SME Times News Bureau | 07 Sep, 2020
A
cost-effective yet customized communication plan can help Small and
Medium Enterprises (SMEs) target their customers more effectively, said Rajdipkumar Gupta, MD
& Group CEO Route Mobile Limited, in an exclusive interview with SME Times.
Excerpts
of the interview…
Please tell our
readers about Route Mobile.
Rajdipkumar Gupta: Route Mobile is a global
Cloud Communication Platform provider, catering to enterprises,
over-the-top (OTT) players and mobile network operators (MNO). Since its
inception in 2004, Route Mobile has been enhancing mobile communications
through technology upgrades and product innovations; meeting the needs of a
diverse clientele across geographies. Our customizable, user-friendly, and
effective solutions enable enterprises and mobile operators to deliver
efficient services and have customized communications with their customers.
Route Mobile is one of the leading Cloud
Communications Platform service provider offering Communication Platform as a
Service (CPaaS) that caters to enterprises, MNO’s and over-the-top (OTT)
players. Our portfolio comprises of smart solutions in Messaging, Voice,
Identity, Email and SMS Filtering, Analytics and Monetization. We offer
value-based consulting, provide a high level of customer service, deploy the
right talent for overall development and help businesses achieve consistent
growth.
Route Mobile empowers businesses by providing
comprehensive and tailor-made communication services that enrich customer
experience. We offer a range of cloud-communication services to clients across
diverse sectors including but not limited to banking and financial services,
aviation, retail, e-commerce, logistics, healthcare, hospitality, media and
entertainment, pharmaceuticals and telecom. Our clients include some of the
world’s largest and well-known organizations, including a number of Fortune
Global 500 companies.
Route Mobile has deployed state-of-art data centers
across six locations globally, which are equipped with requisite failovers and
redundancies necessary for maintaining 24x7 operations. The company has processed
more than 31 billion messages in fiscal 2019-2020.
Route Mobile is headquartered in Mumbai, India with a
global presence in 19 locations across Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa,
Europe and North America. We are member of MEF, GSMA & an accredited open
hub connectivity solution provider.
What are the services
Route Mobile offers?
Rajdipkumar Gupta: Our services can be
widely categorized into Messaging, Identity, Operator, Voice, Bespoke, and
Email solutions.
Our plug-and-play
programmable APIs enable enterprises to integrate with existing business
systems within minutes and send personalized, scheduled, and multi-language
communications to target audience, anywhere, anytime instantly. We have an
array of messaging solutions like A2P messaging, RCS Business Messaging, Viber
Business Messages, WhatsApp Business Solution, 2-way messaging,
One-time-Password (OTP), Omni-channel communications and many more solutions
that can be customized according to the enterprise needs.
With Identity Solutions,
we safeguard the end-user security and enable enterprises to send trusted
business communications, personalize & enrich the end-user experience.
Our Bespoke Solution-
Verbatim, empowers customers to choose appropriate channels of communications,
receive & accept legal disclaimers and standardize regulatory compliances.
With this, we help the enterprises to optimise the customer-agent call time
& save the cost.
Our email solutions enable our customers
to send emails through a safe network without being classified as spam. The key
features of our email solutions are: Email Automation, 24*7 Client Support,
Easy Integration, and Spam avoidance.
Our voice solutions help
to create unique experiences for the end-consumers by personalizing campaigns
and enriching their journey with voice applications. Our solutions include
Outbound Dialer, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Click 2 Call, Call Patching
and Call Center to name a few.
For Operators our most prominent solutions
include Route Shield, SMS Hub, and Instant Virtual Number. In their arduous
task of responding to an increasingly connected
world, our solutions meet the demands of established and emerging Mobile
Network Operators looking to reduce the complexity of SMS coverage expansion,
route monetization and security.
How are these services
helpful for SMEs?
Rajdipkumar Gupta: Being one of the leading
aggregators we constantly endeavour to simplify communications for better
outcomes. Most of our services can be customized according to the businesses’
needs. This enables small and medium businesses to engage with their target
audiences through a cost-effective yet customized communication plan. SMEs as
well as local businesses can communicate with their customers directly through
enhanced business communication solutions like WhatsApp business, RCS Business
Messaging, Viber Business Messages etc especially when staying in touch has
become so important during the current situation.
CPaaS (Communication Platform as a Service) is a great platform for SMEs as it
can enable the enterprises to develop, run, and manage applications without the
complexity of building and maintaining the communication infrastructure. It
comes with the multi-layer data security, redundancy, state-of-the-art customer
management platform that gives customers a complete control of the platform..
Our AI-based chatbots
can assist end-customers of enterprises with FAQs, feedback, fulfil enquiry
details and are capable of transferring the conversation to human agents.
Small as well as big
companies are taking advantage of a wide range of digital connectivity to
provide real-time services to their clients. Your views
Rajdipkumar Gupta: It has now become a
necessity for enterprises, brands and businesses to regularly stay connected
with its customers and more so digitally. Deeper customer engagement is the
need of the hour and enhanced business solutions can easily cater to this
demand. For example, RCS Business Messaging, WhatsApp Business Solution, Viber
Business Messages enables small and big businesses to connect & engage with
its target audiences by sending them rich communication like images, videos,
documents, etc on their default SMS function.
