Remote communications and IT provider GoTo is keen on expanding its footprint in the Philippines to onboard small and medium businesses into the expanding scope of digital economy where hybrid and flex work arrangement is now a daily routine in the continuously evolving workspace.
In the Philippines, or in any part of the world, SMBs are faced with the dilemma to sink, swim or adopt a communications and IT solution that befits their work environment, scope and short and long-term goals, says GoTo Asia Pacific vice president Lindsay Brown. He says the best option, always, is to give SMBs access to the most relevant tools and the best pricing in the market, which is what GoTo is all about.
“Supporting people out of office is certainly something that’s been in our DNA. We have a good network partner in the Philippines,” he says. GoTo’s solutions have been in market long before businesses start to digitize.
Brown has been with GoTo for over 10 years, back when it was still a single, proprietary suites of solutions created by Citrix—a workspace software company that delivers technologies for better offsite and work-anywhere solutions.
Citrix’ merger with LogMeIn created a new set of GoTo product line offering the best packages to small and medium businesses, as well as large, entrenched companies. The software firm offers both communication products and remote IT products.
“We know the past few years have accelerated adoption of various technologies, but certainly for us, these technologies have been around for quite some time. With LogMeIn, you can see already video conferencing and other solutions way, way back. We’ve evolved most of the products to tailor fit to the specific needs of businesses. So that’s how we can help companies streamline IT operations. But we’re quite unique in the respect that we offer what we call an all-in-one solution for unified business communications, and also IT service management. These worlds are sort of colliding, coming together in our product sets,” he says.
“So you may have heard of brands like GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToTraining and so on. We also acquired a cloud telephony solution which is now called GoConnect, which brings together, not only telephone but sort of think beyond the dial tone. And then over time, we also had some remote support and remote access products that were part of the company way back,” he says.
Businesses, nowadays, are aware of what they want and have clear idea of what they need in terms of business communications. Gone are the days of SMS messaging and client calls on the landline. Everything now, even communications, is mobile. Many companies are consolidating, but keeping everyone connected is a hurdle when lacking the tools required to support change.
Businesses that have clear knowledge of their purpose tend to negotiate their terms with suppliers, especially tech and software providers, the communications expert says.
“And what we’ve done is we’ve brought together these help desk technologies to IT service management, making it easy for organizations to manage and support employees and customers. And then we’ve also bought the business communications capabilities together to form now what is go to so we have that within sort of the single brand and the single housing,” Brown says.
What is available in Southeast Asia, and in the Philippines, is GoTo IT service management tool called GoTo Resolve and GoTo Rescue. GoTo has over a thousand clients in SEA and a couple of customers in the Philippines who have become long-time partners.
Brown says tracking the footprint of GoTo in the Philippines, the solutions software company reported 65-percent revenue growth and 30 percent on customer growth on its IT support group portfolio, while channel growth was 40 percent, mostly focused on the ITSG portfolio.
Small businesses in the Philippines, typically with around 30 to 50 employees, may not have the capability to have an IT professional as part of their organization. This where GoTo steps in to support a client’s IT network from mobile phone software needed to engage customers to desk top computers and even POS functions and back-end functions like storage and inventory.
“As the employer, you’re going to make sure that your employees are secure, their devices are up to scratch. That they’re all working, patched and operational with capabilities to engage customers with brands within the hybrid environment. This whole new way of customers engaging with the brands online is way more complex. But what we want to ensure is the safety of clients from risks and their business up and running secure,” Brown says.
Many SMBs are quite wary of software vendors and the set of disruptive products they offer, mainly due to their inability to stretch finances and bring the software they need to level up.
Many SMBs are struggling as hybrid work isn’t easy and security is a big challenge. They always think about ways where they can save money, which in many ways, is similar to other countries within Southeast Asia.
“There’s a lot of pressure on prices, inflation is really continuing to rise. So it’s getting more and more difficult for SMBs to do things. And so SMBs want to save money. They need to think about how they can consolidate the IT stack, save money there and think about how they can still continue to engage their customers the right way. And that’s definitely the proposition that GoTo provides is helping them consolidate, save and be able to engage with your employees through business communications and IT management and support,” Brown says.
