Startup of the Week – Corefactors

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Founded in –  2013

Industry –  Tech

Founder –  Sharmila Sundaram

CEO – Sharmila Sundaram

Startup Motto – Lending a hand to customers in the sales, marketing, and communication space.

Startup Funding – $86,906

Startup Market Cap – $5.02M

Team Size –  25

---

Below is the transcript of our interview with Corefactors.

Could you please tell us about Corefactors to our readers and entrepreneurs, what it is all about? 

Corefactors has seen struggles in maintaining leads for a business, tracking the team’s progress, and accessing reports in a conventional excel sheet. While all of this led to the inefficiency of the business functioning, it also added the difficulty of juggling between various platforms.

Intending to shove away the roadblocks in the way of business sales, marketing, and communication, Corefactors understood the gap. That’s how Teleduce emerged into the business as an “ Integrated CRM to empower marketing, sales, and support teams with inbuilt cloud telephony.”

Now, Teleduce is helping 8000+ Users to sell faster and scale faster.

 

What is your customer service like? What approach do you follow to resolve customer issues faster?

“Nearly three out of five customers report that good customer service is the key for them to feel loyalty towards a brand.” We at Corefactors believe this, and we implement it too.

Among four significant operations (as we call it a box): Marketing Box, Lead Box, Success Box, and Support Box that we handle in Teleduce, the support box is vital. When a lead logs a complaint, it directly lands in the support box, and then an agent will assign the ticket to a respective support executive to avoid missing a single complaint.

We also highlight overdue tasks and assign priority levels to the tickets generated as complaints and resolve them faster.

 

What is Teleduce? Could you please elaborate?

Teleduce is an Integrated CRM software to help various customers in marketing, sales, and support.

It is the software used by businesses to capture leads to converting them into customers and retaining them.

How does it work:

You have access to creating Email, SMS campaigns and broadcasting them to your large set of customer data. In addition, you can run campaigns on third-party websites such as Facebook, Justdial, 99acres and capture leads by integrating with Teleduce. You can also create a landing page and use the URL in your campaigns or website to capture leads.

All this comes under the Marketing Box when your marketing is done.

Your leads from various sources are safe with us inside the Lead Box, and you can start engaging with them through Email, SMS, Whatsapp, In-built Calls inside Teleduce itself. You can also schedule meetings, make a note of the current situation with your lead and categorize your lead into hot, warm, and cold. 

Next comes, Success Box where our converted customers take a seat here. Inside this box, a customer gets full attention to what they require to achieve their goals. The agent will make the process run smoothly for them after the purchase.  Also, the relationship between the customer and the support team builds up here, making it easier for the users to solve their problems.

Another crucial part of CRM, and as I discussed, is the “Support Box,” where we collect all the customer’s complaints and issues and resolve them faster.

This is not over yet.

We have different features like: 

Tasks: To track your team’s day-to-day tasks.

Call logs: To have a look at the overall call report.

Integrations: Teleduce enables customers to integrate with third-party websites like Shopify, 99acres, Justdial, and many more to gather leads from these sites too.

Reports: 

Reports section allows you to get a hand on

Productivity report of your sales team.

Marketing report which has campaign performance.

Content Manager: To create templates, messages for your Email Campaign, SMS campaign.

List Management: You can import your customer’s data here through an excel file and store it.

 

You know there is a lot of competition in the market, could you tell us what makes you different from your competitors? And what parameters do you follow before you sell your product to the customers?

To be specific, our product Teleduce offers everything to the customer on a single plate. When a customer understands Teleduce, he need not invest in another CRM tool or juggle between word file to excel file.

Customers can benefit from every feature we offer, they all are customer-centric, and that is how we designed the tool too. If I have to talk about competitors, I would like to put it this way “ Our customers are our competitors, and they bring out the best in us.”

Coming to the question;  what parameters do we follow before we sell our product to the customers?

We prefer to serve the customers in ways they would like us to. If a company inquiries only about providing them Cloud Telephony, we would offer that alone. We don’t manipulate our customers to buy anything more from us when they don’t have to.

So, the first parameter is a Requirement – We offer our product to meet customers’ requirements.

The second parameter is Onboarding Customers – We streamline the process of welcoming a customer to Teleduce.

There’s no hassle and no confusion.

