Rise Of Third Party Messaging Apps Is One Of The Biggest Tech Shifts For D2C Brands: Girish Mathrubootham

While speaking at The D2C Summit 3.0’s session titled ‘Learnings From Freshworks: Global Startup Insights For The Indian D2C Market’, Freshworks’ CEO Girish Mathrubootham said that the rise of third-party messaging apps (such as WhatsApp) is a major technology shift for D2C brands.

Sandeep Murthy, partner, Lightbox, moderated the discussion on the importance of customer support and engagement for D2C businesses.

Mathrubootham said, “People were using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to communicate with brands because they were not getting the support that they deserved from all email or phone calls. But as technology evolved, it made so much sense for businesses to start engaging with their customers on those platforms.”

He advised the brands and their leaders that tuned into the session to adopt the third-party tech since they are likely to disrupt every aspect of customer engagement, including the gamut of marketing, sales or customer support. 

Mathrubootham pointed out that while businesses have IVRs (interactive voice response), chatbots and chat APIs make a lot of sense from a business standpoint. 

“As your business grows, you can’t keep hiring people. But with the rise of messaging apps such as WhatsApp, the responses get fragmented. It also raises the need for automation. That’s where the chatbot players come in to play.”

He called the system of automation of responses as the gold standard of customer experience. As such, a direct-to-consumer brand can not only use third-party apps for resolving issues but also to communicate and market to its customers.

Founded in 2010 by Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy, the SaaS company Freshworks debuted on NASDAQ last year. It sells a suite of softwares for customer management, an AI-powered chatbot and messaging platform for customer support, as well as call centre-based solutions for customer service resolutions.

As the global chatbot market is expected to exceed $1.34 Bn by 2024, one can easily assume a significant part of the industry will be driven by D2C and ecommerce brands, necessitating the need for automation of customer redressal.

Inc42’s The D2C Summit 3.0 is a forum for discussion among entrepreneurs, founders, marketers, retailers and D2C brands. The Day 1 of the summit nears its end and the speaker line-up for Day 2 is also all set to talk about instant gratifications, festive rush, influencer marketing for D2C brands and more.

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