How a Local Croatian Startup Scaled to a Global Billion-Dollar Business

Harvard Business Review

4 hours ago

Customer experience is undergoing a paradigm shift. Consumers no longer want one-way communications with little interaction.
Now, they want to engage with businesses and brands as they do with their families and friends. They want to have a conversation.
As a result, organizations must offer more conversational experiences. But how can they do this?
When a retailer offers a chatbot to communicate with customers and solve their queries, or when a bank sends an SMS for two-factor authentication before allowing a customer into their account, it is likely that a communications platform as a service (CPaaS) is behind it.
Because customer experience determines success, organizations need to communicate with their customers on the right channel at the right time. CPaaS enables organizations to digitize and personalize such customer experiences.
In this interview, Silvio Kutić, CEO of global communications platform Infobip, discusses why he started the company and describes his route to success, the trends changing customer experiences, and what these trends mean for businesses and brands.
In 2001 and 2002, I started a project with friends in Vodnjan, Croatia, called the Virtual Municipality. It had many elements of today's social networks, enabling locals to communicate with local institutions, associations, clubs, and schools via SMS and email. People could see when their football team was playing, or what was happening in town on a specific date.
After that project failed, I launched My Net, a company designed to offer a system based on content management, geographic information, and mobile communications, based on the Microsoft and Linux platforms and using open standards to ensure usability and upgradeability. This project also failed.
In November 2003, I launched the first version of Infobip with Izabel Jelenić, my co-founder, as a communications API platform. We went through two versions before starting Infobip Version 3 in 2006, with a modest loan of around €25,000 from my parents.
We bootstrapped the company and took no external investment until five years ago. In 2020, we raised $300 million from One Equity Partners, achieving a billion-dollar valuation and becoming Croatia's first unicorn.
It sounds counterintuitive, but failure is often the key to success. I tried two versions of Infobip before launching the third version, which has grown into the global business it is today. We carry this attitude into everything we do.
We learn by doing. Having launched my first project when I was still a student, and then launching this version of Infobip without management experience, I effectively started my internship as the CEO of Infobip. I've learned how to lead the company from a handful of employees and clients to more than 3,400 employees across 75 countries and working with organizations like Meta and Uber.
What trends are changing customer experiences and communications?
The world is going conversational. There are demographic shifts to messaging: 90% of Gen Z would rather text than call.
In addition, rich messaging channels that offer more engaging and memorable experiences are enabling all-in-one applications. Consumers no longer want to download and open multiple apps to communicate with a brand or solve an issue. They want to use the channel they already use with their family and friends. As a result, customer experiences are shifting to rich business messaging.
Last, generative AI is helping deliver more personalized communications while reducing operational costs for organizations.
So two-way conversational experiences are rapidly becoming the norm for customer communications. By creating a richer and more proactive experiences, we expect to see two-way conversations scale hugely across the customer journey, whether for marketing, sales, or support.
Such experiences help break down barriers and enable brands to build understanding and engagement.
With AI and generative AI, innovative brands can provide a friction-free and intelligent customer experience that retains a human feel.
Such conversational AI offers a winning blend of efficiency, personalization, and scalability, making it an asset for businesses and brands across sectors. By using it, firms can boost customer experiences and gain a competitive edge.
Organizations see a four-fold increase in conversion rates from two-way conversations and report a 30% decrease in customer support costs from implementing conversational AI. That's why we've invested in conversational AI through our AI Hub and RCS Business Messaging Solution to deliver a more visionary service.
Delivering such innovation for customers means staying nimble. At Infobip, we are organized in small cross-functional teams that stay close to customers to innovate in the sectors in which we operate. For instance, throughout much of 2023, we were working on generative AI projects before and as the buzz around the technology picked up.
We expect agentic AI, or a collection of intelligent automated agents, to help deliver advanced customer journeys.
As a result, we are actively integrating generative AI and agentic AI into our platform and evolving our approach to help organizations transform digitally in many business sectors, such as retail and eCommerce, finance, telecommunications, healthcare, logistics and transportation, and many more.