CEOCFO Magazine Interview With Cleve Adams

Interview conducted by Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor
CEOCFO Magazine

CEOCFO: Mr. Adams, what is the overall focus behind VOXOX today?
Mr. Adams: VOXOX is a cloud communications platform, meaning that we do communications over the cloud; communications like voice, sending and receiving voice messages and then sending and receiving text messages as well.

CEOCFO: Who is using your services and why?
Mr. Adams: We have a number of different customers. Mainly is it through other corporations, so it is a B2B service. What we offer are corporations or individual offices like insurance agents or real estate agents or any small businesses of any kind; we allow them to download an app on their phone and give them a phone number and then they are freely able to send and receive voicemail or voice communications, which is over the cloud and then text messaging over the cloud too. Therefore, any small business in the world is able to take advantage of this.

CEOCFO: How does VOXOX differ from what else is available?
Mr. Adams: We are completely different. One is that we are a complete cloud communications platform. Yes, there are a few out there, but none of them do as much as we do. Number one, we are the leading voice in communications platform, where you can do voice over IP or voice over the cloud, but we also have text messaging, which you can do “send and receive” text messages over the cloud as well, as a combined package. Then you are able to put together a text marketing program with our technology. That allows you to keep in touch with all of your customers. For instance, Joe owns the local real estate office and he has twenty realtors that work for him at the local real estate
office, they can all download the VOXOX app, put it on their phone, receive a business phone number to communicate through that app like they would their normal business communications on their cell phone. This way, they can do it with one phone number and it can be any phone number. They can utilize both voice and text and put together a text marketing program. Let us say that they have fifteen hundred customers that have walked into their real estate office over the past few years. With the touch of a button, you can set up a text marketing campaign and reach out to all fifteen hundred customers. Therefore, it is very unique and no one has anything like this.

CEOCFO: Do you help set up the campaign? Are there suggestions? Are there templates? How much is the involvement from VOXOX?
Mr. Adams: VOXOX can help you set it up, but it is very simple. You just download the app on your phone, like you have many times on your iPhone or your Android phone, and start utilizing the app. Everyone seems to be doing that every day these days, so it is fairly simple. We also assist. We have support that you can call. We have many videos and FAQs on our website that will show you exactly how to do it.

CEOCFO: Are small to medium businesses looking for a better way? Do they think it even exists?
Mr. Adams: Today, especially with the pandemic, everyone really needs to stay in touch with their customers. You may want to reach out to your customers and let them know you are having a sale or you may want to reach out to your customers and let them know you are going to be doing this at a certain time. Also, if you are going to be in a certain location, you can send out text marketing to all of your customers and communicate with them about what is going on. If you are a realtor with a new listing, or if you are an insurance agent with a new policy, or a doctor or a dentist, you can tell them about the new procedures that you have and the schedules you have come up with. Text marketing is very important out there today. We feel that you need to communicate more and more with your customers and we all know that email marketing is not as effective anymore. Text marketing is about three to four hundred percent more effective and people usually open their text messages within three minutes and respond within five, so it is a great way to stay in touch with your client base.

CEOCFO: Does it involve a separate company and separate system or app than what you have for your communications in general or is everything rolled into one product?
Mr. Adams: We have it all rolled into one product called VoxDirect. Therefore, it makes it very simple to put together voice communications and text marketing communications with the touch of a button. We make it as easy as possible for the small businessman to stay in touch with his clientele.

CEOCFO: Are you able to integrate that with a landline number or maybe an old number someone has or a system where they find it a little bit easier than just using a device? Some people still like the old ways.
Mr. Adams: Yes we can! If you have a number that you like you can keep that number and use that number through our app and through our communications protocol. Yes. If you have had an office line for many years and you want to keep that office line you can use that number to do your text marketing and your voice marketing campaign. Therefore, if you have a number, keep it. If you like a number, keep it. If you want a specific number, let us know what it is and we can get that for you.

CEOCFO: What is involved on the technology side? What have you figured out that perhaps others have not, that allows you to have such a comprehensive system?
Mr. Adams: We have been in the campaign business for fourteen years, so we have done billions and billions of phone communications and text communications. Today, we are also taking artificial intelligence, collecting the data you have through your voice and your text communications, and we are using that artificial intelligence to help you better become a better text marketer. That means that I am going to take the data that I receive from your text marketing, I am going to compare it to other text marketing campaigns that are out there that we collect the data on, and then we can come back to and say, “Hey, if you use this term, if you use this phrase, and if you use this length of a text at this frequency, you are going to be able to increase your business by eight to ten percent. That is a significant technology that no one else in the world has. We are 5G enabled. We are taking advantage of very fast data collection in 5G networks. Our artificial intelligence base, where we are taking all of the data that we collect, makes sense out of it and presents you with customer sentiment and marketing analytics. Then we are able to take the voice and the text communications and marketing communications and stay in touch with your client. Therefore, we provide technology that no one else provides, very expensive artificial intelligence that will allow these companies to learn how to be text marketing experts and be better at marketing for their clients.

