Route Mobile helps telcos and enterprises in customer engagement and experience through the use of multiple communication channels. The company is working towards creating a single platform, a unified API that can be leveraged for better end-user engagement. In an interview with tele.net, Rajdipkumar Gupta, managing director and group chief executive officer, and Milind Pathak, chief business officer, Route Mobile, talk about the company’s focus areas and growth plans…

What were some of the key business highlights for Route Mobile during 2020?

The year 2020 was phenomenal for us – we were listed and grew by almost 47 per cent in the past financial year, the highest since our inception. We also added significant bandwidth to our leadership.

Digital adoption in India grew owing to Covid-19, and we were the direct beneficiaries of that. During the year, we continued to work on developing new and different layers of communication or adding more communication layers within an existing platform, helping our clients to enhance their user engagement. We are developing solutions/platforms that leverage multiple channels of communication, including WhatsApp, Viber, RCS and email.

For us, telecom operators, enterprises, system integrators and developers are the core pillars of our go-to-market strategy.

How is the company bringing value to telcos and enterprises?

We are a very solid company in terms of offering solutions to operators, which contribute to our revenues in a big way. We have deployed a firewall for Idea and BSNL. Globally, there are almost 10 other operators that use our firewall, which enables them to identify the leakages within their network. Further, it allows them to ensure that all the traffic that flows through their network comes through grey routes and follows the right standards. In our enterprise segment, too, we have seen significant traction across enterprise tech system integrators.

Overall, our enterprise customer momentum is very encouraging. We remain bullish on this entire communication platform space. We have been observing that enterprises are increasingly realising the need for a partner that understands not just one channel, say, only SMS or only email, but the entire consumer journey, and is accordingly able to hand-hold the enterprise in user engagement.

What are some of the key trends shaping the cloud communications industry?

The industry is growing at a healthy pace. The segment is reportedly worth around $7 billion as of 2020. We are expected to reach about $25 billion in the pure CPaaS (communication-platform-as-a-service) market space. It is a strong category with a growth rate of 30-35 per cent.

We are also seeing channel shifts emerging within the industry. More and more brands are realising that they cannot focus only on email, voice, or SMS as a channel, and are opting for an omnichannel presence to reach customers. They also want to ensure channel efficacy and understand that of the millions of emails being sent to customers, how many are being opened, clicked, getting converted, etc.

Further, we are seeing a massive momentum in communication commerce. People now want to complete a transaction on the communication channel itself.

What is the role of enhanced business messaging in driving customer experience?

Many years ago, communication between customers and brands happened only through SMS, but now communication is happening on WhatsApp too. Going forward, the same can happen on RCS or KakaoTalk. The benefits of communication on such platforms are better click rate for brands, better data interaction with the consumer, better chances of conversion, etc.

What will be your key focus areas going forward?

Innovation is in our DNA. We always want to create something new, which also has value for our clients. Currently, we are trying to create a very unique offering for operators, which will work on blockchain. We are also working on marketing automation and other channels of communication. Going forward, we will continue to focus on technology and product enhancement.

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tele.net – Enhancing user engagement through cloud communications