How have acquisitions helped you in growing your business?

Acquisitions have definitely helped us to grow our business. They complement our offerings. Be it technology or the domain expertise we have both. We have made strategic acquisitions to strengthen our presence in markets globally as well as to offer a wider set of products and services to our customers. We acquired 365squared – a European headquartered company which operates in SMS filtering, analytics and monetization. The acquisition was in line with our goal of inorganic growth to expand our offering to a broader set of customers. Route Mobile has integrated 365squared’s SMS firewall services for its existing and new clients. The enhanced firewall service provides protection against malicious attacks, unsolicited SMS and fraud. The acquisition of Cellent Technologies helped us to offer differentiated products and services to the marketplace. Further, it has helped in expanding our presence in the A2P messaging business in the Middle East and Africa. The acquisition of Call2Connect was in line with our goal of providing BPO services. With the addition of tCall2Connect, we were able to offer our customers with the entire spectrum of BPO services across all our centres, including call centre services that include voice and non-voice processes, consulting for business support services, collection management services and campaign management activities.

Are you looking at more acquisitions?

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.

What is your India strategy?

We are among the leading cloud-communication platform service providers 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, aggregators and operators to function with ease. We will continue to track new technologies, industry segments and market trends in the mobile technology sector. 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.

It has been a tough time for players in your market. What are the challenges and how do you plan to overcome them?

We are required to keep pace with evolving technological advancements, clients preferences, stay in-sync with the current regulatory needs and safeguarding customer data. With our domain knowledge and R&D team, we endeavour to adopt new technologies and constantly work towards creating innovative solutions for our customers.

What segments are fueling your business?

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. Being an associate member of the GSMA and an accredited open hub connectivity solution provider allows us to manage both A2P and P2P traffic for enterprises and MNOs. In March 2019, through our cloud communications platform, we processed more than 2.46 billion transactions. The escalating need for businesses to communicate with a specific set of target audiences using messaging as the convenient mode of communication has fuelled the growth of A2P messages today.

Have you seen a spike in your business from OTT players in India?

OTT players who are able to offer original content and regional flavors have gained huge popularity in India recently. 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.

Have you witnessed traction in missed-called solutions?

The missed call service is an engagement tool that enables inbound inputs from customers through a simple, free of charge phone call. The tool can be deployed to capture responses or queries and send automated messages or arrange calls to customers. From knowing your bank balance, transferring funds, requesting a cheque book, voting, feedback to listening to bollywood music, missed call has reformed the Indian market.

Going forward, what are the other customer-centric innovations we can expect from the industry?

New age A2P solutions will transform customer conversations into rich and interactive experiences with personal messages and hyper-personalized content. Advanced messaging with chatbots, AI and machine learning as well as plugins to deliver the richer experience consumers, while giving businesses the chance to exploit the direct nature of application-to-person (A2P) IP messaging will be the norm. Enterprises will increasingly adopt an omnichannel platform to integrate all of their digital communication at one place and to provide a unified experience that enables quick resolution and personalized service on demand. At Route Mobile, our research and development team is actively working on emerging technologies like AI, Blockchain, ChatBots, to make the process of messaging and voice communications more interactive, more engaging, and more enriching; helping enterprises driving better monetisation opportunities. Recently Route Mobile entered into for Rich Communication Services (“RCS”) business messaging. With the integration of this solution, our customers will be able to benefit from the next generation of RCS business messaging that gives them more interaction with brands.

With data privacy becoming more important, how are you impacted?

Ans: We are in a digital era, where a huge amount of data is processed. India is no different. Due to a surge in the use of smart devices, data leakages and privacy issue have become more frequent. For the protection of the citizens’ privacy and legal rights, data needs to reside within the country to ensure enforcement. The current data protection regime is likely to strengthen data privacy in India. As a matter of policy, we have always processed the data within the regional boundaries to ensure the best customer experience. With our own hosted infrastructure, we process all the data generated by most of our products from India at our India data centres itself. We safeguard client’s data, restrict access, encrypt as per terms to ensure data privacy.

Published in Times of India: Route Mobile to grow through strategic acquisitions