Giang Thien Phu - "The dedicated developer" behind Callio
VietNamNet•23/09/2023
Having held many leadership positions in large corporations, Giang Thien Phu only considers himself “a dedicated developer”. He created Callio - an interactive CRM platform integrated with a call center that attracted more than 2,000 businesses to use after 3 years.
Giang Thien Phu is not a shy person when facing the media, because he has been sought after by the press since he was a high school student with a passion for making machines, from a chicken coop washing machine, a robot to build Co Loa citadel to a microscope made from a webcam. As one of the 10 outstanding young faces nationwide when he was only in grade 11, opening an IT company at the age of 19, people call Giang Thien Phu "Vietnam's Bill Gates". Therefore, it is not surprising that his work experience profile is associated with big names: Director of Technology for e-commerce at Peacesoft (predecessor of NextTech Group), Technology Manager at Hotdeal.vn, Head of Cross-border E-commerce Department at Adayroi.vn project of Vingroup.
In 2022, Giang Thien Phu appeared on Shark Tank Vietnam season 5, and together with his teammates, raised $600,000 for 10.7% of Callio's shares - a startup he founded and is CEO of. However, he also rejected Shark Hung's offer because he thought the company was not properly valued.
Visiting the office of CEO Callio, everything is designed in a minimalist style: a set of chairs and tables for guests, a desk with only a large computer screen. However, there is a small corner with full equipment, coffee and tea maker. According to Giang Thien Phu, this is where he "calms down" after each time receiving negative feedback and complaints from customers. The three years of building Callio are also the three years of learning how to lower his ego, be more gentle to listen to customers and improve the product.
With a long history of manufacturing a series of machines, your school days must have been very busy?
I am a very entrepreneurial person. In high school, when creating or inventing something, people often think and dream of becoming a doctor, professor, scientist, working in a research institute. But when I have an idea or invention, I always think about how to sell it on the market.
At 19, I started a computer assembly company. I bought components, assembled them myself, and installed them. I sold a few thousand units within a year, and became financially independent. But that state didn't last long, I lost my independence because I spent too much money, and even got into debt.
At the age of over 20, Giang Thien Phu is already a famous face in the technology world.
So, while working as a manager in large enterprises, what inspired you to start Callio?
I am a techie and I understand that I have a good ability to optimize the system. For example, with Hotdeal.vn in the past, the platform could handle 60,000 orders/day, but in the middle of a super sale day, the system was overloaded and had errors, so sometimes it could only handle 20,000 - 30,000 orders, which means it did not reach the maximum sales. I solve problems like that, how to increase the number of users, increase the experience, and optimize the system.
Even before that, right from the time of doing the Chodientu.com project, witnessing the story of online business, then online to offline, I myself really wanted to do CRM (Customer Relationship Management), how to have all customer information in one place for easy management and communication. I kept looking for solutions to use but didn't like any of them, so after I stopped doing e-commerce, I built a CRM platform myself.
Moreover, when looking for a job, I only like to solve big problems. The big problem I want to talk about here is not about vision but about reality, how many users I am serving, how much data needs to be processed at the same time, the minimum requirements for system response speed so as not to affect the user experience, etc. Finding a place that has both a big enough problem and a suitable environment is really quite difficult. And I also thought that, sooner or later, I would have to do it myself. That's why Callio was born.
CRM or Call Center is not a new field. Many large enterprises and corporations have also created similar solutions. When starting, what made you believe that Callio was a model that the market needed? The predecessor of Callio was an outsourcing company, specializing in solving difficult problems with technology for other enterprises, or in current terms, doing digital transformation for enterprises. Some customer groups wanted us to build a CRM platform integrated with a call center to not only store customer information, but also contact customers. Initially, the platform was not as complete as it is now, but customers kept using it, giving feedback, and we edited and updated it. In this call center industry, the common answer that most call center service providers give to customers is "Because your Internet connection is of poor quality, you need to handle the connection well to use our application". That is, relying on right and wrong to push the responsibility to the customer when the system is unstable. At first, my staff answered the same. However, at that time, we quietly collected information, built a monitoring system, optimized the smallest details in the system to improve daily performance, thereby turning it into a competitive advantage among countless other similar products on the market. And then, there were about 15 - 20 loyal customers using the CRM platform integrated with the call center, so we decided to do it and design it well. There is a theory that startups should not think of everything on their own. Instead, they should have an idea and find about 10 customers who can listen to them and understand them. I edited until these 10 customers felt satisfied before launching the product widely to the market. In fact, I did exactly that. In 2018, when there were about 15-17 customers using it daily, their employees found it okay, and I myself felt satisfied, I decided to develop Callio towards the market.
