Conversational Messaging Podcast by Gupshup

In today’s episode of the Conversational Messaging Podcast, we spoke to Nidhi S Mittal, who is the head of marketing at JioSaavn, and Srinivas Vijayaraghavan, who’s the VP of marketing at Gupshup. 

In this insightful conversation, Nidhi spoke about what drives her love for marketing, and how she approaches communication with consumers. She walked us through the key points of the right communication with your audience, whilst not drowning them in automated emails.

Using data to engage customers through meaningful conversations.

Understanding analytics and building strategies around the data is crucial for marketers. Nidhi walked us through her process of analyzing data and deploying the most effective form of communication with your audience. She also spoke about how to not overdo chatbot automation and outreach in general.

“You have to understand the people, process, and the product part of it, you need to put up the best of the product and understand what's really applicable to you, and then expand it over a period of time. you have to have a very, very seamless process from the start till the end for your own internal, team as well who's delivering and also for the customer point of view.” - Nidhi

How to not overdo communication.

We are drowned in information whenever we go on the internet. It is very easy for brands to push their agenda too hard on their audience without knowing the right conversation streams, and how to communicate ‘the right way’ is where miracles happen, as Srinivas explains.

“It's easy to sort of create some distance between your audience and you., while you still might be visible everywhere on every format or retargeting and all of that, but, you should always take care to ensure that you, your brand, and its followers don't feel a separation or a distance. And that is happening quite a bit because, a lot of digital marketing today is sort of like mass marketing, even though you have very good targeting mechanisms. There is a lot of fatigue, that's also creeping in, to what consumers, experience. 
I mean, the kinds of stimuli that we are exposed to, as consumers on a day-to-day basis is humongous. And it's very hard to make and keep that connect with your followers, which is where I think the one-to-one connect with, your followers is where the power of conversations really comes in” - Srinivas

Bios:

Nidhi is a ‘marketer by passion.’ Over years of working across various genres of marketing, she’s developed keen insights into consumer engagement and creating meaningful conversations. Currently, she employs her expertise for marketing in the music streaming industry. 

Srini has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing, and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum, and Tejas Networks.

Gupshup.io

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In today’s episode of the Conversational Messaging Podcast, we spoke to Mehul Bhatt, who’s the CEO and cofounder of FloCareer, and Srinivas Vijayaraghavan, who’s the VP of marketing at Gupshup. 

In this insightful conversation, Mehul walks us through how FloCareer helps businesses secure top-tier talents by working with several stakeholders like the business they are working with, the talent they are interviewing, and the folks who are conducting the interviews.

FloCareer is India’s fastest growing HR tech company that provides “Interview-as-a-Service” and leverages automated interviews to streamline the hiring process.

How automation is key to streamlining the hiring process

On average, the hiring process can take anywhere from 2-4 weeks. The process isn’t as simple as reviewing a job application and then hiring the candidate. In fact, it’s complex and extremely time-consuming in terms of finding availability of multiple parties and scheduling times for interviews. Mehul shares how automation helps streamline the coordination between different stakeholders like the job seeker, the HR, and support team. 

“[W]hat happens is the candidate would say, when they are available for the interview, and they will provide a few time slots on our portal. And we would inform from like 3500 odd interviewers we have, right? We will inform the right set of interviewers based on certain machine learning based algorithms that who are the best interviewer for this particular candidate” – Mehul

Using personalized messaging through multiple channels is essential to connecting with prospective customers 

In this digital age, now more than ever, it has become important to deliver personalized messaging to our customers to engage with them and to build trust and lasting relationships with them. And this can be successfully achieved by humanizing and unifying our communication through multiple channels, as Mehul explains. 

“When we say bot, it's not just the Chatbot anymore, but multiple different ways you can interact with a human being in humanly ways. So, these are the interfaces, especially the tech savvy people are very comfortable using because you know, typing something versus just talking is of course, much more efficient.” – Mehul 

Bios: 

Mehul is the CEO and cofounder of FloCareer, India’s fastest growing HR tech companies that provides “Interview-as-a-Service” and leverages automated interviews to streamline the hiring process.

Srini has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

https://www.gupshup.io/

Follow Mehul on LinkedIn

In today’s episode of the Conversational Messaging Podcast, we spoke to Vitasta Kaul, who’s the director of brand marketing at CredR, and Srinivas Vijayaraghavan, who’s the VP of Marketing at Gupshup.

