Zoom Expands Zoom Contact Center Capabilities in India with Native Phone Number Availability

Zoom has expanded its Zoom Contact Center in India by introducing native phone number availability across six major telecom circles, enabling businesses to deliver compliant, AI-powered customer experiences locally. This marks a significant step in strengthening Zoom’s footprint in India’s enterprise communications market.

In October 2024, Zoom launched its cloud phone solution with native numbers in Maharashtra, later expanding to other circles. Builds on that foundation, Zoom is extending capabilities to full omnichannel customer engagement with voice, video, and social media integration.  

Key Highlights of the Expansion

• Native India Phone Numbers: Available in Maharashtra (Pune), Tamil Nadu (Chennai), Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Karnataka (Bengaluru), Andhra Pradesh & Telangana (Hyderabad)
• Regulatory Compliance: Operates under Zoom India’s pan-India Unified License from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT)
• AI-First Customer Experience: Integration of AI-driven tools for voice, video, and omnichannel support
• Global Reach: Complements Zoom Phone’s coverage in 50+ countries

Benefits for Indian Enterprises

• Seamless hybrid work support with local numbers
• Enhanced customer trust through compliance
• Scalable cloud contact center without heavy infrastructure
• AI-powered efficiency with automated routing and analytics

Comparison: Zoom Phone vs. Zoom Contact Center in India

Feature	Zoom Phone (India)	Zoom Contact Center (India)
Launch Date	Oct 2024	Apr 2026
Coverage	Maharashtra, later expanded to 6 circles	Six telecom circles (Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai)
Primary Use	Cloud phone solution for enterprises	AI-first omnichannel contact center
Regulatory License	DoT-approved cloud phone license	Pan-India Unified License (DoT)
Target Audience	Multinational corporations, hybrid workforce	Enterprises needing customer engagement solutions

Risks & Considerations

• Regulatory dependence on DoT licensing
• Strong competition from Genesys, Avaya, Freshworks
• Integration challenges with legacy systems

Strategic Outlook

• Zoom positions itself as a serious competitor in India’s enterprise communications and CX market
• Expansion enables globally integrated yet locally compliant services

Accenture Participates in $125 Mn Series D Round of Cresta, An AI Powered Platform for Contact Centers

Accenture participated in Cresta's $125 million Series D funding round. This round was led by new investors World Innovation Lab (WiL) and QIA, with participation from other notable investors like EnvisionX Capital, LG Technology Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, and Workday Ventures.

Returning investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, J.P. Morgan, Sequoia Capital, and Tiger Global.

This investment is part of Accenture's strategy to integrate Cresta's AI capabilities into its AI Refinery™ platform, which helps clients build custom AI models tailored to their unique business needs.

Cresta's solutions integrate with existing systems, both on-premise and in the cloud, enabling seamless AI-driven business transformation[

"Cresta's innovative solutions have the potential to revolutionize the contact center industry by equipping customer service teams with tools they need to provide more effective customer service," said Lan Guan, chief AI officer at Accenture. "The combination of Accenture’s AI Refinery™️ platform and Cresta’s AI solutions will allow us to offer our clients enhanced tools that drive productivity by automating routine tasks, offering real-time guidance to agents, and generating tailored customer interactions.”

"Generative AI is transforming the way we interact with customers, creating intelligent experiences that not only meet but anticipate needs,” said Baiju Shah, global chief strategy officer at Accenture Song. “Customer sales and service is evolving rapidly and Cresta is at the forefront. This investment underscores our commitment to leveraging AI to drive growth and innovation, raising the bar for customer service strategies that reduce operational costs and improve customer experience."

The funding will help Cresta double down on its existing product suite, scale its go-to-market efforts, and rapidly develop the next generation of virtual agents. This brings Cresta's total funding to over $270 million.

Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, US, Cresta was founded in 2017 by Zayd Enam, Tim Shi, and Sebastian Thrun, with the vision of using AI to help people learn high-value skills and make businesses more productive.

Ping Wu, CEO, Cresta. said, "Cresta and Accenture have a shared vision for the future of AI-powered customer interactions. This investment enables us to tap into Accenture's deep industry expertise and global reach, accelerating our growth and innovation while empowering more businesses to enhance efficiency, boost customer satisfaction, and create a sustainable competitive advantage through the power of AI."

Last month, Cresta announced Voice Virtual Agent, a powerful, autonomous solution that’s built in a hybrid approach: combining advanced LLMs with deterministic systems to transform the customer experience. This all-in-one solution delivers 24/7 personalized and empathetic experiences, effortlessly managing complex, multi-step workflows – all while seamlessly collaborating with human agents.

