“Our company is expanding rapidly. EVOX allows us to quickly add new employees, departments (such as customer service and purchasing), and new stores. With the mobile app our employees never miss important calls even when they are not in the office.”
CEO QBEBE
A busy mother’s lifesaver - organic instant food for babies
Adhering to the business philosophy of “natural, organic, and no artificial ingredients,” QBEBE has developed more than 500 organic baby food recipes and pouch bags. The company insists on using only organic and safe ingredients, and all meals are created in their central kitchen, which is a Class I clean room. This strict adherence to quality and control has made QBEBE the number one brand of infant and toddler food products, and certified by the Organic Organization. In addition to baby food, QBEBE has also applied its strict organic and natural ingredient standards to create a professional bakery for bread and pastry products for children and adults
QBEBE quickly launched its company communication system using EVOX
Not surprisingly, QBEBE acquired a large and loyal following in just a few years. Their headquarters team was expanding quickly and urgently needed a better system for external and internal communication. Mr. Hsu, founder of QBEBE, chose EVOX for the company’s business phone system due to its good call quality and very convenient online administration center.
EVOX allows QBEBE to easily add and configure phone extensions for employees by just logging into the admin center. There is no need to schedule and pay for costly technician visits to perform these changes as is required for hardware PBX systems. Business extensions can also be assigned to mobile phones as an app so employees never miss a call. The group ring function in EVOX allows an incoming call to be routed to a team so that the call is answered by the first available member.
As QBEBE grew, Mr. Hsu was getting busier. He requested that EVOX have the functionality to allow his personal assistant to pick up calls for him when he was busy. It turned out that EVOX had received similar feature requests from other customers, and had already implemented a group pick up capability. This feature will be available in a new general release of the EVOX Admin site later this year.
Like many growing companies, QBEBE could not hire fast enough, so it outsourced its accounting functions to an outside firm. The EVOX Admin site allows QBEBE to assign extensions to the outsourced accounting personnel. Not only does this make communication with the accounting firm easier, the accountants can contact QBEBE vendors as if they are employees of the company.
Building deeper connections with customers by going offline
With the financial success of their online shop, QBEBE decided to try opening a physical store in Kaohsiung to give customers a more intimate experience. It was an instant hit! The popularity of the store convinced QBEBE to expand into new locations. Its next target is Zhubei, the Silicon Valley of Taiwan, where many high-income busy young parents in the tech industry are more concerned with baby food quality than price. In order to better manage these rapidly expanding locations, QBEBE applied for additional EVOX phone numbers that are local to the stores so they appear local to the customers when they call. In reality, all calls go back to the same EVOX multi-location system and may be answered by staff situated anywhere in the company. As the company continues to add franchise stores, EVOX will provide better branch support such as the ability to set up unique auto-attendants for each location to better serve its local community.
『Longevity of brand』
Instead of being focused just on financial success, Mr. Hsu will continue to adhere to QBEBE’s commitment to produce high quality products and build a brand image that resonates with its loyal customer base. As QBEBE grows, its communication needs will become even more complex and demanding. EVOX will be there, developing practical business communication solutions to grow along side QBEBE.
Interview with an Entrepreneur: QBEBE CEO
Q: What inspired QBEBE? Why did you decide to make organic baby food in Taiwan?
The food business has been around for thousands of years. In the early days, people valued food based on its scarcity. Higher prices were paid for ingredients that were hard to come by. But now, people understand the health value of food.
“Money can’t buy back health”
When I was working abroad, healthy food was readily available and very popular. But the Taiwanese market did not catch on. The general impression of instant food was that of convenience store microwave food. So I decided to promote organic and healthy instant food to Taiwanese consumers.
We are currently developing baked products for children and adults using only organic and natural ingredients. We will introduce them to our online and offline stores in November. I want to correct people’s misconception that bread is unhealthy.
Q: QBEBE What is the main reason you are growing so fast?
Rather than “just doing business to make a quick return”, we focus on building a good brand image of excellent quality. We believe that the most important thing in doing business is to build trust in our customers!
Q: QBEBE You started with an Internet site, why are you now actively expanding your brick and mortar stores?
We opened our first organic convenience store in Kaohsiung because we had a good business partner there. The store was an instant success! This led us to target Zhubei as the next physical store location. With many young parents employed in the technology industry, we feel there would be immediate market acceptance of baby food that is focused more on quality and health than price. As people in Taiwan are generally becoming more health conscious, QBEBE expects to open dozens of franchises within a year.
Q: What are the biggest business challenges in your high growth phase?
We are seeing no major difficulties right now. There were some vicious rumors about our food quality. But we are very transparent about our production facility and the integrity of our ingredients. Customers can visit our production facility at any time without an appointment to see for themselves. So these rumors were easily squashed, and the attention they brought our company was welcome publicity. Our month to month growth rate actually went up from the teens to 25%, thank you very much!