In this insightful conversation, Vitasta walked us through the various ways in which CredR seamlessly integrates their offline shopping experience to their online presence. This helps them 

CredR is India’s Most Trusted Used Two-Wheeler Consumer Brand that leverages Technology & Processes to simplify the Market. 

Understanding exactly what your customers want

Each brand at its very core is trying to solve a problem for their customers. With time, the problems as well as consumer motivation keep evolving. But in a country like India, the customers themselves can be from a varied demographic. Vitasta shows us how understanding your customers becomes really important which also creates the need to directly initiate a conversation with them. 

“I'm talking about that level of personalization, or the problem statements are so unique, that it becomes really, really difficult for us to augment it down to that level, or go down to that level of granularity and understand, like, what is this guy's problem in life? And how can I solve this problem” - Vitasta

Using technology to smoothly initiate two way conversations for marketing

With so many messaging and media platforms, it becomes essential that brands use them thoughtfully without overburdening their customers with messages. Bringing a set strategy into place is key to great messaging and Vitasta further explains this process. 

“A solid customer data platform, in the backend, where a lot of this information, this enrichment of consumer information is present. And then you create an omni-channel engagement strategy. You have your website, you have an app, but you also try to get consumers to have two-way conversations with you, typically on messaging apps”. - Vitasta 

Bios:

Vitasta ,who’s the director of brand marketing at CredR which is  India’s Most Trusted Used Two-Wheeler Consumer Brand that leverages Technology & Processes for its growth.  

Srini has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

Gupshup.io

Follow Vitasta on LinkedIn

In today’s episode of the Conversational Messaging Podcast, we spoke to Priyang Agarwal, who’s the director of brand marketing at Tata 1MG, and Srinivas Vijayaraghavan, who’s the VP of Marketing at Gupshup.

In this insightful conversation, Priyang walked us through the various touchpoints in which Tata 1mg connects with their customers, and walks us through exactly how and where to use chatbots to improve the overall customer experience. 

Tata 1mg is India's leading digital healthcare platform. From doctor consultations on chat to online pharmacy and lab tests at home 1Mg does it all.  

Building the ecommerce journey of digital healthcare

The digitalization of healthcare is a very recent concept in India which also requires setting up the entire customer journey as smoothly as possible right from scratch! 

Priyang takes us through all the different channels that are a part of this journey  at Tata 1mg and the various ways they optimize each stage of the journey.

“We remember you from the day you have come to our website, and from the day you have ordered anything from our website. And once you have ordered, we also try to provide quite a lot of engaging content to you through multiple, again touchpoints.” - Priyang

Finding the balance between automation and humanisation

Even as technology takes forefront in running all digital businesses, it's important for brands to also keep the human factor alive and somehow finely balance both so the customers get the best of both worlds. 

“Suppose you are ordering a medicine, you're stuck in between or you are facing some problems in delivery and if the automated chatbot is not able to solve or not answer a query to the best level of your satisfaction. That's where I think the customer service team comes into play and solves those particular queries. 

I think the balance between the two, that is the human touch, plus the automated journey flow is very, very important. If one is not able to cater to the other, please and please bring the other channel. if one channel is not able to cater to the other, please bring the other channel. That's what I think balance is all about” - Priyang

  Bio:

Priyang is the director of brand marketing at Tata 1MG which is India's leading digital healthcare platform. He has had an incredible career in marketing and is considered one of India’s greatest minds in the space.

Srini has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

 Gupshup.io

Follow Priyang on LinkedIn

In today’s episode of the Conversational Messaging Podcast, we spoke to Ashish Bajaj, who’s the Head of Marketing at Medibuddy, and Srinivas Vijayaraghavan, who’s the VP of Marketing at Gupshup.

In this insightful conversation, Ashish walked us through the comprehensive chatbot flows that his team have to manage at Medibuddy. Medibuddy is India’s largest healthcare platform and they help integrate the entire healthcare lifecycle for their users through their chatbot communications.

Managing the Online to Offline Integrations

Medibuddy and Ashish’s team have to look at managing and automating the entire customer lifecycle. Everything from online to offline. That means setting up appointments with the right doctors to manager your particular ailment, to partnering with pharmacies to help provide the medication.

