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In year three of a global pandemic, how consumers engage with brands has changed dramatically. Today, consumers want brands to be accessible anytime, anywhere. Given the amount of time people spend on their smartphones, especially on popular social media channels, it’s become a prerequisite for brands to design intuitive customer experience journeys on these platforms, making brand-consumer engagement truly personalized.

Gupshup, the leading global conversational engagement platform, is helping 45,000-plus businesses drive richer, more engaging consumer interactions across the world. The company’s strong business growth is built on the foundation of deep investments in product and engineering capabilities. Gupshup’s mission is to build the most advanced conversational engagement platform to make business-to-consumer engagement as simple as texting friends or family. And the company’s acquisition strategy aligns with this larger product vision.

With five acquisitions in under eleven months, the San Francisco-headquartered unicorn has been augmenting its product stack as well as vertical depth to simplify, automate and personalize business-to-consumer engagement. It has acquired Dotgo (leader in RCS), Knowlarity (leader in voice communications), Active.Ai (leading conversational AI platform used by BFSI companies), AskSid (leading conversational AI platform used by retail/e-commerce/CPG companies), and OneDirect (leading omnichannel, AI-enabled, customer service platform of choice for top brands in India, South East Asia, and the Middle East). In the process, Gupshup has grown to become the only full-stack conversational engagement platform for businesses across industries.

Helping businesses fast-track their growth

Gupshup ensures conversational messaging solutions for every industry. For instance, in the BFSI sector, Gupshup ensures 1-click bill pay, KYC authentication, and secure messaging. Thus, enabling customers to make easy payments to bills, EMIs, and other purchases right from the chat screen. That also includes simplifying KYC with guided flows and online document collection, while reducing effort and drop-offs with anytime video KYC.

Retail is another priority industry vertical for Gupshup. Thus, leveraging the power of conversational messaging, Gupshup enhances the digital retail experience as interactive and trustworthy as the physical one. From enabling personalized product discovery and offers, to enabling Online-to-Offline Commerce, the services also include automated shopping journeys from discovery to purchase with 24×7 shopper support, and live agent handover.

Gupshup’s solution made NoBroker one of the first real estate companies to offer WhatsApp as a communication tool. NoBroker noticed that many of its customers were facing problems while uploading photos of properties they wanted to list on the website or app. Thus, the team would then reach out to its customers via SMS or email but noticed that the open rate for emails was less than 3 percent, and SMS had a poor click-through rate of 4-5 percent. The company also spent extensive time on support calls with property owners to collect and upload pictures onto the website and app from their end.

Gupshup developed a WhatsApp chatbot that helped property owners interact with NoBroker and reply with pictures on the chat window itself. Once the real estate platform’s deep-learning algorithm approves the photos, they are then automatically uploaded to the online property listing. Besides, the overall time taken to upload photos to property listing was reduced from three days to six minutes, resulting in 20X annualized ROI and a 2.8X increase in property let-outs/sales.

Gupshup helped the education platform provider Doubtnut go live with a WhatsApp chatbot and increased the tutor-student engagement rate by 260%, ensuring a streamlined experience with a 95% user satisfaction rate. Students seeking guidance with STEM-related matters can upload pictures of their questions on the Doubtnut website or mobile app. A sophisticated optical character recognition matched the students’ query with pre-recorded content in the Doubtnut database while displaying the most appropriate one. Thus, the students could send their questions via WhatsApp and receive links to five solution videos, with options in 11 different languages, within 10 seconds.

Gupshup turned unicorn in April last year with a valuation of $1.4 billion and raised $340 million from Tiger Global, Fidelity Management, and Research, along with other marquee global investors. Empowering businesses of all kinds and sizes to engage with customers in meaningful, personalized ways via conversational apps, Gupshup would continue delivering rich interactive messaging experiences while sending positive messages in business communication.