CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Karthik Jagganathan, Cofounder and CEO, Gallabox
What is Gallabox? How are you planning to empower a million SMBs with conversation automation tools?
Gallabox is a conversational commerce platform which helps Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) increase their sales through WhatsApp. The no-code conversational commerce platform leverages WhatsApp Business API to help SMBs improve their sales conversions and offer a full mobile experience to their customers without the need for a mobile app.
Acquiring customers digitally, SMBs spend enormous efforts and marketing budgets to generate leads, but struggle to convert them because of opacity of customer conversations, multiple touch-points, and dependence on sales team-members to provide updates. There is no way to keep track of prospective conversations, streamline them to the right team-members, get transparency to customer interactions, enable greater team collaboration, and finally take the prospect to closure. Most SMBs cannot afford to develop interactive experiences like a mobile app unlike large companies.
Gallabox enables businesses to interact with their customers instantly on WhatsApp, understand their requirements and offer a collaborative experience. Gallabox is the always-on ‘digital agent’ for businesses to deal with new customer expectations and sell better. The multi-agent team inbox and campaign features are layered with a sophisticated but simple-to-use, no-code bot, thereby marrying the ease of messaging with the power of automation.
Total funding till date. Who are your investors?
The company has raised a total of USD 1.2 million in seed funding led by Prime Venture Partners with participation from 100x Entrepreneur Fund. Some of the other noted angel investors include Pallav Nadhani (ex-CEO, FusionCharts), Abhishek Rungta (Indus Net Technologies), SV Swaroop Reddy (ex-SPI Cinemas), and Siva Rajamani (co-Founder & CEO, Everstage).
What is the addressable market size for your product?
According to various reports sizing the SMB opportunity in India, notably Zinnov, there are at least 20MN businesses that are ready for Conversational Sales Automation. The India opportunity is at least $3BN businesses that will benefit from Gallabox.
What are the key challenges you have observed in the present conversational tools for B2B businesses which Gallabox caters to?
Manual vs automation: WhatsApp was never built for businesses originally, but it is the world’s favourite messaging platform, and hence, SMBs and their teams use their personal WhatsApp for communicating with their customers. Gallabox helps businesses integrate with their CRM and other business software, offers a shared team inbox and empowers them to automate all customer conversations offering a delightful customer experience
Conversation vs Transaction: Conversation tools were focused on initially sending one-way notifications and then for 2-way interactions. But Gallabox leverages the power of automation with the ease of messaging – and added the ability to see through an entire transaction
No-code vs custom-built: Enterprises built bots to interact with users, while Gallabox is making bots available off-the-shelf, requiring no set-up and tech efforts.
What are the sectors you are targeting? What problems are you solving for the customers in these areas?
Our key focus is to empower businesses in the Services sectors to digitise and automate their customer conversations. The key sectors of focus are:
Travel [tour operators, travel planners, ticketing]
Education [edutech, study abroad, K12 online courses]
Healthcare/Wellness [clinic, diagnostic centres, salons, spas]
Real Estate [builders, aggregators]
We have built >100 workflow recipes sharply relevant to the multiple sectors we serve. These recipes are designed to be easily deployable across sector-specific workflows that automates the sales conversation at scale.
Why are you better than using just Whatsapp-for-Business for companies?
WhatsApp for Business app is useful to manage the limited number of conversations and the basic tools to provide automated replies and showcase the product catalogues. However, Gallabox is built on the WhatsApp Business API, with which businesses can automate their conversation flows, qualify the leads/prospects better by triggering chatbots, integrating with their existing CRM and provide automated notifications, interact with prospects by rich text, interactive lists, button messages and integrate their product catalogues and service SKUs via WhatsApp. Gallabox replaces the need for having separate business mobile apps and automates almost all the use cases of converting prospects to customers.
