Exotel is a cloud telephony service provider for small and medium enterprises in India. Cloud telephony refers specifically to voice services and more specifically the replacement of conventional business telephone equipment, such as a Private branch exchange (PBX), with third-party VoIP service. Cloud services is a broad term, referring primarily to data-center-hosted services that are run and accessed over an Internet infrastructure. It provides virtual phone numbers and telephony applications to businesses.

Exotel was started by Shivakumar, for his previous venture Roopit, for which he needed a simple automated call center solution. He built an in-house solution, and eventually it became a standalone company. Exotel picked up a Rs. 25 million funding from Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures in March 2012. As of June 2013, the company has annual revenues crossing Rs. 10 million and more than 350 clients. On 20 Jan 2014 Exotel hit 500 Customer mark, plans to add 1500 customers by the end of 2014. Exotel provides small and medium enterprises in India products like IVR, SMS, Call Recording Software, and other applications around cloud telephony. They also provide APIto developers and technology teams to build 3rd party applications for businesses.

Cloud communications providers deliver voice & data communications applications and services, hosting them on servers that the providers own and maintain, giving their customers access to the “cloud.” Cloud communications are Internet-based voice and data communications where telecommunications applications, switching and storage are hosted by a third-party outside of the organization using them, and they are accessed over the public Internet. Because they only pay for services or applications they use, customers have a more cost-effective, reliable and secure communications environment, without the headaches associated with more conventional PBX system deployment.

A lot of features that exotel offer are listed below as:

Complete control over your calls:

With Exotel’s, Cloud Telephony, we can now have intelligent call flows that will route calls to the right agents based on your requirements. And building this call flow is as simple as dragging and dropping the right commands.

Seamlessly sync data between your CRM and your phone system:

Now all the call data and call recordings of the customers can directly be accessed in the CRM. Everytime you make a new call or send a new next, you can automatically update it in your CRM using our APIs.

Record all your calls:

All your calls, both incoming and outgoing, will now be recorded and available in your Exotel dashboard. Track actionable insights in real-time: Reporting is a major functionality for building a smarter business. Cloud telephony makes this really simple.

Simple and Powerful APIs:

Plug in the data into the CRM and make for an enriching experience at your end. Imagine all call logs of your customer, data on voice & SMS integrated with your ticketing platform, or support application/sales CRM. The API allow you to do this and more.

Save time and click-to-call:

Use the Exotel Chrome plugin to make calls directly from your browser without having to copy-paste phone numbers to your dashboard. Download the plugin, log into your Exotel account and you’re good to go. Now, you can call any phone number on your chrome browser with just a click.

Multi-level IVR:

Have a professional message to greet your customers every time they call. Now, you can get them to “Press 1 for sales, 2 for support” etc and route their calls to the relevant team with no manual intervention. Build an IVR that works best for you.

Call Analytics:

They firmly believe that you can only measure what you track. Just the way you need Google analytics to tell you exactly what’s happening on your website, when you use Exotel’s cloud telephony, you get easy, accessible and real-time insights on how your business is functioning over your phone system.

Real-time notifications:

They  want you to never miss a customer call . So, every time a call is missed, get an email notification along with the number of the customer who’s call you missed.

Exotel is growing at a rapid pace and their revenues and customer base are growing. Their churn rate is at an all-time low and they hav rolled out some really cool features like an all new dashboard with unparalleled search features, priority SMS, bulk SMS etc.