"We get a lot of valuable statistics from Telavox, it's a tool I use when we look at outgoing and incoming calls."
Martin Branzell
Head of Partners at Krea
About the company
Krea helps businesses find the right financing. They work with different types of financing, primarily business loans. In addition to loans to companies, they also offer factoring (invoice credit), business credit, real estate loans and leasing.
Martin Branzell is Head of Partners and joined Krea one month after its launch in December 2018. Together with Krea’s Operations team, which currently consists of six people in Sweden and one in Finland, his main task is to ensure that customers who apply receive as many offers of financing as possible. Krea’s partners are primarily banks, lenders and factoring companies.
The challenge
The importance of personal contact in business loans
The telephone is particularly important for Krea, as Martin and his team place great emphasis on personal contact.
“Taking out a business loan is a big decision for a company, whatever its size. In that situation, it is important that we are present. Even though our entire process is seamless and digital, you still need to know that there’s someone on the other end of the phone – a human being who’s on top of things if you have any questions.”
“We are often the point of contact between borrowers and lenders and there are many conversations. Business financing is a jungle for many. It is difficult to know what applies to invoice financing, which leasing variant is suitable or what type of amortization you should have. Being there and being accessible is crucial.”
We chose Telavox because of their agility and price reasons. It was super easy to add new users, phone numbers and to build the switchboard.
Martin Branzell
Head of Partners at Krea
Martin and his team aim to call all their customers. There can be up to 4 calls per customer, and in October 2023 they received over 1,000 applications in Sweden and Finland. In total, that’s over 4,000 calls.
“I guess it’s more than that, but that’s the ambition for all customers – to show that we are here. Emails and text messages are not personal enough, but telephony is the way to go for a personal touch.”
The solution
Easy to switch up with Telavox
As a smaller company, Krea doesn’t have the time to have an employee organizing everything in the switchboard.
“With Telavox we can do everything ourselves. If we need to change opening hours, have a new answering machine, change licenses and so on – we’ve been able to do that. I don’t know how many times I’ve changed our opening hours for a day when the whole company is away or changed the answering machine in five minutes because we’ve added a new service – it’s super easy.”
For a growing company like Krea, it is important to be able to scale up when needed, even beyond national borders. In Finland, they have set up a sister company under the Kredita brand.
“When we were looking for a telephony solution, many people offered their own telephony, but their packages were too cumbersome for us. It became obvious for us to continue expanding with Telavox.”
With Telavox’s presence in the Finnish market, Krea/Kredita only needed to add one new license – just like adding a new person in the Swedish market.
“Having telephony in place in Finland is crucial. Someone has to be there and we chose Telavox because of their flexibility and price. It was super easy to add new users, phone numbers and to build the switchboard. We built the opening hours and call flow ourselves in a super simple interface, and then we were off and running with the whole communication.”