OCUS

OCUS provides the world's largest companies with all-in-one imagery solutions, including professional photography delivered by a network of 35,000 photographers, AI automated content moderation, and image enhancement. After receiving 24M in funding in April 2021, the Paris-based company set its sights on expanding across EMEA, APAC, and NORAM — regions where email isn't used as regularly as other channels, a big challenge for a company where 90% of communication was sent via email.

As a two-sided marketplace, communication at OCUS is complex: it spans partners, merchants, and photographers operating in different countries, each with different channel preferences. Client expectations had moved from a one-week turnaround to same-day delivery in major urban areas, with SLAs becoming increasingly stringent. Yet OCUS was held back by fragmented communication, using fifteen different localized solutions that led to gaps in information and inconsistent communication across channels.

“We were looking for a solution that would give us the time and energy to focus on new problems and not have to revisit old ones repeatedly.”

Christopher Kaisoum, Director of Global Operations, OCUS

OCUS needed a more data-driven solution — one that battled issues of visibility and redundancy. The key characteristics they were looking for were:

After a demo and follow-up calls, it was clear Bird met all of the above. What made Bird stand out from the competition was the experience of the team and the helpfulness of the sales process — including being based in the EMEA region and having experience working with similar two-sided marketplaces. Walking the OCUS team through relevant case studies, a best-practice session hosted by a Technical Account Manager, and answers on integrations led OCUS to choose Bird as its omnichannel partner.

Here's how OCUS is putting Bird to work to tighten communications and scale:

“As a freelancer, I operate my business through my cell phone, particularly using WhatsApp. Having work opportunities come to me straight into my WhatsApp inbox is extremely convenient for me and allows me to choose assignments that work best for me in just a couple of seconds.”

OCUS Photographer

Sending such a high volume of notifications manually would have taken eight dedicated FTEs to achieve, with zero holiday time. By moving onto one centralized, low-code platform, OCUS automated that work and freed its operations team to focus on problem-solving rather than phone calls.

The greatest value of a low-code/no-code solution is putting the power to create tools into the hands of operations managers — building solutions tailored to their unique needs without relying on software engineers. Next, OCUS wants to explore conversational intelligence to gain insight into client questions and concerns, and aims to cut manual intervention in customer service by 50 percent in the next six months.

“When the people who deal with the issue every day are actively building that solution, they are by nature going to build a better solution.”

Christopher Kaisoum, Director of Global Operations, OCUS