CXOToday participated in an exclusive interview with Karthik Jagannathan, Co-Founder and CEO, Gallabox
What is Gallabox? How do you plan to empower a million SMBs with call automation tools?
Gallabox is a conversational commerce platform that helps small and medium businesses (SMBs) increase their sales through WhatsApp. The code-free conversational commerce platform uses the WhatsApp Business API to help small and medium-sized businesses improve their sales and offer a full mobile experience to their customers without the need for a mobile app.
In acquiring customers digitally, SMBs spend huge efforts and marketing budgets to generate leads, but struggle to convert them due to the opacity of customer conversations, multiple touch points and dependence on sales team members to provide updates. There is no way to track future conversations, streamline them to the right team members, gain transparency into customer interactions, enable greater team collaboration, and finally drive the prospect to close. Most SMBs cannot afford to develop interactive experiences like a mobile app, unlike large companies.
Gallabox enables businesses to instantly interact with their customers on WhatsApp, understand their requirements and offer a collaborative experience. Gallabox is the always-on “digital agent” for businesses to meet new customer expectations and sell better. Multi-agent team inbox and campaign features are layered with a complex yet easy-to-use no-code bot, thus combining the ease of messaging with the power of automation.
Total funding to date. Who are your investors?
The company has raised a total of US$1.2 million in seed funding led by Prime Venture Partners with participation from 100x Entrepreneur Fund. Some of the other notable angel investors include Pallav Nadhani (former CEO, FusionCharts), Abhishek Rungta (Indus Net Technologies), SV Swaroop Reddy (former SPI Cinemas) and Siva Rajamani (Co-Founder and CEO, Everstage).
What is the addressable market size for your product?
According to various reports assessing opportunities for small and medium enterprises in India, Zinnov in particular, there are at least 20 million businesses that are ready for conversational sales automation. The opportunity for India is at least $3 billion businesses that will benefit from Gallabox.
What are the key challenges you’ve noticed in current conversation tools for B2B businesses that Gallabox caters to?
Manual vs. Automation: WhatsApp was never originally designed for business, but it is the world’s favorite messaging platform and hence, small and medium businesses and their teams use their personal WhatsApp to communicate with their customers. Gallabox helps businesses integrate with their CRM and other business software, offers a shared team inbox and enables them to automate all customer conversations, offering a pleasant customer experience
Conversational vs. Transactional: Conversational tools were focused on initially sending one-way notifications and then on two-way interactions. But Gallabox harnesses the power of automation with the ease of messaging – and adds the ability to see the entire transaction
No-code vs. custom-built: Businesses have built bots to interact with users, while Gallabox provides bots out-of-the-box without requiring setup and technical effort.
What are the sectors you are targeting? What problems do you solve for clients in these areas?
Our main focus is to enable businesses in service sectors to digitize and automate their conversations with customers. The key sectors of focus are:
Travel [tour operators, travel planners, ticketing]
education [edutech, study abroad, K12 online courses]
Health/Wellness [clinic, diagnostic centres, salons, spas]
Property [builders, aggregators]
We have created >100 workflow recipes that are relevant to the multiple sectors we serve. These recipes are designed to be easily implemented into industry-specific workflows that automate the sales conversation at scale.
Why are you better than just using Whatsapp-for-Business for companies?
The WhatsApp for Business app is useful for managing the limited number of conversations and the basic tools for providing automated responses and presenting product catalogs. However, Gallabox is built on the WhatsApp Business API, with which businesses can automate their conversation flows, qualify leads better by triggering chatbots, integrate with their existing CRM and provide automated notifications, engage with leads through rich text, interactive lists, push notifications and integrate their product catalogs and service SKUs through WhatsApp. Gallabox replaces the need for separate business mobile apps and automates almost all use cases for converting leads into customers.