Businesses are evolving and every niche sector in the Nigerian market is looking for ways to better engage with their customers and improve profitability. This has led businesses to adopt various innovations and leverage trends that help boost customer experience and business-to-consumer communication, according to Ravi Sundararajan, Chief Operating Officer of Gupshup.
Gupshup is a provider of conversational engagement solutions to global businesses, powering over 7 billion messages every month. Brands use the company’s conversational messaging platform to engage and interact personally with consumers via popular messaging channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, SMS, Instagram, and others.
The tech company is operating in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. Their presence in Africa was boosted via Gupshup’s acquisition of Dotgo. The latter already had an enterprise sales team and existing operator connections in Nigeria, Ghana and a few other markets.
“We make it easier for customers to connect with businesses via meaningful, two-way conversations,” said Sundararajan.
“Across verticals, thousands of large and small businesses in emerging markets use Gupshup to build conversational experiences across marketing, sales and support.”
He stated that the company is one of the biggest partners of WhatsApp worldwide and remains the number one player in India. “Our end-to-end suite of conversational engagement solutions – across voice, video, text – and our capabilities across 30+ channels, has helped us become the growth partner of choice for enterprises and small businesses in emerging markets.”
According to Gupshup, conversational messaging helps brands engage more deeply with customers – in a personalized, interactive way, in a contactless setting. And with the personalization aspect, which is made possible with Artificial Intelligence (AI), businesses will better understand the user behaviour, requirements and what they need, so they can tailor their services accordingly.
“Many businesses have millions of consumers and users, but earlier, brands couldn’t scale the communication. You would have one or more sales representatives trying to deal with hundreds of people and doing physical store promotion. Whereas now, when you engage them using the most natural way, which is conversational messaging, it becomes personalized, at scale.”
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He highlighted that through conversational messaging; brands can interact with consumers anytime, anywhere, across any channel, not just for commerce but to provide customer support as well.
“Nigeria is a key growth market for Gupshup. We work very closely with telcos in Nigeria, Ghana and a few other countries in the region. We also have a team in South Africa. So, we have about a dozen people in Africa working with enterprises here, including a couple of leading banks, who are using our services on WhatsApp, SMS and RCS. We are also working with companies to help them leverage Google Business Messages and personalize customer engagement via rich business messages”, said the senior executive.
Speaking on how the platform benefits businesses in Nigeria, Sundararajan said, “Our platform helps businesses engage with consumers all through the journey – before, during and after purchase. The biggest benefit is personalization, interaction and using AI to make it more contextual, timely – to drive more business via faster conversions and repeat purchases because now they’re happy with the experience.
The COO, while speaking about the company’s operations in the region, emphasized the importance of Nigeria, with a lot of businesses – especially in sectors like banking, telcos and online businesses using their services for Omnichannel messaging and business to consumer communication using several channels. He noted their connections with companies like MTN using their Google business messaging, WEMA bank using their Whatsapp and SMS services.
The tech executive stated that as a US-based company, the platform is focused on emerging markets like India and Latin America, which already account for a lot of Gupshup’s revenues, adding that the next phase of growth will come from Africa. He stated that the business model in Nigeria is to go for direct sales, while also partnering with operators and independent software vendors (ISVs) to resell their products.
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