Shankar Iyer, director, business development, Asia, Infobip
Infobip is a company focused on omnichannel engagement, powering a broad range of messaging channels, tools and solutions for advanced customer engagement, authentication and security. In an interview with tele.net, Shankar Iyer, director, business development, Asia, Infobip, talks about the company’s role in the evolving communication-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) space and its growth strategies….
What are Infobip’s key focus areas in the Indian market? What are your telecom product offerings?
Infobip’s focus in the Indian market revolves around the evolving CPaaS landscape. The combination of new-age and conventional channels comprises SMS, MMS, email, WhatsApp, voice, rich communication services (RCS), live chat, Instagram, Viber, etc., enhancing the customer experience like never before. Infobip’s portfolio also extends to Google’s Business Messages, Apple Messages for Business and web push.
Our vision in India is to enable businesses to offer omnichannel customer engagement through our solutions such as Moments, Answers, Conversations and Experiences. Moments is a customer engagement solution that enables brands to onboard, engage and retain customers through offers and campaigns. Answers is an automation-powered tool that ensures companies are available 24×7 to assist their customers at a lower cost with a virtual assistant. Furthermore, Infobip’s cloud contact centre solution, Conversations, empowers businesses to interact with customers through a range of widely adopted industry-standard communication channels. The latest addition in our portfolio is Experiences, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot assistant for businesses.
What are the growth trends in enterprise demand for CPaaS? What role is Infobip playing in this segment?
The landscape of enterprise demand is changing with evolving customer expectations around their experience with businesses. Businesses leverage Infobip’s platform and cloud infrastructure to manage large volumes of messages and online interactions with minimal delays and excellent delivery rates. For example, we improved security for Uber by enabling a number-masking feature and enabled customers to book rides on WhatsApp with a chatbot powered by our Answers platform. Bajaj Auto leveraged our services to engage with its customers by implementing WhatsApp and RCS as communication channels. As a result, the company’s engagement increased by 133 per cent, it achieved a 2x increase in conversions and the click rate surged by 8 per cent.
Similarly, Anand Rathi, one of India’s leading financial services firms, registered a significant 40 per cent rise in clickthrough rate using Infobip’s WhatsApp chatbot. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation also leveraged Infobip’s solutions to launch a chatbot for assisting citizens, tourists and businesses in Mumbai on a range of civic issues.
What are the key challenges faced by enterprises adopting CPaaS? How does Infobip plan to address this?
Universally, businesses grapple with operational bottlenecks as they strive to expand, tackle reporting issues stemming from data overload, and encounter go-to-market delays compounded by heightened regulatory and compliance pressures. In terms of unique challenges, each client has specific use cases and often struggles to identify adaptable partners capable of addressing and resolving these unique needs.
To resolve these challenges, we have introduced CPaaS X, the next phase in the evolution of the Infobip CPaaS application programming interface stack. CPaaS X streamlines the onboarding process for brands, effectively tackling a significant pain point associated with CPaaS onboarding.
What are the company’s future growth strategies and priorities?
In India, we are focusing on harnessing the power of CPaaS to offer the latest solutions in communication trends and enhance customer experience for businesses. The convergence of super apps and generative AI enables the incorporation of technologies into communication channels. We are dedicated to developing a wider array of global solutions, driven by analytics and generative AI to steer this transformation forward.
Our objective is to shift from merely cross-selling transactions to becoming esteemed partners, delivering software solutions that enhance the value of Indian businesses. In both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) scenarios, our commitment is to support digital transformation journeys through conversational platforms. We are excited about helping emerging companies in their global expansion endeavours, leveraging our established presence to facilitate global communication scaling. This strategy involves organic growth and actively seeking opportunities that complement our offerings. Our primary focus areas include expanding our partner network and nurturing our teams to excel in value-driven sales. Despite our global reach, providing localised support remains essential.