Generative AI is transforming contact centers by enhancing efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction. AI can generate automated responses for common customer inquiries, reducing the workload on human agents. AI-powered virtual agents can handle routine tasks and customer interactions, allowing human agents to focus on more complex issues.

Vodafone Idea Partners Genesys to Launch CCaaS Platform

Vi Business, the enterprise arm of Vodafone Idea, has partnered with Genesys, a global leader in AI-driven experience orchestration, to launch Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform, which aims to provide Indian firms with advanced cloud and telecom solutions.

By combining Vi Business’s robust network infrastructure with AI-powered technology from Genesys, the partnership aims to deliver a cutting-edge, agile solution that accelerates the deployment process, enabling businesses to go live faster.

Late last month, Genesys secured a Unified License Virtual Network Operator (UL VNO) license in India, obtained under Department of Telecommunications (DoT) guidelines, which established Genesys Cloud as the first global Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform with a UL VNO license, enabling both domestic and international customers to comply with Indian telecom regulations while accessing secure cloud services and innovative AI solutions for better customer engagement.

Vi Business and Genesys partnership aims to deliver a unified omnichannel customer experience by leveraging Vi Business's robust network infrastructure and Genesys's expertise in AI-powered experience orchestration.

The combined solution enables businesses to deploy contact center operations quickly, reducing time-to-market and minimizing downtime.

The collaboration will enable the provision of cloud-based CCaaS solutions, helping businesses manage customer interactions with advanced, flexible, and scalable options.

This initiative will allow Indian enterprises to adapt to evolving customer needs and utilize cutting-edge technologies without the substantial capital investments associated with traditional contact center setups.

​NovelVox Introduces BI-enabled iVision Plus Wallboards and Agent Dashboard for Cisco Webex Contact Centers

Global software product house NovelVox has announced the launch of an intuitively designed iVision Plus Wallboards for the Cisco Webex contact center. The feature-rich Wallboard empowers supervisors and agents with self-management and enables them to take proactive actions to improve contact centers' performance.

NovelVox's collaborative and fully configurable iVision Plus Wallboards and dashboards are now available for Cisco Webex Contact Center. iVision Plus ensures Business Intelligence (BI) powered 360-degree monitoring that helps you to gauge agents' performance and make informed business decisions. NovelVox strives to deliver bespoke contact center solutions to boost agents' productivity and performance.

The BI capabilities of the Cisco Webex CC wallboard turn your complex data into valuable insights for more effective data analysis. The Smart Notification Engine helps you to create instant audio and visual alerts and notifications about threshold breaches through Email, SMS, and MS Teams. With 50+ in-built design templates, you can get a unified view of KPIs to motivate agents to do more and achieve organizational goals, efficiently and effectively.

NovelVox's Webex Wallboard and Agent Dashboard is above par vis-à-vis their competitors owing to its features, such as 50+ visually appealing wallboard templates for a real-time view of agent performance while allowing the agent to work as per their visual comfort. The Drill-down reports extracting specific data from high-level information enables us to make informed decisions. The option to create instant audio and visual alerts about threshold breaches through Email, SMS, and MS Teams make it easy to manoeuvre through the desktop, enabled by an extendable Drag and Drop studio environment. As many as 75+ 3rd party integrations ensure seamless integration with all Webex contact center-powered data, making it one of the most agent friendly solutions.

NovelVox CEO, Amit Gandhi, quoted, "Supervisors cannot harness the agent's strengths due to the inefficiency of the Wallboards. This affects the agent productivity along with contact center performance. Being associated with Cisco for 14 years as a preferred partner, we take a major step forward to align our business strategy with Cisco's product strategy. We are focussed on making all our products compatible with Webex CC. Thus, we have launched Wallboards and Agent Dashboards for Cisco Webex Contact Center with the intent to motivate and engage agents to achieve more. Our fully-configurable and visually appealing iVision Plus Wallboard ensures that agents are always on track with their KPIs without getting bored by dull, plain, and boxy wallboard designs."

NovelVox is a global software company developing flexible contact center agent desktops, wallboards, and contact center applications for customers of all sizes, ranging from Enterprise Organizations to more dynamic customer-centric companies that meet the client's requirements and needs. At NovelVox, exceptional attention to detail is given while designing the products to complement various Contact Center applications, including Cisco, Avaya, and Genesys.

For details, please visit: https://www.novelvox.com/

7 Contact Center Software Solutions We Can Vouch For

There's no doubting that contact centres have always been on the cutting edge of innovation, evolving organically with the times. Over the years, performance management, real-time authentication, automation, customer journey analysis, and many other features have been implemented, ranging from simple to multi-skilled workforce management and from voice to omni-channel setup.

