Brands are looking beyond one-way interactions and want to offer personalized, tailor made experiences to their customers. Gupshup, which is bullish on conversational engagement is now using a mix of voice, video and advanced messaging solutions to drive digital customer journeys. Gupshup’s Chief Product Officer, Gaurav Kachhawa in an interview shares his thoughts on how Gupshup is enabling brands to grow faster with holistic customer engagement solutions.
- Did the pandemic expedite the shift towards automated customer experiences?
The pandemic compelled businesses to better align with consumer expectations. In line with this, brands realize the need to demonstrate more empathy and drive greater personalization and transparency. More importantly, brands understand the necessity to reach consumers on their preferred communication channels, round the clock. Consumers want personalized engagement at every stage of their interaction with their favourite brands. However, for brands, delivering customized experiences to millions of consumers in real-time is an enormous challenge. Conversational AI solutions can help businesses tackle this challenge by automating customer experiences and delivering them in a natural, human-like approach to consumers.
2. What key advantages does Gupshup have to offer to businesses looking for a holistic, AI-enabled conversational engagement platform?
Most businesses typically have a piecemeal Conversational AI strategy. They end up using one tech provider for messaging, another for voice and perhaps one more for analytics and customer service. This often leads to integration, security and performance shortfalls, resulting in a fragmented brand experience for customers. With Gupshup, tens of thousands of businesses have made conversations an integral part of their omnichannel customer experience strategy. Using AI and advanced automation, we offer businesses a holistic customer engagement solution that helps them future-proof conversational user experiences. These experiences are delivered via voice, video and text – or a combination of these – on 30+ channels using our single API so that the brands can just build once and deploy anywhere with the bare minimum hassle and retooling.
3. Could you outline a few examples where Gupshup has helped businesses enhance their CX journeys?
A good example is Doubtnut, an EdTech platform, which helps students clarify doubts related to STEM subjects. Earlier, students had to post pictures of their questions on Doubtnut’s website or mobile app. However, Doubtnut quickly realized that limited access to high-speed mobile internet connectivity in rural India was impacting their service. To tackle this, Gupshup helped Doubtnut develop a smart WhatsApp chatbot. Now, students simply send their doubts via WhatsApp and receive links to videos with answers to those doubts, in their preferred language, in about 10 seconds or less. The result – Doubtnut saw a 95% user satisfaction rate, and the number of daily users spiked by 224%. In effect, Doubtnut’s tutor-student engagement rate rose by 260%.
NoBroker is another good example. Previously, as part of the property listing process, less tech-savvy customers were facing problems uploading photos on the NoBroker site and mobile app. As a result, the NoBroker team had to manually reach out to customers, collect the photos and upload them from their end – a tedious, resource-intensive and inefficient process that resulted in cost overheads. We collaborated with NoBroker to develop a WhatsApp chatbot, which allowed property owners to interact and upload photos directly via WhatsApp, as if they were sending pictures to a friend on WhatsApp. The overall time taken to upload photos for the property listing came down from 3 days, to just 6 minutes. As a result, NoBroker saw 20x annualized ROI and 2.8x increase in property let-outs/sales.
4. What drives your acquisition strategy?
Our vision is to make it as simple for a business to engage with customers as chatting with friends or family. In line with this, we are working towards building the most comprehensive conversational engagement platform. And our acquisition strategy aligns with this larger product-led growth mission.
5. How will your acquisition of Knowlarity help enterprise customers?
The Gupshup – Knowlarity combination offers a mix of voice, video and messaging solutions to our enterprise customers, who can now drive multi-channel conversations over voice. Knowlarity’s voice solutions combined with Gupshup’s messaging capabilities can help businesses deliver superior customer experience in a seamless manner.
Let me share an example so it’s easy to understand the voice + messaging interplay and how it can transform customer engagement. Many of us have dialled a bank’s or an e-commerce company’s customer care for a quick, urgent query. After getting through the automated voice instructing us to press multiple keys and be on hold for let’s say a few minutes, we finally get through to the customer care executive. If by chance we get redirected to another customer care executive, then we end up explaining all over again. Imagine if the bank or e-commerce site had a smart voice-enabled chatbot, which could not just alert you about all customer care executives being busy but ask you to instantly schedule a call back at a specific time, via a voice message. And what if the chatbot can trigger an automatic notification confirming the time slot, allowing you with a single-click option to block your calendar. This seamless transition between voice and messaging interfaces can dial-up customer delight as we know it and help win customers for life.
Several enterprises have already started using our combined technology stack of voice plus messaging solutions and are reporting lower customer acquisition and support costs, with increased profitability.
