 I would like to invite on stage Sabyasachi Mitter, the managing director and founder of Fulcrow. Let's have the gentleman on stage. Welcome, sir. Could you please have a mic for sir. And he will be talking on how WhatsApp could change the digital acquisition process completely. Hello. Thank you. That was a very nice introduction. The house that you're doing in the match, anyone watching the match on your phone? No? Not good? Okay. So, the reason I asked that question is if any of you had filled up a lead form slightly earlier in the day and you got a call from the call center right now, how many of you would have stepped out and taken that call? Raise your hands. No one? And once you missed, oh, two of them, wow, very nice. That must have been a lead for a BMW. But for most of us, I guess we wouldn't be going out, right? So then how do you get back to the brand where you have expressed an interest and you've missed the call? Okay. You can go to Truecaller and you figure out that, okay, it's a call from let's say Tata Motors. But then if you again go to the Tata Motors website, fill up a form and again expect a call which you might again miss because you're busy, right? We don't really love cars that much, right? So what we're going to talk about today is something which, you know, we have experimented a lot with platform APIs and how they can fundamentally disrupt processes and why traditional companies need to be aware of how new kids in the block, all the new startups are looking and using technology to fundamentally change business processes which might actually make our business processes very, very irrelevant, okay? So if you can, I don't have the, sorry, right? So how many of you come from or work for a traditional brand? A traditional brand would be let's say cars, would be let's say retail or any of that? Any raise of hands for you to sell a physical product, right, all of you? How many of you have agencies work in a media agency or have a media agency which runs campaigns for acquisition? I mean, you fill up a lead funnel, you run media ads and then people fill up forms and then what happens then it goes to a call center, right? Okay, disjointed process. Media agency gets the lead, call center does the qualification, call center hands it over to somebody else in the field, maybe at the dealership, maybe somewhere else, who's then taking a pre-qualified client and is actually trying to convert a sale. That's the traditional sales process that most companies are used to today. The second problem with the sales process like this, and I work with a few auto brands, is that it's non-interactive, okay? You get a call from a call center agent who's paid some 13,000 bucks. Anyway, sir, you want a test drive? As if I have to ask something in the car. Sir, it will happen later. First tell me, do you want a loan? Now, that's the kind of interaction you get from a fairly decent sized auto brand, right? Anyone experience this? Now, how interactive is that? I want to buy a car. I have a few questions. I want to know how many variants it comes in. I want to know what, you know, engine sizes it comes in. And all you get to hear is, sir, if you qualify these four questions, then you will get a call from my dealership, right? So that's how interactive today's sales process is. And it's very person-dependent. And I'm a fan of Citibank. Because when they call, even if it's a cold call, they're so polite that you just feel like talking to them. And I get calls from a few of the other banks. Maybe some of them are here today, so I won't name them. And when you get calls, sir, you want a credit card? You know, that's how person-dependent experience can be. And it's very, very manpower intensive. I know for one auto brand that we work, the moment we have a plan to run a high-scale media campaign, they say call center may capacity may it may calls much generate crowd, right? Has anyone faced that before? When marketing effort is linked to the downstream supply chain of it being completely people-dependent because leads are always going to be serviced by people. All of this leads to very, very low fuel funnel conversion efficiency. For one auto brand, out of 100 people who are visiting the website, we were converting half to retail. That means out of 100 people who were interested in the car, only half of them bought the car. They were all falling off at multiple stages of the funnel. How many of you have bought a one-carat diamond for your better half? Raise your hands. Okay, half-carat? No? Yeah, come on. Okay, any diamond ring? Ah, there. And how many of you have bought it online? Just one hand. Okay, now this is a true story. I got corn for my daughter to buy this online. Okay, I bought a three-lakh rupee, one-carat solitaire ring online, and it's not my client and I've not been responsible. So I'll take you through how it was sold to me on WhatsApp by Carat Lane. And this actually got me thinking into creating an entire business solution around what WhatsApp can do for business. Okay, so let's see how it all started. I filled up a form on the Carat Lane website. Yeah, I immediately got a message from somebody called Anita, who gave me her number and email address. And then I said, okay, I want to buy this one-carat VVS-1 diamond ring. She gave me a list of all the diamonds which were available in their stock. That's an Excel sheet, or I think it was a PDF that was sent across. I said, okay, this is the one I want. She's throwing me a 5% discount. Then I asked how much will it cost, the entire thing, so she gives me a cost. And on the same day, she schedules a visit from a field executive to visit me at home. She asked me where I stay. I'm able to share my address. I share on my Google map. She tells me to RTGSE amount. Okay, all of this didn't happen in the same way. I just deleted some of the messages so it just gives you a flow. I get the RTGSE details of Carat Lane. Okay, I transfer the amount. They need a PAN card because it's about 25,000, so my PAN card goes on WhatsApp. Then that's the CAD image of the ring that I'm supposed to get. Right, I approve the design on WhatsApp. The order is raised, order number shared with me. I get the delivery of the ring and all of this. Can anyone guess how many days it took from the time I started the conversation to the ring in my hand? Guess, no, you can't make a ring that fast. Four days, I got the ring in my house. Okay, I didn't have to step out of my house and I concluded a three lakh rupees sale on WhatsApp. Right, and this is