As you can imagine, getting the numerous process and possible scenarios toward which the company must interact with their customers is hugely important, but also really challenging. And in this episode, Ashish breaks down exactly how they do it!

“So, touch is very important factor in how the offline world works, from a point of view of one-to-one interaction. But if you map how digital platforms are doing it, doesn't mean if the touch is not there, the empathy is not there, when you come on a digital platform, the first step then becomes knowing more about you, and the kind of information require any illnesses previously, any reports that you want to upload. This feeds into a lot of information back to our databases, and allow us to have a much more stitched, experience for the consumer.” - Ashish

The importance of Social Listening

Social Listening through automated tools helps you truly understand what your customers are saying and think about you. It also helps understand what areas you need to improve. Ashish and his team and Medibuddy consistently use this to help create their content and make improvements to their processes.

“I think it's important for any marketing team to figure out what their consumer is saying. The other day we were, we were having a chat at one of the other panels for future in terms of how the brand will listen to consumers. I think, consumer sourcing is going to be a very, very, very, very thing in terms of immediate impact. Now coming from there, and we being into healthcare. just imagine that, you need a lab test to be done, and you're fasting since seven and somebody's supposed to come by eight and pick up. We need our SLAs in place with partners to execute on this. We are one of the highest rated app in terms of doctor consultations in the medical category itself.” - Ashish

"So, we have more than 1200 FAQ videos through doctors where people have asked questions to us. And I'm talking about four different languages, five different languages. And that now has become a repository that sits on our platform as well, where you can find out already, similar FAQ kind of things which people are looking for, that answer is already there.” - Ashish

Bio:

Ashish Bajaj is the Head of Marketing at Medibuddy, which is India’s largest and highest rated Healthcare app. He has had an incredible career in marketing and is considered one of India’s greatest minds in the space.

Srini has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

Gupshup.io

Follow Ashish on LinkedIn

In today’s episode of the Conversational Messaging Podcast, we spoke to Rumi Ambastha, who’s the Director of brand marketing at The Man Company, and Srinivas Vijayaraghavan, who’s the VP of Marketing at Gupshup.

In this insightful conversation, Rumi walked us through how her and her team at The Man Company humanize, personalize and optimize their chatbot experience on their website. She let us know exactly how they consistently create new content for their chatbot and interactions for over 100 SKU’s with their users.

Humanizing the messaging

Chatbots are such a powerful to tool for ecommerce companies like The Man Company. Why? Well, they allow them to scale their customer interactions. Instead of having a team member, having to spend his/her time with a customer, a chatbot can be programmed to answer any and every question a customer may have. But to make that experience a positive one for the customer, the messaging needs to be deeply thought about. Rumi walks us through exactly how her and her team do so.

“So, it becomes extremely crucial for a D2C brands like ours, because you are talking to all kinds of men, different age, different region, different language, and you are talking to them not just on online, you're talking to them offline, you're talking to them on your DMs, on your social media. So, your conversation in all the spaces need to be, need to have the same tonality or the same language.” - Rumi

Optimizing your messaging

For a company like The Man Company, it’s so crucial to be consistently updating their chatbot based on their previous interactions. Everytime a customer asks a question, it’s a new learning for the marketing team to decide whether they want to include that as part of their interactions.

“Data plays a huge role here, because we have a very robust customer database. There is a lot of insights coming to us. Then the job is, of the marketer to cull out actionable insights from that and enrich, not just your physical people standing, offline but also your chat, your bots. You need to be a customer centric brand to actually progress and there has to be a lot of self-awareness that you may not have all the right answers right now as a marketer, but the customers out there will be teaching you a lot of new things. So, you need to stay open with all this knowledge that is coming from every medium possible.” - Rumi

Bio:

Rumi Ambasta is the Director of Brand Marketing at The Man Company and she specializes in building powerful brands and effective messaging campaigns. Rumi has a wealth of experience in marketing and has spent her entire career helping brands grow their awareness.

Srini has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

Gupshup.io

TheManCompany.com

In today’s episode of the Conversational Messaging Podcast, we spoke to Rapti Gupta, who’s the director of brand marketing at Instamojo, and Srinivas Vijayaraghavan, who’s the VP of Marketing at Gupshup.

The conversation centered around two major points. The first was how to build messaging campaigns and stories that resonate with audiences, and the second was how to use chatbots to scale and personalize interactions with end customers.

