Upcall: Outbound Calls as a Service

Outbound Call Center Software for Startups and Midsize Companies

Industry

Sales & Marketing Automation

Location

USA

Core Technologies

Ruby on Rails TypeScript Apache AngularJS Gandi

Upcall

Outbound Call Center Software for Startups and Midsize Companies

Upcall is a human-powered outbound sales and marketing platform that helps business owners acquire new customers and maintain good relationships with existing customers. Upcall makes it fast and easy for business owners to set, start, and track call campaigns regardless of their company’s size.

Challenges

Having dealt with startups, the Upcall founders had fully experienced the challenges of outbound sales. Understanding that they weren’t the only ones who faced such difficulties, they came up with the idea of Upcall, a platform that would provide on-demand call services.

In 2016, Upcall was launched and voted a #1 tool for startups. But the Upcall founders didn’t stop there. They decided to extend the platform’s feature list and make the platform more sustainable. The RubyGarage team was invited to work with the backend of the platform and set up a number of integrations.

We were responsible for:

Solving the issue with app architecture to make the app scalable on-demand and to extend the existing feature set
Enabling fast and high-quality calls with extended opportunities and quality monitorin
Coming up with a strategy for managing a big amount of data
Ensuring a convenient payment and reporting system
Providing communication and scheduling tools for effective interaction between campaigners and callers
Enabling campaigners and callers to do quick and extended search

Caller profile contains ratings and information about completed campaigns

Upcall enables high-quality calls with extended opportunities and quality monitoring

Upcall is a human-powered platform

Upcall brings together business owners who need call services and callers who make calls.

Campaign dashboard

Upcall lets business owners create and track call campaigns.

Solutions

Implementing integrations was our primary task, but we suggested making profound changes to the application architecture to solve issues including lack of agility and poor scalability. We offered a domain-centric instead of a database-centric architecture. The Clean Architecture approach made it possible to extend the whole application seamlessly, without overloading its cache or compromising performance.

To let Upcall campaigners and callers communicate, complete call campaigns, collect data, and manage their payments, we implemented a number of integrations.

We took the following steps:

Set up a domain-centric architecture: to help scale development, implement new features, extend the technology stack, speed up and simplify the development process, and ensure faster testing
Built and set up an Upcall API: to make sure that campaigners can easily integrate Upcall with their current workflows and tools
Integrated Twilio: to speed up connection. Previously, a caller had to connect to a new Upcall session for each call. With Twilio integration, callers can create one session and then just add each new call to it. This allows operators to make more calls
Integrated Watson: to ensure real-time speech recognition and customize a transcription model according to specific content
Integrated Salesforce and Intercom: to manage data
Integrated PayPal, ChargeBee, Stripe, and Plaid: to let callers instantly get and track their payments, offer campaigners a quick and easy way to connect their bank accounts, and provide complex billing models
Integrated SendBird and Slack: to let campaigners reach out to their callers using direct messages or group chats
Integrated Google Calendar, Outlook, and Nylas: to let campaigners easily and conveniently set up meetings with their callers
Integrated AlgoliaSearch: to provide Upcall campaigners and callers with a powerful search tool with geosearch and various filters

Technology Stack

Ruby on Rails
MySQL
TypeScript
Apache
Angular 2
Bootstrap
Phusion Passenger
Gandi
ChargeBee
PayPal
Stripe
Segment
Bugsnag
Twilio
Watson
SendGrid
more

Results

To facilitate further development and provide new business opportunities for this product, the RubyGarage team reorganized its architecture and implemented a number of new features.

With these changes, Upcall can meet its users’ needs by offering low-cost and time-effective solutions to increase sales and manage customer engagement.

Upcall

Founder of Upcall

RubyGarage joined the team a few months after the project got launched. They were able to refactor most of the code and wrote good RSpec tests. We were in constant communication with them. They would communicate on a daily basis and tell us of any outstanding questions they had. I was impressed with their day-to-day reliability.

Thanks to the application that RubyGarage developed, our revenue increased tenfold. They were critical to the success of our startup.

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