real. Okay, now it might sound very cool, right? I mean, Carat Lane is doing this. Let's all try selling diamonds on WhatsApp. But unfortunately, what Carat Lane is doing is not scalable, right? It's an experiment for them, I later found out. The first problem that you have in trying to sell on WhatsApp is what is called routing. Now it's very easy to, I mean, any brand managers here who have toll-free numbers, how many toll-free numbers would we have? One. How many WhatsApp for business numbers would you have? One. Which one, the same toll-free number, right? Because for WhatsApp for business, you can make the toll-free number your WhatsApp for business number. Now imagine if 10,000 people were to submit a WhatsApp lead right today, how many agents would you need to address those calls? But you have only one number and because WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, if you have to load it on a normal mobile phone, you will have only one guy. So what you have to do is what is called routing. Now anyone here who has WhatsApp for business API access, it's a very closed group of people who have, I guess none, right? So recently it was, you knew the book my shows and all got the access. Now brands are getting access one by one. For example, Hero Motors has got, Kotak has got, and some of the examples that I have are use cases that are being built for Hero Motors. Okay, so the first thing that you have to do with WhatsApp for business, because it doesn't support any of this out of box, you only get a send API and a receive API, is you have to route, which means you have to put a series of agents behind one number and when the inbound messages come, you have to intelligently figure out which agent will get that particular chat request or WhatsApp request, right? That's called routing. And you have to route the message back to the correct customer. Now if you get this wrong, the wrong customer will get the wrong message, right? So Carat Lane is not routing, Carat Lane is doing a manual process of actually taking a lead and physically sending that to one particular person who is then conducting that chat. Now the second problem with that is logging. Anyone from the banking and financial space or work for a client who's in banking or financial? You know, if you want to, you work with Kotak in the bank when we did Twitter banking for them called hashtag banking, you have to log everything. You have to log everything that everyone says. So for example, if you're trying to sell an insurance product, you have to take consent and you have to record the consent. Now if you're doing WhatsApp between two human people, where is the log? You know, WhatsApp is end to end encrypted, we can't read that. So you have to have an intermediary logging system where you have to first take the message, decrypt it, store it, encrypt it and send it back to the agent, right? So that's the second problem that Carat Lane can't solve for. The third is everyone wants CRM integration, right? You want that data to go into some system. So the next time somebody wants to call out that particular customer or if the customer happens to call the call center, you have a record of exactly what happened on that WhatsApp conversation. Now you can't do that the way Carat Lane is doing. The fourth is history. Now the same person may not be available through the life cycle of the customer to sell the product. Sometimes it takes 45 days to sell a car, maybe 60 days, maybe 90 days. Now the same person who did the chat, like Anita may not be there in Carat Lane today. Now if I want to talk to Carat Lane, I've lost all the history that I've had with Anita, right? So you need to be able to present the history to whoever is the next person who's handling your request. That pretty much happens well in a call center. But how do you do that on WhatsApp? Now I mentioned that you'll need 1,000 Anita's to handle 1,000 such requests, right? You can't do that. And that's where AI comes in. You can't fool a customer by saying that you're talking to an AI bot. But then there are many things, like in a car, many questions that can be successfully answered by AI over WhatsApp. So when you put WhatsApp, you don't just put WhatsApp by putting human agents to service every single request. You typically will try to put an AI engine, some kind of machine learning to be able to predict and answer some of those questions before you get a human in, right? So that you have to build yourself. The next is agent management. Not typically in the case of financial products, et cetera. You don't want the customer to really know who's the agent and what's his number. So you're masking the agent's number by putting in an intermediary number, right? So which means what happens is when an agent leaves, you have to reassign that customer to a new agent who already has that history. So that entire administrative management of agents is something that you have to take care of as part of your solution. Financial institutions and more corporates will want imprimised development. You can't have people carrying physical WhatsApp on their mobile phones and be allowed to answer any of this. So you have to develop consoles which can be used by sales agents at various stages to be able to handle that entire lead. And the most important thing which people forget is the biggest strength of WhatsApp is assets. I mean, who better than the BJP who would create hundreds and thousands of assets to answer each and every possibility of a user query and a user scenario. So you don't put people there to keep typing all the time. You create assets. You create video assets. You create YouTube links. You create images and I'll show you some of them of some of the stuff that Chiro Motors is using. So you have to empower that person or the AI with a huge bunch of assets which should be able to do NLP on top of that inbound request and be able to give multimedia responses to solve for the process. So this is something that if you are in Bangalore, I think kind of couple of other cities, if you go to the Tata Nexon website, you'll be able to do this. Is the video gonna play automatically? Let me try. Can I have some audio, please? Video has audio. Okay, so you go to the website, you fill in your details, you click chat on WhatsApp. It opens a chat on WhatsApp window and this is a chat that you will typically have. Right, so you can ask it questions. Here, for example, you're asking questions about Nexon, what options does it have? It gives you the answers. What