The global contact center software market size was valued at USD 23.94 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.2% from 2022 to 2030, according to the report by Grand View Research.

For an uninitiated, a Cloud Contact Center is a comprehensive suite of tools and applications that works as a centralized hub, operates over the internet, and allows the virtual or remote contact center agents to handle all the inbound and outbound customer interactions across various channels such as call, web, email, chat, social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube), voice calls, SMS, and other messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp.

Call centers and contact centers both provide customer service and outreach, but they differ in the communication channels they use. Call centers use one channel -- the phone -- while contact centers use several channels including voice, web, video and WhatsApp/or chat, among others. Whereas, a Virtual Agent, also known as an IVA, virtual rep, or chatbot, is a software application that uses natural  language processing and pre-defined answers to support humans online.

The growth of the market can be attributed to the growing adoption of cloud-based and virtual contact center solutions to achieve better business continuity

To ease out things for you, we have compiled a list of a seven companies/start-ups offering contact centre software solutions that we can vouch for.

NovelVox

Since 2008, NovelVox has been contributing to the contact center industry, offering varied tools to integrate any industry’s core applications. NovelVox offers AI-powered virtual assistant/agents that automate contact center conversations that include automating repeated, basic queries across channels.

Designer Studio is one of the company’s flagship products and it was India’s first-ever Agent Desktop Designer Studio with a drag and drop designer in low code model. Understanding the pulse of the industry, the company keeps introducing innovative software solution to best address the prevailing trends and challenges. NovelVox announced CXInfinity in 2020, an Omni-channel messaging and conversational AI platform that is tailored for all major sectors and uses AI and use-case scenarios to best advise users.

Knowlarity

A leading cloud telephony solutions provider in the country, Knowlarity is pretty popular among SMBs, startups as well as large enterprises. It enables businesses to streamline their communication and related processes while storing all the data safely in cloud. By embracing their cloud telephony solution your business can instantly transform into a smart virtual calling platform with robust technology support. Accessing data stored on cloud is super easy and so is its maintenance. 

The software also gives a better glance into callers’ performance and monitor their productivity levels. The company claims to improve employee productivity levels by over 25%. 

Rezo.ai

Rezo.ai is an AI-Powered Contact Center that enables enterprises to enhance customer experience and boost revenue by automating and analyzing customer agent interactions across multiple channels including voice, email, chat/Whatsapp and social, at the required scale, whilst training agents with minimal costs.

Rezo.ai leverages NLU and ML algorithms to enhance customer experience and save costs by automating, analysing customer-agent conversations across multiple channels whilst coaching them. 

The company was founded by IITian couple - Rashi Gupta (Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist) and Manish Gupta (Co-founder and CEO) in 2017.

HoduSoft

This India-based company started operations in 2015 and became popular for offering cost-effective contact center solutions. The company offers a varied range of innovative VoIP-based solution and ensures an excellent return on technological investments of their partners. Their products are user-friendly and easy to integrate. The company pays special attention to their product’s UI/UX and overall aesthetic design to ensure ease of using the products. One of their products called HoduCC has also won laurels for the company for its fantastic performance and results.

Call Hippo

Call Hippo is a cloud-based Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) service provider that integrates cloud computing into telephony. Call Hippo provides local assistance numbers in over 50 countries to startups and enterprises all over the world. A business can set up a contact centre in minutes thanks to their simple interface and robust backend architecture. 

The company deploys and scales a flexible telecommunications network based on internet availability. By replacing desk phones with soft phones and removing the complexity of setting up a contact centre, the company hopes to simplify the overall profile of callers.

DialPad

DialPad, which has India office & team offers both virtual and cloud contact center solutions. AI-powered DialPad has built-in speech recognition and natural language processing. Dialpad has bee named a G2 leader in eight categories includinh UCaaS, VoIP, CCaaS, and Conferencing.

DialPad has recently acquired Kare Knowledgeware and Koopid allowing it merge their features including - self-service, automated engagement, and augmented agents tools (from Kare); and comprehensive omnichannel support, including chat, messaging, self-service, and social media (from Koopid), to Dialpad Contact Center.

Vonage

Vonage's AI-powered Contact Center solution automates as much administration as possible. So what helps your people focus on delivering a personalized, engaging sales pitch actually breaks down organizational silos, too. It has feature that allows click-to-dial or auto-dial within your CRM like Salesforce.

Voice, digital, video, and more — all channels are included in Vonage Contact Center, so when call volume slows, agents can handle emails and SMS—and vice versa—to bolster productivity and efficiency. 

AI-driven speech recognition and analytics technology of Vonage Contact Center makes voice recordings the ideal source for training machine-learning models, replaces IVR with virtual agents, and helps live agents find answers faster.