We provide a manual that can be read and understood with ease. We also advise them to reach us for any queries. And we help them in every possible way.

 

How does a company, be it small or medium, benefit from using Teleduce?

Zypp Electric, India’s leading last-mile delivery app.

Zypp has increased productivity up to 27% and sales upto 6% using Teleduce.

CEO and Co-founder of Zypp Electric, Mr.Akash, said:

” With Teleduce we can track all our rider callers in a structured way. Tech solutions offered helped reduce lead leakage and quick TAT, which increased team productivity “.

This is one of the verticals we help our customers through. We have many more success stories in real estate, Healthcare, Fintech, Edtech, E-Commerce, Logistics, and Technology.

 

What are the challenges you faced during the initial days? And how did you push through?

Building a product was the biggest challenge. We started off as a service provider company. So, creating a product from scratch involved lots of changes.

The other challenge we faced was bringing in the right team and especially the sales team to meet our goals. Then dealing with the change in the mindset of the entire team refrained us. It took us lots of effort and time. But then there was more to it. First, we had to trust in every process to position ourselves in the market.

We all face challenges, and we all have to overcome them. Although, I do not want to sugarcoat the process of overcoming these challenges in our way. We felt awful. But I realized that we needed to move on. Self-analyzing paved the way for acknowledging where we stand and understanding where to improvise ourselves.

I have watched numerous motivational videos. They did make me better. However, I always felt there was no one to back us. To guide and to mentor. But then, I wasn’t alone. I got hold of my old friend: Books. Books talked to me to inspire, to learn, and to not give up. They guided me like a mentor would do. And I found one, finally.

 

What is your vision and mission behind this company? And where do you want to reach? Any future plans?

Vision:

Corefactors team is committed to helping sales, marketing, support executives to perform better and achieve goals.

Mission:

To help business owners and managers to drive the business for growth.

Our Future Plans:

• To help 20,000+ users in the next 24 months.
• To reach 64 Crore Revenue with funding by 2025.

 

What have you failed at? And how do you recover from that phase? Because being an entrepreneur is not easy, it’s like walking on the stone each day. So what boosts your mind when you face failure?

We have failed in making decisions. We also failed at hiring resources that didn’t see the same vision in the organization as we did. There were so many wrong decisions. One wrong decision can cause lots of repercussions. And we faced hurdles in every corner; financial setbacks, mental turmoil, lack of strength to make another decision. Amidst these challenging times, we had people who took faith in us and supported us all along the challenging journey.

Our customers.

Customers patted our back; to learn, try and fail again. And to repeat it until we don’t have to try again. We gained knowledge, implemented it, failed at it, and then tried again. Our journey was a learning curve that stretched as much as it could and finally won.

 

In which cities you’re currently serving? Any further expansion plans?

We are serving across all the cities in India. Further expansion plans are in: Southeast Asian Countries.

 

How do you describe the work culture at Corefactors?

Communication is the best tool an employee can adopt to progress in his/her career. And we make that simple by interacting every now and then and addressing employees of all levels friendly and approachable. Work culture took a toil when pandemics hit.

Corefactors made sure about the employee’s safety along with job security. When there was a crisis all over the world and employees got fired irrespective of their performance. Corefactors did not fire a single employee and declared work from home in the initial days of the pandemic. We pay attention to the people who are in need of employment. Our LinkedIn profile is full of opportunities. One example is Pankaj tagged me seeking a job opportunity, and now he is our Product Manager.

We not only spot the talent but recognize it too! The same culture reflects all over Corefactors.

Any secret formula to young entrepreneurs?

Secret Formula is always the same “ Never give up.”

But I would like to suggest a strategy for young entrepreneurs to develop a product that stands strong in the market in the long run.

1. Consider a problem a society/city/nation is facing.
2. Ideate, brainstorm and come up with a solution. And become exceptionally clear with the solution you have to offer.
3. Perform a Product-Market fit.
4. Prepare and aim for a strong process base.
5. Then scale your business.

Could you describe yourself in one word?

One word that suitably fits is “ Perseverance.”

 

Before we conclude the interview, anything you want to say to the Unboxing Startups team?

I feel encouraging the startups and creating awareness of their journey boosts many more entrepreneurs to come forward and launch their own ideas.

You guys are doing a fantastic job of introducing startups all over the US and India.

And I wish you all the success.