Exclusive Interaction - Vishwadeep Bajaj, CEO, ValueFirst

Vishwadeep Bajaj, CEO, ValueFirst discusses the usefulness of digital platforms to communicate and engage with clients.

What challenges and hurdles enterprises face to engage with customers efficiently, effectively and seamlessly?

Vishwadeep Bajaj - In the digital ecosystem, some of the challenges brands faces are –

Data security & privacy For brands to communicate with customers, they need to have a database of personal information such as contact details. However, customers are concerned about data security and privacy, and may not trust a company with their personal information. According to Kaspersky, India ranks amongst the top five APAC countries for cyberattacks and data security breaches. Keeping customer data secure and building that confidence is one of the primary challenges that today’s brands face.

Identifying the channel of choice In the age of hyper-connectivity, a customer is “omnipresent”. There are multiple touchpoints and channels where brands can engage with customers, but one of the challenges enterprises faces is identifying the “channel of choice” where the customers will be more responsive because of which, we see a lot of cross-channel marketing automation tools coming out so that the messaging reaches the customer on the channel that they prefer. With this information, enterprises can invest in growing the right channel and engage with their audience more effectively and seamlessly. For e.g.: When a customer books a service, an enterprise can confirm it via SMS, WhatsApp, and email. An enterprise must choose the channel intelligently, to avoid spamming the customer, yet ensuring that the communication reaches them easily.

Seamless and effective communication with customers is dependent on the coordinated efforts across the departments. With multiple points of dependency, enterprises often face the challenge of internal collaboration and updates which delays accurate and timely communication with customers.

Amongst all these challenges, enterprises often face the challenge of identifying the right CPaaS partner. In such a scenario, enterprises should look for a reliable partner who can ensure data security and protection and adapt to business requirements of scaling and agility.

How can technology help overcome these barriers?

Vishwadeep Bajaj - In the last 2-3 years, digitisation has accelerated several advancements such as all things web, penetration of mobile phones, and the introduction of 5G. Today, technology is the only reliable partner for enterprises to overcome the challenges mentioned and strengthen the customer relationships. Some of them are -

Cost and resource optimisation Like any industry, deploying technology for customer engagement optimizes costs for enterprises. Consumer engagement technologies enable enterprises to optimize their cost by enabling them to do multi-level integration using a single solution. For example, our email automation solution enables brands to have interactive animations/CSS & creative, personalized, data-driven, and automated email engagement and NotifyHub that enables intelligent, automated, and secure transaction management to enterprises. It intelligently routes transactions to multiple carriers seamlessly, that an enterprise may be using. A state-of-the-art on-premise solution, NotifyHub has optimized resources and costs for enterprises by ensuring go-live within a day, automated traffic routing, seamless integration, real-time transaction status amongst other features.

Expanding reach without broadband Internet – Indian customer demographics are changing, and enterprises are no longer restricted to Tier 1 cities. However, as they expand their customer base to emerging towns and cities, the available channels of communication are independent of broadband based Internet connectivity. Enterprises can overcome these challenges with technology advancements such as Rich Communication Services (RCS) Messaging that enables an enterprise to share rich format content such as images, videos, links etc. to customers, on Android Messaging apps. Our clients who have adopted RCS Business Messages have benefited from 72% increased brand conversations and 74% increased engagement.

Rich data reporting Technology platforms bring intelligent insights and information to enterprises, enabling informed decisions for the enterprises. By analysing real-time data, enterprises can optimize the resources and provide a personalized experience to the customers. This enables strategic customer engagement from enterprises.

Minimise data risk By using secure technology platforms, enterprises deliver the promise of safeguarding customer data with built-in capabilities for data governance and stewardship, along with flow verified communication with end-users to secure their trust.

What are the prospects of growth in these types of platforms? What is the rate of adoption of such platforms?Vishwadeep Bajaj - As per the IDC forecast, the communications platform as a service (CPaaS) segment is expected to grow at 33% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2019-24. The key drivers include rapid adoption of smartphones for commerce and communication by consumers; ease and scalability offered by CPaaS platforms to add communications channels; maturity of adjacent technologies such as chatbots, analytics, etc. that help companies effectively segment and target customers; and finally, digital transformation helping companies better leverage multiple communication channels.

With digitisation, industries such as healthcare, education, logistics & transport which were earlier considered laggards are also steadily adopting CPaaS platforms to engage with their communities, innovatively and creatively.

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