ICT services have become a need in our daily life. Companies are always trying to offer cutting-edge solutions and software to improve the quality of service and guarantee a good customer experience. In order to know more about the latest solutions and software offered, Telecom Review spoke to Professor Charbel Fares, CEO, SpiceTech s.a.r.l. who explained more about the company’s latest CRM solutions.
Can you give us an overview of the main services and solutions that SpiceTech offers? And who are the company’s target customers?
SpiceTech was established in 2017 by a group of technology entrepreneurs with two goals:
- Reducing the cost of software development (mobile and web) and increasing the quality of the software products in the market.
- Showing the different businesses the importance of the data they have and making sure that they use the most of it.
We are currently a team of ten software engineers with expertise in the below domains:
- Software and database cloud architecture
- Mobile and web full stack design and implementation
- Mobile and web security assessment
- Augmented reality and virtual reality
- CRM design and implementation
- Chatbots and AI
- Internet of Things
- Big data and data analytics
Below is a selection of developed project:
- CRM with WhatsApp Chatbot for Bourj Hamoud Municipality. A project funded by UNDP in order to support BHM to coordinate current emergency response efforts but also to address longer term needs. The system establishes a Municipality Hotline system and a chatbot based on WhatsApp.
- Digital polling system. A system delivered to Vector s.a.r.l to help them create and manage polls in Lebanon and the MENA region.
- Smart farming. Different projects delivered to Sitera Romania to monitor animals in farms.
- Counsela Platform for Online Psychological Counseling.
We have three type of customers:
- The startups who wish to have their platform ready to be deployed in a very short time and with a squeezed budget without sacrificing the quality. The startups who wish to have a partner rather than a software development company are the one that we like to work with. We believe that our role does not end when we deliver but actually delivery of a product is just one milestone.
- The companies who want to digitalize their processes and develop their own custom CRM.
- Companies who wants to assess the security on their existing mobile and web applications.
AR/VR are two technologies that have shaped the ICT industry. How do you leverage them? Are you working on any new projects that involve AR/VR technologies?
After obtaining a PhD in virtual reality, I personally saw the need of AR/VR in our everyday usage since 2006. It took some time for the hardware evaluation and the internet connection to cope with the advancement of algorithms. At SpiceTech we are working on couple of research projects with universities in Lebanon and France in the AR/VR algorithms and implementation.
We are currently working on a CRM with AR/VR capabilities for building information modeling. This project is being developed for A-Tech, a giant aluminum company based in Australia. We are giving all the stakeholders involved in building access to whatever they need during their site visit by augmenting the reality with virtual elements giving them the possibility to access a full CRM at the backend of the system. The system can be used at all the phases of building development: pre-sale, operation and as-build.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is nowadays a key element in any company’s strategy. How do you ensure that your customers have the right CRM tools?
At SpiceTech we consider ourselves as partner to every customer and we make sure to solve his problem in the optimum way as if the problem is inhouse. We take our time to sit with the customer and all the different stakeholders within the company to make sure we understand the problem from all the different angles. We work on optimizing the solution in a way that fits for all the stakeholders. We always think out of the box while proposing solutions. We don’t believe that an “all you can eat” or a “one size fits all” solutions are adequate anymore especially when it comes to CRM solutions.
What other technologies do you use in the development of your services and solutions?
Most of our solutions are cloud-based. Our platforms are developed as web and mobile applications. We believe in the cross platform mobile applications development. Our team has expertise in Flutter, React Native, and Ionic. Using such technologies, we can amortize cost without sacrificing security and functionality. We are adopting Scrum methodology for developing, delivering, and sustaining our products. We use different open source tools with Linux servers for our back-end development. We are using Tableau for data analytics as well.
We believe that data is a gold mine and we want to make sure that our partners get the most of it.