Enhanced business communication enables enterprises to
send notifications like important alerts, OTP (one-time password), QR codes of
e-tickets, product catalogue, offers etc. It can also be integrated with a
chatbot that can initiate dialogues that can enable two-way communication flow
like enquiries, customer support, feedback requests, bill payments, online
ordering, sending invoices, requesting a product or a service to name a
few.
Apart from its host of features, it also provides read
receipts, delivery receipts, and intelligent customization of information for
customers for taking insight based actions. It can benefit across industries
like retail, tours and travels, hospitality, entertainment, healthcare and many
more. Extremely flexible in nature, it can be moulded as per the requirement of
each of these industries thereby making the entire communication process a
fulfilling experience.
A2P messaging has
emerged globally as a large segment of revenue growth for Mobile Network
Operators. Please comment.
Rajdipkumar Gupta: According to a leading research
organization, the Global A2P SMS Market size will reach $70.0 billion by 2020.
Historically, the main channel for A2P
messaging traffic and enterprise spend is an SMS. A2P messaging has become the
most executed and valuable messaging tool for businesses today. It is
considered to be the fastest and most reliable way to reach end-consumers. It
is customizable, cost-effective and efficient means of communicating
notifications, alerts, transactions, details and updates. This adds to its
popularity amongst businesses globally. Hence, the A2P messaging market is
growing steadily and strongly when it comes to traffic and enterprise spends
globally across all components.
SMS is, and will continue to be a dominant
A2P channel due to its unmatched global reach,
multiple connectivity & interface options, multilingual messaging
capabilities, 98% read rates, security and spam protection filters. According
to a leading research firm, approximately 88% of enterprise spends were
attributed to enterprise A2P spends and approximately 83% of the A2P traffic in
2019.
With enhanced business
messaging, enterprises will broaden their A2P messaging perspectives and
explore multiple channels of communication in order to increase customer
engagement and enhance their experience to get more customer loyalty. It is
quite possible for them to achieve scalability while controlling the costs.
How much adoption of
new age messaging solutions is going at present?
Rajdipkumar Gupta: In this
pandemic scenario, digital transformation has now become a mandate for
businesses. Considering the situation, many enterprises are supporting remote
working, because of which, we are witnessing a steady rise in the demand for
innovative digital solutions through cloud communications platforms.
To
seize the opportunities and stay connected with the customers, enterprises have
started adopting cloud communications to enhance business communication
strategies. Advanced messaging with chatbots, AI, and machine learning as well
as plugins are now used to deliver the richer experience to consumers. Also,
A2P solutions are transforming customer conversations into rich and interactive
experiences with personal messages and hyper-personalized content. Enhanced
business communications such as- RCS Business Messaging, WhatsApp Business
Solutions, Viber Business Messaging have played a crucial role during this
unprecedented time.
Enterprises are considering APIs not just from an IT
decision making perspective but also as a part of digital transformation as
they can redefine their business models. They are increasingly adopting an omnichannel
platform to integrate all of their digital communication in one place and to
provide a unified experience that enables quick resolution and personalized
service on demand.
The changing dynamics, ongoing developments, and
upgrades in the IT industry are instrumentally complimenting the rise in
digital enhancements and adoption within telecom infrastructure. Cloud
communications have become the need of the hour as it can automate the
communication processes. Apart from large scale, small scale and medium scale
businesses have also started adopting & exploring cloud communications due
to limited capital investment required for deploying the setup, faster
on-boarding, and ensuring end-to-end communication cycle.
Please share your
future plans with our readers.
Rajdipkumar Gupta: With
growing internet penetration, business models are evolving and cloud
communication services are being used by enterprises for streamlining back-end
operations as well as for engaging with customers, employees and other
stakeholders.
We
are proud to say that, today, we are one of the leading cloud-communication
platform service providers offering Communications Platform as a Service
(CPaaS) and will continue to focus on building our presence in new markets and
addressing the need for cloud-communications services in new industries. We
plan to add a few more products and services to our portfolio along with
messaging platforms that will help enterprises to function with ease. We will
continue to track new technologies, industry segments and market trends in the
mobile technology sector.
As
a global aggregator, we intend to leverage our robust in-house developed
technology platform and our ability to manage large volumes of client data to
focus on big data analytics, providing our clients with additional business
insights. We intend to focus on developing communication solutions through
artificial intelligence (“AI”), machine learning (“ML”) and blockchain for
advanced data analytics and predictive analysis, which will allow our enterprise
and MNO clients to discover and monitor historical relationships and trends in
their data.
We
intend to expand and enhance our chatbot services using AI and ML to help our
clients automate customer interactions and service requirements.
Being
one of the leading global aggregators, we have been extensively working towards
bringing enhanced business messaging solutions like RCS Business Messaging,
WhatsApp Business Solution, Viber Business Messaging and Identity solutions in
the mainstream for a couple of years now and are fully committed to ensure the
successful adoption among enterprises.
That’s
not all, with strategic acquisitions, we intend to increase the scale of our
operations, access new clients and enter high-growth geographies in a cost-effective
manner. We also intend to expand our existing offerings to include more
operator-related product offerings.