CEOCFO: VOXOX recently announced some new features. What have you added to the mix?
Mr. Adams: We make it easy to communicate. We wanted to make it easier for people, at one press of a button, to communicate with their clientele. Therefore, we constantly update our features to give you a little more colorful, better, more benefits and more features to your cloud phone capability. That is what we have upgraded. It is to make it easier for you to stay in touch with your client.

CEOCFO: Where does cost come into play?
Mr. Adams: We are very inexpensive and that is a good thing about us. We have many large telecommunications companies that use our technology to market to their client base. For instance, if you have a cellphone and you pay a normal fee on the cellphone of X amount of dollars per month, then Telecomm companies will allow you to add this feature onto your cell bill. Therefore, it is very inexpensive. You just pay a few dollars a month more for the ability to have this technology on your phone and through your cellular company. The price is insignificant. It is very inexpensive and it very worthwhile.

CEOCFO: What about your recent partnership with YouMail? What does that add to the mix?
Mr. Adams: As you know, VOXOX, as we mentioned earlier, is a telecommunications company. We do cloud communications or communications over the cloud I should say. In doing that, you can get people that use it in a different way; for instance, maybe some robo-callers. We want to know about that so we can discontinue that. We partner with YouMail to make sure that we catch the people that are committing fraud and that we catch the people that are using our technology for reasons other than what we want them to use it for.

CEOCFO: What was the expectation when the company started 14 years ago? What has been the biggest surprise in getting to where we are today in communications?
Mr. Adams: I have not been with the company for fourteen years. I have only known the company a few months. They hired me as the CEO to drive revenue forward and make the company grow. However, the origin of this technology fourteen years ago was that there was something very popular called Voice over IP. Voice over IP was significant because it would really shave a lot of dollars off of our phone bill. Therefore, the three founders of the company had an idea about going out and playing or actually servicing this Voice over IP marketplace. That was the original intent of the technology and it evolved into a cloud, AI-based, artificial intelligence-based cloud communications platform.

CEOCFO: What did you see when you considered taking over at VOXOX? I am sure you did a lot of due
diligence as everybody should and most people do. What did you find when you actually started working at the company that surprised you, that made you happy you took the challenge?
Mr. Adams: Many things make me happy! I am a serial entrepreneur and I take a look at companies that I can help and inject myself into the company and say, “if you did this, this and this, we could really grow your revenue and make it a bigger company.” That is what I do for a living. As I said, I am a serial entrepreneur that loves helping other entrepreneurs. When I took a look at VOXOX I found that they had a great technology that worked and a great marketplace that was growing and they had a very good management team and they had a very good strategy. All they really needed was to execute the strategy and that is when I came in. I really wanted to help them execute the strategy that they had. When I took a look at VOXOX I really found a diamond in the rough. The reason is that they were not taking advantage of some of the biggest markets in the world. One of the biggest markets in the world today is a $2.1 trillion 5G market. Everyone wants to be 5G compatible or 5G enabled because that is the new telecommunications standard, but VOXOX was not taking advantage of the 5G. Therefore, I wanted to make sure that all the products and all the apps that they build and used were 5G enabled and 5G compatible. Another huge market that they did not participate in was artificial intelligence. Being a cloud communications company, they collect and send and receive a lot of data and if we could collect that data and use artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms with that data, we could come up with some very unique marketing analytics to help our customers be better at what they do. I found that if the company participated in the 5G marketplace and if they participated in the artificial intelligence marketplace, they would have cutting-edge technology and they would be able to grow their company faster because of the wider audience recognition. I came in and kind of turned the ship a little bit, if you will, introduced the 5G products that were 5G enabled, introduce artificial intelligence algorithms to be able to use the data that they collected from marketing analytics and that is why, I think now, the company is really taking off with a new surge in customers and a great product to attract them with.

CEOCFO: What is our global reach and do you see that changing?
Mr. Adams: We are worldwide! We have customers in Mexico, the United States, Canada, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and as far as the eye can see, we are worldwide. We have some companies that are white-labeling our products, meaning taking our products, putting their name on it and using it as their product, worldwide, with license fees. Therefore yes, this is a global product and it is only going to expand. We have hundreds of companies interested in using this technology and it is expanding very fast for us, worldwide.

CEOCFO: What is ahead? We just talked a little bit about expansion, but what do you see for 2021 at
VOXOX?
Mr. Adams: I find that next year we are going to be doing very well, not only internationally, which many international companies took interest in our company, but also domestically. We feel that we have technology that is unique to anyone else. We feel that we can compete in this marketplace as well as anyone else. Therefore, there is going to be a lot of expansion from our products standpoint, from an artificial intelligence standpoint, from a 5G compatibility standpoint and from a customer recognition standpoint. I feel the company is going to grow very fast and I feel it will accumulate many more customers in 2021 and it is a very exciting time for us as we grow into a bigger and more powerful company.