On a good day, a Nigerian entrepreneur rarely thinks about the mechanics of a phone call. A customer dials an 080 number, an automated greeting plays, a representative answers, an order is confirmed, or a complaint is resolved, and business moves forward.
On a bad day, the call does not connect. Or it connects only after several attempts. Or a business owner discovers that a former employee has departed with key customer conversations—and the customers themselves—stored on a personal mobile SIM.
For Mayowa Okegbenle and Opeyemi Shokunbi, founders of PressOne, the Lagos-based cloud-telephony company, the sharp disconnect between how business phone systems ought to function and how they actually operate in Nigeria presented a compelling market opportunity.
The core value proposition was simple: a small business with four, five, or ten employees should be able to run a professional phone network—complete with automated greetings, extensions, intelligent call routing, and complete interaction records—without requiring an enterprise IT budget or a bank’s capital.
Originally published by TechCabal.