Building Testimonial Campaigns that resonate

Testimonial campaigns are powerful. The reason they work so effectively, is because they are genuine reviews of your product or service, from people who look and speak exactly like your audience. And this a great way of building trust with your audiences. At InstaMojo, Rapti and her team are currently running a very successful testimonial campaign called Mojo Stars.

”If you as a brand are able to tell your story and talk about the value that you can create to your end customer and the impact that you are delivering through your product or service. I think that's what's the most important part of a story for a business, especially when you're doing a customer testimonial. Today, Mojo Stars is a very heartfelt and a very warm campaign for everybody who's looking at it and understanding it. It's written in first person where they are talking about their challenges, they're talking about how they went about solving it” - Rapti Gupta

The Key Elements of a Great Story

“It's really about their journey, the focus is the customer. And I think it goes and it extends beyond just storytelling. It has to be even on your product. The only reason that your B2B SaaS product will work if they understand the customers from the core, right? What are the real problems that they're facing? What are the challenges that they face on a day to day basis.” - Rapti Gupta

The importance of personalizing your chatbot communications

Instamojo’s customers are ecommerce entrepreneurs. And to enable their B2C Entrepreneurs, they allow them to access chatbots through their app store. The main purpose of this is to help them improve their communications with their prospects and to personalize the experience.

“They struggle with traffic to their stores. And once someone lands on the store, you wouldn't want to lose them. You can't afford to lose them. So chatbots allow a great way to capture those leads, and understand what channel they came from and what kind of things they were looking And also, there are FAQs, and different other things that one could use on the ecommerce website to engage the lead who has not yet converted into a customer.” - Rapti Gupta

Bio:

Rapti Gupta is the Head of Brand Marketing at Instamojo and she specializes in content execution and strategy. Rapti has been with Instamojo for over 5 years and has been a core member of their content team ever since joining them.

Srini has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

Gupshup.io

Instamojo.com

In today’s episode of the Conversational Messaging Podcast, Thiagarajan “Thia” Rajagopalan, Founder and CEO of Tripeur, joins Srini to discuss how conversational messaging can massively get rid of customer pain points while increasing brands’ efficiency. Tune in for a conversation about how better communication equates better brand reputation. 

The Changes in Consumer Requirements 

COVID has definitely brought massive changes on the way people travel, regardless if its for leisure or for business. According to Thia, people demand more information about travel arrangements, places they’re travelling to (restrictions, policies, etc.), and have expectations in terms of the place, hotel, etc.). All of these are driven by the fact that people’s regard for safety alongside convenience has become higher. This drives the need for better communication. 

“I would say the travel industry is innovating and adapting to the new needs of the travelers. I would say this is just the beginning, we are just scratching the surface.” - Thia Rajagopalan

The Increased Need for Communication

Because people’s priority is safety, communication has become more important than ever. As many travelling transactions are affected by the pandemic, there is also an enormous need to provide consumers with the information. Hence, it is important to provide contactless but reliable communication to consumers. 

Thia believes that automating this process through conversational messaging is the best way to optimise operations.  

“Since we are a tech company, we started focusing on, ‘how do I let the user help himself or herself, without having to speak to anybody without having to even pick up the phone and talk to somebody?’” - Thia Rajagopalan

Ensuring Your Brand’s Good Reputation 

Before, brands’ reputation used to be completely based on their customers’ offline and real-time experience. However, with the accessibility of technology, the market has become so much more competitive than the way it used to be. Consumers now assess brands in terms of their online services (e.g. mobile apps performance, etc.). Hence, today, brands should be making an effort to impress the users not only while they are actively transacting with brands but also before and after their transactions. Brands can do this by sending out personalised messages to customers, which Thia believes to have a positive influence on brands’ reputation.

“Social media is becoming very, very common for all the users. The direct connectivity between the service provider and the consumer is only going to accelerate, and it'll go to the next level.” - Thia Rajagopalan

Bio:

Thiagarajan “Thia” Rajagopalan founded Tripeur, an AI-powered end-to-end corporate travel management platform. With a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in Computer Science, Thia is a known figure in product management and product marketing associated with telecom giants such as Motorola, Qualcomm, and Mobileum . 

