Business Insight Journal Interview with Steve Flavell
Steve, your journey from strategy consulting to co-founding LoopUp spans multiple industries and milestones. What motivated you to dive into enterprise communications, and how has your perspective on the sector changed since?
Today, LoopUp is squarely focused on multinational cloud telephony for Microsoft Teams; we help multinational enterprises consolidate how they buy and manage their global telephony, moving from multiple regional service providers to one with LoopUp.
However, our journey started in the related world of conference calling, where we seized the opportunity to make dial-in conference calling – numbers and codes if you remember those days – just less miserable than it used to be. We turned the BlackBerry into a ‘remote controller’ of the call to give the host visibility and control that was previously lacking. However, that industry was drastically impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, as businesses moved to broader unified communications platforms such as Microsoft Teams.
And so, in late 2020, we pivoted decisively into the related world of multinational cloud telephony for Microsoft Teams. We have since grown that business swiftly to more the $10 million or annual recurring revenue, and we are very proud to have never lost a single customer.
Global enterprises often wrestle with fragmented telephony setups. How is LoopUp addressing the complexity of unifying international communication under a single provider?
At LoopUp, we simplify the worlds of our multinational customers. Rather than having to deal with multiple regional telco vendors that come with multiple contracts, management portals, pricing tariffs and support teams, we enable our customers simplify and consolidate all that into one vendor. Why have multiple – often tens of – vendors, when you can just have one?
Service is implemented in a globally-consistent way, and is all managed centrally and integrated with Microsoft Teams. Indeed, this makes Microsoft Teams truly ‘unified’ communications.
As organizations shift to the cloud, telecom providers are being forced to evolve. What does staying competitive look like for traditional players in this landscape?
Telecoms providers have all embraced cloud-based service. This has been a major restructuring of the industry that started well before the pandemic, but which accelerated materially as a result.
The more recent restructuring affecting telecoms providers is the integration of telephony into broader unified communications platforms such as Microsoft Teams. This has perhaps been less popular with legacy providers, as some of the value is inevitably conceded to Microsoft through the necessary license extensions. However, the end customer market pull has been too strong to resist.
An even more recent trend has been the geographic consolidation of telecoms service provision. However, this makes less sense for the traditional providers, because their core businesses of broadband network services still require the provision of physical cables – albethey now fibre rather than copper – into buildings, which is not conducive to a global go-to-market strategy.
And hence the emergency of new global service providers, such as LoopUp, that don’t have that constraint. We provide cloud-based Microsoft Teams Calling in more countries than any other provider, with the broadest country coverage on Microsoft’s Operator Connect and Direct Routing programs.
Cloud telephony is gaining serious traction. What are some of the most transformative impacts you’re seeing in how enterprises approach voice communication today?
Moving to cloud-based telephony – rather than on premises based telephony –helps both end users and enterprises alike. Users are able to make and receive phone calls wherever they have internet access, be that at work, at home or on the move, with their numbers no longer tied to a physical desk or office.
Furthermore, enterprises are able to strip out all of the on premises legacy equipment (PBXs) from their offices and sites worldwide, eliminating the associated overhead costs of support, upgrades and replacement.
Many companies are exploring Microsoft Teams as a complete telephony solution. What does it take to make Teams not just a collaboration tool, but a fully functional enterprise-grade voice system?
Microsoft Teams is a powerful collaboration platform, but out of the box, it does not offer numbers-based telephony.
This shift to integrate telephony into Microsoft Teams needs a little planning to make sure that all of the valuable (but not redundant) capabilities of previous on premises equipment (PBXs) are mirrored on Teams Phone System. However, the migration can be swift; we recently moved a major global IT infrastructure company onto Microsoft Teams Calling in over 20 countries in three months.
Cost efficiency is top of mind for global businesses. Where do you see the biggest opportunities to reduce communication spend without compromising on quality or reliability?
Global businesses can save on a number of dimensions by embracing next generation telephony.
First, the move to cloud-based service means all legacy on premises equipment can be stripped out of every site in that global organization, so eliminating the need for ongoing maintenance, upgrading and replacement.
Second the move to integrate telephony with Microsoft Teams delivers the operational simplicity and vision of ‘Unified communications’ as opposed to Nearly Unified Communications.
And last, but by no means least, global consolidation of service provision means operational teams in that global organization only have to manage one vendor, with one global contract, management portal, pricing tariff, and support team. The savings from this simplification are immense, freeing up that resource to work on value-enhancing projects for their organizations.
You operate in a highly regulated and technically demanding space. How do you ensure LoopUp meets the scale, compliance, and resilience requirements of large multinational clients?
For multinationals, telephony is business critical, and it is therefore paramount to have compliant, reliable and high-quality service across every country in which they operate.
This is indeed what we’ve built at LoopUp. We take care of all regulatory requirements in the markets where we provide service, and we work with more that 20 underlying carrier partners, using ‘highest quality routing’ to provide resilient and premium service globally.
Our legacy in conference calling, where we served 25 of the world’s top 100 law firms for their critical client calls, means that a very high duty of customer care runs through our veins – something that we believe shines through in our track record of precisely zero ever customer churn since entering the Multinational Cloud Telephony market in 2020. We have over 350 customers.
AI continues to make headlines across tech. How do you see AI influencing the future of enterprise communications, particularly in areas like call routing, customer interaction, or analytics?
AI is becoming a core part of enterprise communications, for example in tools like Microsoft Copilot, which can summarize calls, generate insights, and help draft follow-ups right inside Teams. The integration of an enterprise’s telephony with Microsoft Teams means that all calling data can be captured within that enterprise’s AI data set, further empowering tools such as Copilot.
Having built and scaled businesses in multiple markets, how do you balance long-term strategy with the need to adapt quickly in a space that’s constantly shifting?
At LoopUp, we believe the key to balancing long-term strategy with the need to adapt quickly lies in effective internal communications. Making sure that the team understands ‘the why’ of why we’re doing what we’re doing and always taking that back to our underlying strategy and goals, empowers them to make more agile and better informed choices and their comfort and ability to to react to inevitable changes in market environment and customer needs.
Looking forward, what strategic priorities are top of mind for LoopUp as cloud-based communication becomes the norm rather than the exception?
Cloud-based communications has already become the norm rather than the exception. Strategic market priorities have moved on… first with the move to integrating cloud-based communications tools – in LoopUp’s case integrating telephony with Microsoft Teams – and second, consolidating vendors geographically for simpler, more efficient and more cost effective service provision. At LoopUp’s we’re laser focused at being the best in the world at these two things.
A quote or advice from the author
Always have the 20-second story of ‘why you exist’: how you help your customers thrive. Tell that story at every opportunity and don’t forget to keep telling it to your team too. It’s impossible to overtell.
Steve Flavell
co-CEO and co-founder of LoopUp
Steve Flavell is responsible for LoopUp’s global commercial activities, based out of London. Steve was a co-founder of LoopUp in 2003 and has overseen the company’s market flotation in London in 2016, reprivatization in 2024, and shift in strategy to focus on multinational cloud telephony. He has an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and MEng from St. John’s College, Cambridge.
LoopUp helps multinational enterprises consolidate how they buy and manage their global Microsoft Teams telephony, offering phone numbers and full cloud-based, PSTN-replacement service in more than 100 countries around the world. We liberate multinationals from the frustrations, complexities and inefficiencies of working with multiple regional carriers, each with their own contracts, pricing, support teams and management portals. LoopUp offers a single and consistent global solution, combining design, deployment, service delivery and support – provided globally and all integrated with Microsoft Teams. LoopUp is headquartered in London with operations around the world.
