One app for all customer communication. This is the main motto of the company Daktela, which develops cloud-based contact center software that enables businesses to provide perfect care to their customers. The company, which has been on the market since 2005 and is active in 7 countries, has had a new boss since February. He became the new CEO Jiri Havlicek, who has been at Daktela for the sixth year, the last two of which as Technical Director.
What does this change mean for him and what does he want to focus on in his new role? What were his beginnings at Daktele anyway and how has the company changed over the years? And how are they doing as a technology company with digitalization? That's what we asked George in this interview.
How and when did your journey in Daktele actually begin? What position did you start in?
I started at Daktele more than 5 years ago. David Hájek and Richard Baar (NB: founders of Daktela) approached me at the time for Customer Success. Basically, it was about providing a kind of VIP service for our key customers. In practice, this meant that when a larger customer came in and needed to adapt Daktel to their processes, I joined. I handled the entire case - from initial analysis, through development, to deployment, and often I worked on most of it directly.
How has Daktela changed over the years? After not even 4 years you became a CTO, what was the genesis behind your progression to a leadership position?
First of all, we've really grown up a lot. This is a big change in itself, which has an impact on all areas. Starting with the fact that you may no longer know everyone as well as in 30 people. Otherwise, I would say that we still retain such a key cultural core and principles. Regarding my advancement to the position of CTO - the stepping stone was the Smart Quarantine project, on which I spent almost 2 years of those less than 4 years. It was a technologically very successful project for us.
So you have been part of Daktela's leadership for a long time, what has changed for you after moving to the position of CEO?
It's a completely different position. Suddenly, you are responsible for the overall financial and business results of the company. So we need to gradually get acquainted with all the business reports and figures, in 7 countries plus our entire indirect network. However, I still get to the technique. We're still a tech firm, it's our main focus.
The product is still one of the most important things for us.
Is there anything you want to specifically focus on in your new role?
In the beginning, I focused primarily on marketing. We are now working on a new concept of how we want to do some things, we are preparing a new website and so on. A very important topic for us now is performance marketing. However, we're not just improving marketing, there's still a lot of work to be done in every area.
Daktela is growing not only in terms of sales and number of customers, but also in the number of employees. Was it natural growth? They prosecuted your HR Processes Adapt to this growth?
I think it can still be called natural growth, although in some years it has been a little faster. From the point of view of individual years, covid has strengthened us a little in this regard. Our cloud solution is the ideal model for remote-first organizations, which was pretty much everyone's day-to-day business back then. So there was a lot of interest in our solution at the time.
In addition to the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Daktela is also active in other markets. Does each market have its own HR department? Do you manage to have all HR processes unified across all markets?
What departments there are in each country is determined primarily by the size of the branch. HR is not exactly one of the first departments that you will establish in-house if you enter a market. Those HR processes that you need in a small scale can be outsourced from the beginning, or they can be handled by a country manager.
You are a technology company, so digitizing processes seems natural for you. How are you with digitalization in general?
I would say that most of the processes that digitize go to are not done on paper anymore. In fact, our own solution also helps us a lot in this, in which, for example, we approve documents, transfer contracts with each other, or fill out travel orders. Daktela It is very flexible in this regard, and it is possible to model such procedures as well. If something is holding us back somewhere, it's more like legislation or underdeveloped legislative processes.
As a CTO, you participated in the project digitization of HR agendas. Did any particular situation lead to the decision to acquire HR software where you said that without HR software you could no longer do it?
In general, I think that in the number of, for example, more than 50 employees, Excel and similar tools simply cease to be enough for you. Whether it is a register or, for example, vacation and approving them, gradually you will find that having specialized in it HR Software means a bunch of saved time.
Having specialized HR software means heaps of saved time.
What role did you play in the HR software selection process? Did you make the final decision on the HR department's opinion?
Back then, as CTO, I had more of a technical advisory voice. The decisive word had HR Departmentto whom I helped with the evaluation of individual platforms from a technical point of view.
Can you, as CEO, assess the contribution of Pinya HR to Daktela? Is there any specific functionsWhich makes your job easier the most?
It helps me a lot if we all look at the same current data, see who has what time, salary, vacation status and so on. I think anyone who still runs all this stuff in Excel spreadsheets knows all too well what a mess and how many different versions of individual records can be made. A great advantage for us is also the readiness for the European countries where we currently operate.
What are your plans for the future? Does Daktela plan to grow in terms of headcount as well?
We certainly have plans for growth. However, one of the main priorities now for us is to expand more and more abroad. We are in charge of 7 countries. In most of them, we still have huge potential to acquire a large part of the market. Of course, there is also an increase in personnel.
