams through voice.
  • Value-adding their offerings: Retaining and expanding their existing customer base with hyper-relevant voice solutions and services.
  • Transforming their business: Creating operational efficiencies to maximise profits with our Intelligent RevOps solution that is seamlessly integrated with SecureCo's Intelligent Voice Platform.

As for what are the key challenges that SecureCo's customers are facing and how it solves them, there were a few standouts:

  • Cloud migration: SecureCo helps to manage the complexity of bringing real-time communications to the cloud.
  • Systems operability: Legacy hardware-based technology hinders access to next-generation AI voice software like speech analytics, intelligent voice agents, identity management & biometrics, etc.
  • Voice data connectivity: It's challenging to deploy speech intelligence across all voice touch-points across the front office (contact centres) and back office (unified communications – remote workers).
  • Vendor lock-in: This prevents organisations from accessing best-in-class technology critical to innovating customer/employee experience and accelerating digital transformation.

"Our partners are absolutely critical to our organisation's success. As we sell almost exclusively through the channel in ANZ, our partners are integral to the sustainability and growth of our business. That's why we launched our new partner program in late 2022, as we expanded our offering from secure payments towards SaaS voice orchestration. With our new Intelligent Voice Platform, we knew we needed to build up our partner ecosystem with the proper knowledge and expertise to help democratise voice tech," continues Bird.

"Our main goal is to enable the success of our partners and support them in building differentiated solutions and opening new recurring revenue streams. We're excited to leverage our new program to find innovative ways to support our partners to grow and become more agile as the technology landscape evolves."

To learn more about SecureCo's offerings and what it can do for you, you can find more information on its website.