To explain in an easy-to-understand way, how is Callio different from other call center solutions on the market? The problem with the market is that not many CRM platforms have a call center section, and vice versa, most call centers do not integrate CRM, not to mention other convenient communication protocols such as Chat, SMS, Email... Callio's solution is an interactive CRM, which helps businesses manage customer information and communicate with their customers with a clear, automatic and fast division of labor. With an effective business communication system, when a customer contacts you via phone or any channel, your staff needs to know who that customer is and what they have purchased. But most traditional methods cannot do that. For example, I called the call center of a network operator and reported that the Internet was down. If it works properly, the second time I call, the operator can say: "Mr. Phu, you reported a network outage yesterday, has it been resolved today?", instead of asking from the beginning: "Who are you?", "Where do you use the network?", "What is your subscription number?", "What problem are you having?". There are cases where after calling the network operator 10 times, the customer has to explain all 10 times from the beginning. The history of a customer's interactions with a brand is scattered everywhere and we organize it in one place. In addition, a very common situation in customer care centers today is that when a customer contacts via call or chat message, the staff has to copy and paste the customer's phone number through a CRM platform to save, then copy the customer's number from CRM to another tool to call or take care of it. With Callio, when a customer calls, the system will immediately display the customer's history and information. Employees do not have to switch multiple screens or perform multiple operations. This helps create a better experience for customers. At the same time, the call center staff only needs to do one initial operation, which is to press call, then everything is automatic, minimizing manual operations, "Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V" operations, thereby doubling and tripling productivity and efficiency. Callio also expands integration, automatically receiving and initializing new customer information from the landing page of an advertising campaign, automatically synchronizing customer information from familiar sales software on the market or Excel/GSheet files that small stores are using. Our system also allows automatic Lead sharing settings, meaning that whenever a new customer is generated, an employee will be assigned to take care of that customer immediately.
This is what helped Callio gain 2,000 enterprise customers in just 3 years? If you ask 100 enterprises about choosing a tool to take care of customer experience or a tool to sell and reach more customers, I'm pretty sure that 99 people will choose a tool to sell more effectively. That's why Callio's initial hack-growth strategy was to create a really good sales tool for businesses. Just think, instead of having to hire more people with a monthly salary of about 7,000,000 - 10,000,000 VND, you only need to pay 200,000 VND/month to Callio, your employees can work with double the productivity and almost the same efficiency increase. However, that is not our ultimate goal. In the long term, Callio wants to build a tool that provides a complete experience for enterprise customers, including before - during - after sales. Enterprise customers, after using Callio to boost sales, will gradually pay attention to how to take care of old and current customers, to aim for sustainable growth in the future.
With some B2B startups, they initially try to conquer a large customer to build prestige and reputation. With Callio, you target the customer group of SMEs? I am a practical person. People say that at first approaching large enterprises will bring in a lot of money, but that is not easy, you have to convince customers yourself when you don't have much. But after operating in the market for a few years, Callio has proven itself to many customers, then I started approaching large enterprises. In fact, many very large enterprises have approached and used Callio without much sales. In addition, it also depends on each product model. Callio's products are suitable for both SMEs and large enterprises. And most of all, I like that customers have to actually use my products. If I sell to a large enterprise with a big vision but then their employees don't use it, even if it brings in a lot of revenue, to me it is a failure. A successful product is a product that is used, even if customers complain about this or that error, I am much happier. Up to now, I have always focused only on the product. When I do well, money will "follow" me. I have never wasted time on sales, I only care about what my product lacks, how it can be more perfect. There is a business that initially had only 5 employees, they went with Callio, grew together, improved together, now they have expanded to 200 employees. Up to now, we also have large corporate customers. One business belongs to a very large technology ecosystem, although the parent corporation has a CRM solution, they still use Callio. However, I also refused a high-value contract to stay true to my model. This business tested Callio for 6 months with more than 300 accounts and wanted to deploy it to 15,000 accounts. That is a very large number. However, they wanted Callio to be integrated into their infrastructure. That would no longer be SaaS. I was stubborn and refused. For me, SaaS is more important than $1-2 million.
With so many customers, is Callio profitable now? Who are Callio's main customers, sir? Before going on Shark Tank, we had been profitable for about 6 months. At that time, the accumulated profit was also several billion VND. According to statistics, more than 30% of our customers are in the real estate sector, in addition to beauty salons, retail stores, clinics, training centers... Even when reading real estate sales recruitment posts on Facebook, many businesses also attach Callio as a benefit for telesales. Callio currently serves nearly 2,000 customers with automatic top-up and payment, but only needs a few programmers? I want the company to have as few people as possible. To do that, first of all, you must have good qualifications and working methods. People often think that the qualifications of a programmer are professional and technical qualifications, forgetting about work organization and time management skills. I do not support you working too much at night, staying up until 2-3am. Of course, when you have a goal to pursue, you may need to do so, but if you stay up until 2-3am, the whole next day you can't do anything, it's useless. So, qualifications are related to both working methods and work-life balance. Second, related to tools, if people don't have good tools, they won't achieve good productivity. Third, attitude and responsibility are the most important things. People who do not have a good attitude and responsibility for work will have low productivity. When recruiting people who want to work and contribute, they will make everything better, and the leader himself does not need to manage anymore. So I always think between two options: hire 5 people to work or hire only 1 person and pay 5 times more? I will choose the second option.
Have you tried it?
Okay, "runs well"!
So what is the next challenge that Callio wants to conquer, sir?
For the plan to conquer foreign markets, Callio is building a customer interaction tool right in the app, suitable for the international market from the beginning (From Global) instead of developing in Vietnam and then expanding to the global market (Go Global).
Another challenge I have now is how to make businesses use Callio more civilized, not just focusing on sales calls but also increasing experience, handling complaints, and taking care of customers. That is the way for those businesses to develop sustainably. And when businesses develop sustainably, Callio will be even more sustainable.
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