SMBS can actually start to access GoTo products for free. The trial package can connect up to 5 devices. From there, and at a price point that is affordable, SMBs can scale up to afford what is already affordable at GoTo.
High profile clients
GoTo services some the biggest companies and institutions in the Philippines. A good example is the Philippine National Bank which was in need of a fast, reliable and flexible remote support tool that can support home workstations, conduct multiple sessions simultaneously and is easy to deploy.
“For a big company like a Philippine National Bank, they want to make sure that their employees are productive. The bank is happy since the tech support ensures productivity and output from their employee base. But one of the biggest reasons that they chose us for their remote support needs, is our Rescue product. It offers a high level of security and prevents anyone coming in and scamming. Rescue is a product that’s been around for the past 20 years. It’s gone through a lot of security checks over the time. It’s compliant with a lot of the security standards. We can sort of say it’s got bank level security,’’ Brown says.
For large organizations like the PNB, the product gives them a lot of confidence to invest in tools like GoTo Rescue, because of the promise of security and ease of deployment derive extra productivity for their employees and offers the company business continuity.
GoTo Rescue has helped the bank upgrade protocols with a remote support tool that controls, troubleshoots and maintains machines throughout the organization with end-to-end encryption. Through implementing Rescue, PNB was able to lower call volumes by improving first-call resolution, increase customer satisfaction, and enhance support technician productivity.
Another Rescue-user is Philippine client Inspiro, an outsourcing specialist, with clients across the globe. Inspiro offers outsourced IT support to those companies to make sure that they can be continually operational, especially during the pandemic.
Just as the pandemic is starting, Inspiro was using a slow remote support solution that didn’t provide the real time insights and speedy connection that agents needed to help customers troubleshoot issues in a timely manner.
“From what we saw in our research about 80 percent, if not more than 90 percent of Philippine organizations obviously had to go into lockdown and get into that hybrid environment. And now we’ve got this new working norm, they continue to use the products because they have to help these organizations support their employees as they’re working within the hybrid environment,” Brown says.
The BPO started to level up with the deployment of a remote support solution that increased agent adoption, strengthened by responsive support from GoTo specialists. Elimination of connection issues helped Inspiro hit serve level agreements nearly 100 percent of the time, redounding to increased employee satisfaction and productivity.
Competition
Unlike other business communications vendors selling five or six different products to serve full engagement package to clients, GoTo gives customers a value proposition that is more cost-efficient yet packed with the necessary tools essential to companies.
“So if you look at who are our competitors, you got Zoom there or Microsoft Teams and for webinar you got Google Meet and so on. But they are point solutions. They are not part of an IT stack. And when you think about that, purchasing individual solutions is very expensive for SMBs. And so what we’ve done is to package an all-in-one IT stack,” Brown says
“But then we’ve been quite smart about it and we say if you’ve purchased Microsoft Teams, no worries. If you’ve purchased Salesforce, no problem. If you’ve purchased something like Slack, easy. We use these capabilities here to integrate directly with those particular systems so you can run your meetings, or you can run your call center off Teams, or you can run your conversational ticketing off Slack for instance. And so you can leverage those existing investments, but still get the benefit of having an all in one solution, rather than having a really complex IT stack, which is made up of multiple vendors. We’ve got many competitors, but we don’t have one competitor which matches uniqueness of our capabilities,” he says.
He says GoTo is unique as a company because it is the only one solution for essential connections, and building on the capabilities of the brand will only serve to benefit users.
Citing a recent study with SWNS Media Group on business preparedness in the face of economic uncertainties, GoTo reveals that 90 percent of Philippine companies agree that preparing for recession is a key to sustain a healthy business while 91 percent believe having the right business tools and an IT support mechanism will help them companies pull through.
Another unique finding is that 87 of respondents agree that employee morale has improved since last year and 96 percent will prioritize retention of employees over recession given three economic factors impacting employees at work—COVID-19 pandemic, inflation and increased taxes.
One of the most agile companies globally, GoTo does not have any physical offices in Asia Pacific. It operates 100-percent remotely in SEA. The company operates a few offices in key markets across the globe.