This startup wants to make sure you never miss another customer on the phone

Zal Dastur, co-founder of Singapore-based startup Lucep, has a sign in his office which reads, “Persistence pays.” It’s a maxim that most startup founders probably repeat to themselves before they go to sleep every night, right up there with “If at first you don’t succeed…”

Dastur and his co-founder, Kaiesh Vohra, know the value of persistence. It drove them to India to try out their first startup Venuemirror, a MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferencing, Exhibitions) leads generation company for hotels. The startup didn’t work out, but they learned something valuable.

“At the time we didn’t know anything about running a startup,” Dastur confides in Tech in Asia. The co-founders had to learn about the minutiae of the startup business the hard way – by trial and error and, yes, persistence.

They also had to deal with the Indian market, which can be brutal to those it sees as outsiders (even though both Dastur and Vohra are of Indian descent). But learn they did, from how to pursue investors and partnerships to how to interview potential employees.

Dastur was persuaded by Vohra to leave a cushy if a bit unrewarding job to start Venuemirror. “I think I grew more in those two years living [in India] than I did in a lot of other places,” Dastur says.

Startup take two

The co-founders certainly know better with Lucep, which is their latest startup. Lucep got an unlikely start as a software R&D division at a Southeast Asia system integrator company, where Dastur and Vohra worked after shutting down Venuemirror. The division spun off on its own, retaining the intellectual property it was working on.

The Lucep team.

The startup has built a mobile app for lead and prospect management for businesses. “The tool allows you to connect with any prospect that comes on your website in under 60 seconds,” Dastur says. The idea is that companies who want sales, especially small and medium enterprises, need to get back to prospective leads as soon as possible, or risk losing that potential customer completely.

Lucep has a widget that appears on a business’ website, much like a customer support chat box. Prospective customers can enter their name, phone number, and query. On the business’ side, a notification pops up on the salesperson’s phone, who can then get in touch with the customer right away.

The tool creates a virtual queue of prospective customers, allowing the next available person in a sales team to follow the next lead. The salesperson then receives the personal data provided by the customer, as well as a host of analytics to better engage with them. “The salesperson is proactively engaging with the customer, and doing so within five minutes,” Dastur says.

Worldwide appeal

The tool is currently in beta, but Lucep has been in talks with several parties interested to make use of it. In Singapore, companies like Fullerton Healthcare want to use the tool as a queueing system for patients. The startup is talking to banks that can use it in a similar fashion. Its first client, real estate company CBRE, is interested mainly in the analytics engine behind Lucep. “They saw value in […] our ability to compile large amounts of data and have them turned into easy to understand reports,” Dastur explains.

The startup is also speaking with governments, hospitals, and banks worldwide – a lot of them in South America, according to Dastur. It can even revisit its co-founders’ old stomping ground, as its tool can help hotels with MICE-related services. “It’s really about connecting businesses to their customers,” Dastur says. “And it’s a flexible platform.”

Persistence pays