Sydney-headquartered Local Measure had found success in the hospitality, travel and retail sectors across Asia-Pacific through its customer experience platform, with wins from the likes of the Sydney Opera House and Starbucks Coffee in Singapore.
After the COVID-19 pandemic wiped away some 70 percent of its revenue as hotels sat empty, Local Measure sought to change course to keep the company in business.
Speaking at the AWS re:Invent conference in the US last week alongside AWS global channel chief Ruba Borno, Local Measure chief executive and founder Jonathan Barouch said the company at the time had been introduced by AWS to its contact centre platform, Amazon Connect. Local Measure at the time was at that point an AWS customer, and had been working with a mix of vendor partners.
“We were fortunate at the time to be introduced to the Amazon Connect team and the APN (AWS Partner Network), and that sort of set off the course of events of the last few years, and got us to where we are today,” Barouch said.
“What we ended up doing was taking the best of Amazon Connect, collaborating with that team and sort of extending and enhancing that platform which is AWS’ omni channel cloud contact centre, and we developed a product which today is called Engage.”
Engage delivers WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WeChat, Twitter, email, SMS and voice using Amazon Connect Telephony in a single pane of glass delivered at scale. Its customers range from SMBs to larger enterprises.
The company has since grown into a global firm through AWS's partnership, particularly through AWS Marketplace, while also recording 500 percent year on year revenue growth in the last year.
“From an APN perspective, the really cool thing is we've leveraged a number of [AWS’s] programs to really accelerate that journey,” Barouch added. “I think probably one of the most meaningful for us was AWS Marketplace, because that gave us an ability to sell globally, and I think that's probably one that we've really helped us a lot.”
Barouch and Borno at the time also announced Local Measure signing a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement with AWS, where both companies will invest in go-to-market activities across several countries and accelerate the development of Engage.
Barouch said that looking back, the COVID-19 pandemic ended up becoming one of the best things that has happened to Local Measure, and that the agreement they reached would not have been possible without the pandemic.
“I can't describe the feeling of watching your business fall and collapse within a matter of weeks,” he said. “But the thing that kept us alive and pulled us through was we have an amazing team, and we've got a whole bunch of core values and principles which I think are reasonably aligned with Amazon - punching above, working backwards to meet the customer problem and developing software for that problem.
“And that allowed us to really quickly pivot and come up with a solution and migrate customers and find new customers in totally new verticals.”
Barouch added pivoting from a customer experience platform to a contact centre solution felt logical for Local Measure.
“We had thousands and thousands of agents around the world using our software at the front line and front desk,” he said.
“[Local Measure] had spent six or seven years thinking about, ‘how do you scale customer communications?’ The moment a customer walks into a hotel lobby or to a retail store, how do you just intuitively know what they want, or who they are?
“We built this expertise at the edge of an organisation and essentially we’ve shifted that into the contact centre when the pandemic hit. When retail outlets and hotels were closed, the contact centre became the front door of customer experience to the organisation.
“So the experience we learned on the edge as a customer of AWS was sort of ported into the core of the organisation as a partner of AWS.”
Local Measure ended up with Amazon Connect over other competing platforms for its ability to “democratise” solutions typically reserved for large enterprises.
“What we liked about Amazon's approach was you’re essentially democratising solutions that were typically reserved for really large Fortune 500 organisations,” Barouch added.
“If you think about the cloud contact centre industry, it’s about a US$25 billion industry that’s all trapped in legacy tech, legacy applications or CRMs, and so there’s so much left to move to the cloud and that was what was appealing for us. But organisations get stuck and find it really hard [to modernise], and can get really expensive.
“What that meant for us as a partner was we could build solutions on top of something which was usually reserved for very, very large organisations and go to market with that technology as a turnkey solution, clicking a button and it's live. That's what really appealed to us.”
Barouch added Local Measure’s success came down to the culture, the team and the ability to think backwards from a customer to create a solution where there’s actual demand.
“I think that’s the hardest thing. My scepticism wasn’t sure whether there was a market demand even though we read all the Gartner reports, but the proof is in the pudding,” he said.
“When customers start paying, that's very binary. They paid for the solution and there's a demand now, and if they don't pay, you have to go back to the drawing board.”
Nico Arboleda attended AWS re:Invent as a guest of AWS.
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