are your engine options? It gives you the answers. Okay, what are the difference between the models? You will get a much more enriched version of that, which is a PDF document through WhatsApp for Business API, so you can actually open it offline and see the differences. Okay, now you may ask for colors and you can actually send images to the users saying, okay, these are the colors. Then you can send video URLs, which will give a preview and you can watch the video within WhatsApp without having to leave WhatsApp. Now, if you want to book a test drive, automatically it'll take the pin code and then actually connect through API with the test drive scheduling system and it will actually give you a test drive. It will also, I think, give you the map link of where you can buy that, right? So, a far more interactive way of qualifying a person, making him more interested, and we've seen almost a 2x better conversion through a WhatsApp channel as against the traditional channel. Now, in that quick video, you saw four types of messages that you can use or five types, actually. They have added documents now. So, you have a text message, you have a text message with URL, you can have a message template, which is not exactly the most important type handling this use case. You can have a media message and you can have documents. Now, one of the coolest thing that we've seen working for some of our clients is what we call the comparison cards. So, if you were to, this was for the Hero Xtreme 200 R, so if you would actually, these are all WhatsApp creatives for comparison. So, straight head on. See, it's very difficult for a brand to create direct head on comparison creatives as in the good old aerial and surf days on the public internet. But, when it's a one-on-one WhatsApp medium, you can go all hammer and tong at competition. So, these are really hard-hitting creatives trying to prove that the Xtreme 200 R is better than competition across all the features. So, if anybody's interested in the, see, nobody's interested in only one product, right? So, if they're interested in Xtreme 200, they're also probably looking at Pulsar and Yamaha. So, you go hard and hammer and tongs at competition, playing around with the specs so that it looks compelling for you. Right, so, few key takeaways to leave you thinking because a lot of you will have to wait for quite some time before you can do any of this. The WhatsApp business API or Waba, as they call it, that's a WhatsApp business account. So, that's the acronym that you need to know. Do you have a Waba? That should be the party talk at bars. Okay, does your company have a Waba? But you're not gonna get that very soon. So, remember that you have a lot of time to plan for this. What are the four key things that you need to understand? And this is where we see the whole system failing because this is a completely new way of looking at business, right? So, the first thing that you understand is WhatsApp for business is extremely powerful. It has more people in the world using it on a day-to-day basis for the maximum amount of time and is on the front screen of every possible phone, right? So, you're handling an enterprise-grade global system. You need to have enterprise system to drive scale. Otherwise, like in the case of one of our clients, they had to restrict it for a few hours in one city and still don't know how they're gonna take it across the country at scale, right? So, you need to understand this is not child's play. You don't put two programmers and you try to build something in-house. The second is asset creation, which is the single most important thing that WhatsApp allows you to do. You don't sit on WhatsApp and chat. You don't sit on WhatsApp and type messages. You use WhatsApp to create automated messages, predicting the intent of the guy. You put a good amount of AI and NLP to detect emotions, detect sentiment, detect the right answer, have a customized answer, and you have a huge IT engine behind using AI and NLP to help you deploy those assets to increase the efficiency of conversion. And often clients say, oh, let's just put all AI. Forget about the humans. I mean, we gotta save so much tons of money. The entire call center can be disbanded. None of that is gonna happen. Okay, please, while I work on AI, I love AI, everything to do with AI, I still feel we are some distance away where an AI can close a sale for you every time. 80%, 70% of the questions can be handled by AI if you train it well, but then you will always need to build a human failover because at the end of the day, you're still not reached the stage and evolution where humans can be done away with, right? So remember how you balance AI with humans is the most important success of any of these automated processes. And the last one is you need to retrain everybody right from the MD of the organization because today, a lead funnel has multiple stakeholders. You have the digital marketing team which is supposed to get the lead. You have retail which is supposed to close. You have a call center which falls under the CRM team. Each of them are maintaining their silos. In this process that I showed you for Carat Lane, there is only one person who is taking that lead right from acquisition, right down to the test drive. And then after the test drive person remains as a relationship manager intended to be a still not reach there right through the life cycle of that customer to the resell of the next car, right? People might change in the back, but for the customer, there is one person, one relationship manager from pre-sales to post-sales to loyalty. That means there's a change in the thinking within organizations, cross-functional teams have to be built to manage this entire process and that, ladies and gentlemen, is going to be the toughest part because we all like to protect our turf. Technology is great as long as everybody is willing to be an equal stakeholder which unfortunately is not the reality outside of this room. So be ready for a great time ahead with what's there for business. And you always have to close a paid session with a sales pitch. If you need any help, reach out to me. Thank you. Thank you. I would request you to be on stage for a few seconds, please, please. We would like to present you the token of gratitude and I would like to invite Mr. Amarjeet Nayak, Head of Media Marketing India and Sark Akamai. Can we please have the gentlemen on stage? Thank you so much for that session, sir. Could I request you to take the center stage, please?