Become Transforms How SMBs Obtain Funding

Become’s mission is clear: To transform how small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) obtain funding and improve their capability of being funded. The company was born from its founders’ challenges and experiences with financing their own venture.

“When we were running our previous company, we tried to get a business loan to expand our business, improve operations, and hire new employees,” says Eden Amirav, CEO and co-founder. “We met with a number of banks, received many loan offers, and also tried to apply online for a business loan.”

“We found the process to be difficult, unintuitive, and extremely time-consuming,” he continues.

They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. So we decided to enter the market ourselves and fix what was broken.

We aimed to use the experience and technology we had already developed for that venture to make lemonade in the business lending market.”

Now, Become offers a variety of funding opportunities, from business loans to lines of credit, equipment and vehicle financing, merchant cash advances, and more. Using its own proprietary algorithms and LendingScore™ technology, Become quickly makes connections between SMBs and lenders, improving funding odds, unlocking better funding opportunities, and providing optimal funding solutions.

Part of the process includes ensuring optimal communications between local agents, business owners, and the lender. That’s where Become found the need to leverage their web app to enable high-quality calls between agents and customers around the world.

Creating a better call and customer experience

With more than 120,000 customers around the world and 50-plus lending partners, Become is quickly scaling its business to meet demand. Since most communication between customers and account managers is done through Become’s web app, it was a natural step to implement a calling solution that was also in the browser. By using Plivo’s Browser SDK for the call center, the company is able to not only expedite calls and increase account manager productivity, but also create a great customer experience.

We have a large group of account managers, and we need to handle multiple incoming calls.

“We’re able to easily traffic the calls and redirect them to an available account manager in the case of a new customer or to an associated account manager if they’re an existing customer. It makes the whole process much smoother and more efficient.”

In addition, once the first connection is made between a customer and an agent, the system remembers precisely which account manager last talked to the SMB owner. “Best of all, our account managers can quickly pick up where they left off to build a strong relationship,” Amirav says. “With Plivo as the solution, we can provide fast, uninterrupted, and stable processes for our customers.”

Call quantity and quality

For almost five years, we’ve relied on Plivo for high-quality global calls with customers, totaling more than 6 million minutes.

“Its reliability and ease of use is a boon to our agents, and it helps us reach our goals of fulfilling the lending needs of SMBs,” Amirav says.

While the capacity for a large number of calls each day is important, the quality of those calls is paramount. Call reliability and voice quality can be challenging when people are calling over Wi-Fi. Since Plivo’s Browser SDK uses the Opus codec for audio transmission, Become can better handle fluctuating connectivity, delivering consistent voice quality to customers no matter their internet connection. Reducing the choppy audio between agents and business owners leads to an uninterrupted calling experience that enables better communication and lets everyone focus on the actual financial discussion.

With Plivo as the core infrastructure for their calling solution, Become can help SMBs realize their business dreams even sooner.