Elizabeth Solaja • 10 January 2023
PressOne Africa, a startup with a unique product that allows entrepreneurs to monitor all business calls on the go, announced the closing of her $600,000 pre-seed round. The round was led by Ventures Platform, along with participation from Voltron Capital and a set of stellar angels.
Founded by Mayowa Okegbenle and Opeyemi Shokunbi, PressOne delivers world-class reporting and call monitoring to enable entrepreneurs get the maximum value from every customer call. With the PressOne app business owners can monitor all customer phone conversations made by staff or team members from anywhere, just like big companies do.
One of the major challenges faced by entrepreneurs is poor communication systems with customers, especially during phone conversations. Small business owners currently use regular lines as their business numbers. Hence, they lack access to customer-employee conversations, past conversation records or a central dashboard to see all team conversations with customers in real time. The adverse effect of this is dissatisfied customers, poor customer retention, high employee turnover, business decline and in some cases, total shutdown.
With PressOne, business owners can manage customer interactions from their computer and mobile devices. They are also able to monitor phone conversations, follow up properly, handle customer calls better, improve sales and reduce customer churn. One PressOne phone number can be shared with team members and business calls can be recorded and monitored for quality assurance purposes. Teams can communicate with accountability and customers can experience excellent customer service from small businesses using PressOne.
The journey so far
According to Mayowa Okegbenle, CEO for PressOne Africa, there has been a lot of innovation around messaging, but the primary channel for building new customer relationships, and closing transactions is still over phone calls. With PressOne, entrepreneurs now have real-time visibility into all those calls, so they can properly track customer support activities and sales..
"We are excited to be backing Mayowa and Ope as they enable millions of businesses in Africa to stay more connected to their customers. In time, Pressone will enable tomorrow's most successful and beloved brands and businesses to unlock deeper, and more personal relationships with their customers. We’re at a tipping point in the evolution of customer service and businesses that will thrive within this new paradigm will be those who can listen deeply and attentively." Kola Aina. Founding Partner, Ventures Platform.
Opeyemi Shokunbi, the CTO of PressOne says, “We built our platform to democratize the complex technology of owning a business phone number that allows entrepreneurs manage all customer interactions on a single platform, share one business number with team members, receive multiple calls at the same time and with the same number from multiple devices anywhere”.
PressOne gives entrepreneurs more control and insight into their customer engagement, such that they are able to increase their customer satisfaction and retention rate.
PressOne launched its beta in June 2022, with hundreds of entrepreneurs participating in the beta program to improve the solution. Visit www.pressone.africa to get started, with subscriptions starting from ₦1,499 per month.
