{Startup Watch: Flock} The Platform Unifying Office Communication in a Growing Indian Market

The workplace communication platform that’s competing with Slack is seeing rapid growth in the Indian market.

As India wakes up to more digitization in office communications, there is a shift from informal platforms like WhatsApp and texting to more formal ones like email and video conferencing. In a post-pandemic landscape, communication within offices and business organizations are taking on priority, creating the need for many in-office communication tools like Slack, MS Teams, and Zoom.

Flock, a workplace collaboration and communication company, is bringing all the required communication together for a cohesive experience in offices. Especially in times when Covid has brought in remote working with the need for secure communication, Flock is helping many companies to not just stay in touch but also operate from a single platform.

While India is yet to see major adoption of platforms like Flock, Gaurang Sinha, Director, Go-to-Market at Flock told The Tech Panda that the country is experiencing a transformation curve right now.

A lot of businesses still very much rely on informal messages of communication. In many companies, thousands of employees are just operating on WhatsApp. The need and that market is just starting to grow here in India.

“A lot of businesses still very much rely on informal messages of communication. In many companies, thousands of employees are just operating on WhatsApp. The need and that market is just starting to grow here in India. The first question that people ask is, ‘I am using all these tools and messaging people for free, why should I pay for a platform?’”, says Sinha.

However, the realization for the need of information security, efficiency and productivity, and the need for cutting down on email is leading to growth in the Indian market. In the past couple of weeks, Flock alone has seen 3x increase in new work teams joining Flock in India. Additionally, it has also witnessed a 3.2x increase in companies using the platform for messaging colleagues, sharing files, video conferencing and screen sharing.

Unify All the Communication

The problem that Flock wants to solve is the scattered nature of office communication that happens across different platforms.

“The idea of Flock is to unify all of the communications, be it over video, audio, or text, into a single platform. The second goal is to basically connect it to all of the context or all of the metadata of your organization,” says Sinha.

So Flock can do everything that potentially a Slack can do, what an MS Teams can do, or any other platform can do. But we approach it in a way that you don’t have to be an engineer to do it.

Flock is enabling organizations to streamline communication and centralize access to a variety of tools and services used in the workplace. It provides a secure solution for teams to get work done and bring people together, regardless of their location. It’s providing organizations a complete suite of products, which include an intuitive communication tool, email, calendar, video conferencing, and several other features.

Flock has been witnessing rapid growth in the last few years. Launched five years ago by serial entrepreneur and billionaire Bhavin Turakhia, it’s used by over 30,000 companies and teams in more than 150 countries. Globally located, Flock has offices in Boston, the US, Dubai, the UAE, and in Mumbai and Bangalore, India. It counts clients like web.com, Namecheap, Sodexo, and McDonald’s India.

Flock Vs. Slack

While Flock has many similarities to the American platform, Slack, Sinha says that Flock’s USP lies in its ease of use among other features.

“Our product was designed to be easily adoptable by somebody who’s never used a platform like a Flock or a Slack before. This is somebody who’s just used to WhatsApp or instant messaging and wants to move to a platform within a professional context,” he explains.

The team has designed Flock to be closer to a normal messaging platform on a phone, but the user can open it on a desktop with all the functionality that other competitors including Slack offer.

“So Flock can do everything that potentially a Slack can do, what an MS Teams can do, or any other platform can do. But we approach it in a way that you don’t have to be an engineer to do it. You don’t have to be a technical minded person. There’s nothing to learn,” he says.

Support for Covid Fighters

With the Covid pandemic pushing office organizations to their limit, a platform like Flock obviously saw a surge in usage, up to 600%-700% within a span of weeks. The number of users, especially paid, went up tremendously.

The pandemic has been a catalyst for profits but Sinha says it was never their goal to gain in this manner.

“We’ve had a very positive impact on our revenue, but that wasn’t necessarily the goal. The goal is to be as useful as possible to as many people as possible,” says Sinha.

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To help those in need, Flock has gone out of its way to support their existing as well as new customers. To begin, for a period of six months, they gave away Flock free of cost to anybody who was an NGO, a Covid fighter, an educational institution, a government or in non-profit space.

“We said, these are the people who are on the front lines. The last thing we want to do is charge them money for something that’s an essential service. So for specific services and sectors, we made the product free of cost until the end of the year,” Sinha explains.

Even today, any business of any size, be it 50 people or 5,000, can use Flock for 30 days, with all of the pro features before deciding if it’s the right product for them and whether they want to pay for it.

Helping Remote Workers

As the numbers surged, the Flock team set up systems and processes to scale to that kind of volume. Since many companies were moving to remote work, they incorporated and created new enterprise and corporate-oriented features in sync with the demand.

We’ve had a very positive impact on our revenue, but that wasn’t necessarily the goal. The goal is to be as useful as possible to as many people as possible

“A couple of our large customers came and said, ‘We’re concerned about the fact that people are accessing all this sensitive information from their personal devices or from their laptops, but how do we make sure that they’re not passing it on anywhere else,” says Sinha.

To solve such problems, they added the ability to restrict Flock to be used from very specific networks. So unless a user is logged in from their office VPN or office virtual machine, they won’t be able to use a platform like Flock.

“We wanted to make sure that employers and companies have the comfort of knowing that the person is only accessing company information over a secure platform. So we put what we call IP white listing in place,” he explains.

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They also realized the need for video conferencing not just within the company but also with external platforms. So they created a new native integration with Zoom. Now, rather than users having to switch out of Flock and start a Zoom call separately, they can just use Flock to talk. They can just create a Zoom link from Flock and send the link to the other person.

Over the next year, the focus of the platform is to continue adding features and integrations with other tools. They are working with many of their partners to build more innovations and improving core features, for example, video conferencing, security and administrative controls, and analytics.