CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Gautam Rajesh Shelley, CEO & Founder of AiSensy
- Can you outline AiSensy’s journey in the WhatsApp marketing space, detailing the challenges faced during entry and how the company’s vision has evolved alongside significant milestones such as processing over a billion messages and earning recognition as the “Emerging WhatsApp Partner of the Year 2023”?
We’ve been in the WhatsApp marketing space for almost 3.5 years now. We pivoted from our Chatbot startup Triny to WhatsApp to build a WhatsApp Engagement platform that helps businesses with WhatsApp Marketing & Engagement. Initially, we called ourselves a WhatsApp Chatbot, Marketing & Engagement platform. The eureka moment came for us when we saw businesses driving significant revenue using AiSensy, and that was quite moving for us. We evolved our vision to not only connect customers with businesses but also help businesses drive revenue using AiSensy. Since then, that has been our vision. We have been making a lot of progress on those notes. We have built a lot of features around the same philosophy that whatever generates more revenue for the customer is our goal to achieve. Hence, we have been able to hit a billion messages, and we got the award for Meta’s “Emerging Partner of the Year 2023.” It all starts with helping customers with the right thing, understanding their needs, and figuring out what will help them succeed. We can proudly say that businesses that work with us drive 25-80% of their revenue using AiSensy. That typically means that whenever a business starts using AiSensy, they double or triple their revenue, or even drive 5x of their revenue after using AiSensy. That is what we, as a team, are proud of and what we aim to keep doing further.
Some of our biggest milestones are:
- Awarded Emerging WhatsApp Partner of the Year 2023 by Meta
- 1 Billion+ Messages done till date
- Native Click to WhatsApp Ads dashboard that we launched in collaboration with Meta. We were the first platform to bring native Click to WhatsApp Ads, Click tracking (the ability to track clicks on link buttons sent in messages) and advanced segregation (segregation based on tags, attributes & other filters) within the platform.
- 25000+ Happy customers and 1500+ Partners including Vivo, Skullcandy, Cosco, Upgrad, PhysicsWallah etc
- 300+ Features Launched
- 1000 Cr+ Revenue Generated for Brands
- 2500+ Partners working with us
- What sets AiSensy apart from competitors in the crowded WhatsApp marketing market?
We innovate in a number of areas to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. The first is the product, which we have built to be user-friendly, adding depth to our range of products, and using AI to assist clients in increasing their revenue. We call ourselves “The Smartest WhatsApp Engagement Platform” which essentially means that the platform is smart enough to tell the business what to do next to drive revenues.
Next is Innovation in Customer Support. We’ve been a brand that has been built on Customer love and that’s been our top priority right from the start. We take the effort to go on Zoom, Call, Chat, and WhatsApp and allow every customer to reach out to us via multiple channels, which helps the customers resolve their queries faster and use the platform effectively. We’ll be coming up with a lot of more industry-specific training to help customers get better insights on how they can leverage WhatsApp in a better fashion.
- Could you elaborate on how AiSensy addresses the evolving needs of modern businesses beyond just mass messaging with its WhatsApp functionalities?
Today’s businesses wish to communicate with their clients in a meaningful way rather than merely sending them unsolicited emails. WhatsApp assists organisations in creating engagement models since, in contrast to email and SMS, it is a two-way communication channel with almost 10x more open rates & click-through rates.
Businesses today are using WhatsApp to drive KYC verification, offer products through catalogues, create engaging chatbots, qualify clients using WhatsApp Forms, and even collect payments within WhatsApp. These customer engagement journeys assist companies in developing strong brand value and a deeper level of consumer trust. That is the driving force behind modern businesses.
That’s how we address the evolving needs of businesses by providing them an end-to-end WhatsApp Engagement & Marketing Solution
- How does AiSensy prioritize and utilize customer feedback to drive product development and improvements?
We are regular with our customer feedback reviews, and try to make sense of what the customer is saying vs what they want.
A lot of times what they say vs what the customer wants is different. Trying to figure out what they actually are looking for & building on that is what we try to do.
We make an effort to ascertain what they are genuinely searching for and then develop upon that.
We review a lot of the questions our sales and support teams receive, have in-person meetings to learn more about the solutions they require, refine our offerings, and keep shipping!
- Can you highlight some of the past successful innovations by AiSensy that are shaping the company’s future strategies?
We launched our Native Ads Manager which helps businesses run Click to WhatsApp Ads on Facebook & Instagram seamlessly last year. Our Ads Manager product has been used by 3500+ Businesses to drive leads at 1/5th of the cost. Second is the way our Campaign Management engine is built, Customers who migrated from other known platforms have seen a surge of 3X in conversion rate due to the way our campaign manager is designed. As I said the platform is intuitive and smart enough to drive to the next best step, just play with it and you shall see the conversions happening!
- How does AiSensy measure success beyond traditional metrics, and what other indicators does the company consider important?
We measure effectiveness by vouching for our customer’s feedback on how their revenue is growing, how their customers are satisfied and how they trust AiSensy with every large campaign they do!
The second is how quickly they accept recently introduced features. We’ve seen 500+ businesses start using and navigating WhatsApp Payments within 3 days of its launch, which gives us a lot of direction.
- Looking ahead, how does AiSensy plan to integrate cutting-edge technologies, such as AI, with customer feedback to shape its future innovations and offerings?
With ChatGPT ruling our lives today we’re coming up with multiple innovations around AI. It starts with helping businesses generate WhatsApp Template Messages via AI that can be optimised for higher click rates, open rates or reply rates. Further highlighting the right customer cohort to target via previous campaign data of the business that helps them improve their ROI. We believe AI will play a major role in growing a businesses revenue by 1.5-2X and that’s what we aim for.
Next, a lot of our focus is towards knitting the product strongly to help businesses drive acquisition to growth & further monetisation. In a sense, they can create and run Click to WhatsApp Ads from the platform for acquisition, further build chatbots, and native forms & retarget the customers & collect payments all under one platform.