Srini has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

Gupshup.io

Tripeur.com

In today’s episode of the Conversational Messaging Podcast, Gupshup’s Product Leader, Kunal Talreja, joins Srini to discuss how the Gupshup IP Messaging empowers a no-app, no-call, and no-store visit—the most convenient customer service for both sides. Tune in to see how less is more! 

The Gupshup IP Messaging 

Kunal explained the power of the Gupshup IP Messaging (GIP), a platform that transforms one-way messages into two-way conversations. Ultimately, GIP gets rid of inconvenient processes that require customers to call the brands, install applications, or visit the stores. By just clicking a link that’s embedded in messages sent to customers, customers can start transacting using automated customer service powered by smart bots. 

“When it comes to IP messaging, since it is on the internet, it gives you a leverage of using various different formats, can carry large files, and it can enable two-way communication.” - Kunal Talreja

Accessing Everything at Home 

Digitizing and automating customer processes should be a norm for brands, especially now that there are so many restrictions due to COVID-19. It’s a convenient and smart move for brands, no matter which industry they’re under—retail, banking, or even car dealerships. The customer should not have to go to stores, banks, or showrooms for processes they can complete by just scanning a QR code or clicking a link that would just collect their information and proceed with the process. With just a click, everything they need should be delivered right to their homes. 

“The customer change that a customer needs to make is not major; it's just within the same SMS template that they're using.”  - Srinivas Vijayaraghavan

Personalized, 24/7 Customer Service 

The GIP offers countless possibilities—customer experience improves significantly, from being able to reach resolution bots 24/7 to get a more personalized customer experience. For the brands, it’s quick and easy as they only have to provide the template for messaging and provide the functionalities (i.e. report fraud, file a complaint, apply for a loan, purchase a product, etc.). With the GIP, the messaging channel doesn’t stay a messaging channel; it becomes a marketplace where brands could expand and reach a wider audience. 

“It gives a very good competitive advantage to small retailers and SMEs to have their own digital store in which they can get customers to do all those transactions without coming to their store physically.” - Kunal Talreja

Bio:

Kunal Talreja is a Product Leader at Gupshup. He’s been driving a lot of cool innovations around the area of messaging within the company. 

Srinivas has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

Gupshup.io

In today’s episode of the Conversational Messaging Podcast, Gupshup’s Product and Strategy Team Senior Member, Adwit Sharma, joins Srini to discuss how conversational messaging makes company processes and communications seamless. Tune in and see what you’re missing by not automating your HR processes. 

Communicate More Naturally 

Because of the pandemic, many companies have switched to remote setups. While this brought many issues as employee communications can no longer happen face-to-face, there is a way for companies to still make communications seamless, easy, and natural. Adwit believes that many work-related issues, instead of being raised through complex processes (i.e. ticketing system) can be resolved through automation using common messaging channels such as Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, Hangouts, etc. 

“We are improving usability as well as availability, using conversational automation without replacing anything that already helps and works for an organization.” - Adwit Sharma

Easier Company Processes

Automation is especially helpful for the Human Resources (HR) as it can make HR processes (i.e. hiring, onboarding) easier. Simple inquiries like scheduling an interview, sending out documents, all the way to setting up the company equipment, if tied to an automated messaging channel, can be a great help in reducing inconvenience not only from the HR officer’s perspective, but also the new employee’s. Automating company processes may also be helpful for employees wanting to file leaves, get payslips, and many others. 

“The repetitive queries that you get, they automatically go down fast. Because people are now reading your notifications.”  - Adwit Sharma

It’s Not Complicated

For Adwit, the beauty of automation and tying it to messaging channels lies with the fact that it’s not a complicated process for the companies at all. Once you select a vendor that would oversee the entire automation process, integration integration framework and engineering resources, business analysts, and a conversational design team are all provided. There’s also no need for employees and the company to heavily adjust with the new systems as automation is commonly tied with Teams, Slack, and WhatsApp, which people use on a day-to-day basis. 

“You don't have to expose people outside your company to too much technical complexity.” - Srinivas Vijayaraghavan

To know more about Conversational Messaging in Company Processes, listen to this episode.

Bio:

Adwit Sharma

Adwit Sharma is a conversational automation industry giant. He is currently a Senior Member of Gupshup’s Product and Strategy Team.

Srinivas Vijayaraghavan

Srinivas has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

Gupshup.io