Mumick: Business Messaging Will Offer Opportunities for Growth, Expansion

Executive Vice President and CEO, Dotgo Business Unit at Gupshup, Dr. Inderpal Singh Mumick, speaks about how the growth of high-speed data in Nigeria has enhanced business communication as well as the new growth opportunities that business messaging offers brands. Emma Okonji brings the excerpts:

As a telecom expert, how will you describe the type of services offered by Dotgo in Nigeria and Africa?

Dotgo specialises in the field of rich communication services (RCS) and rich business messaging. I have been working in the African market, particularly in Nigeria for over a decade and we have been offering services in business messaging. Dotgo is focused on business messaging services such as WhatsApp Business Messaging and Rich Communications Services messaging in Nigeria, Ghana, and other African countries. With the acquisition by Gupshup last year, Dotgo will help to strengthen Gupshup’s conversational messaging platform, which helps businesses and developers build richer customer experiences. It will help expand our business messaging platform and further strengthen our brand in the African continent. In the last six months, Dotgo has grown its traffic and revenue in the Nigerian market and we have doubled our traffic in Nigeria. We are servicing the needs of the Nigerian market and the African market, by providing WhatsApp Business Messaging, Instagram Business Messaging, Google Business Messaging, SMS Business Messaging, and Rich Communications Services (RCS). We service the needs of big telecom operators, insurance companies, banks, and other financial institutions, including medical institutions in Nigeria and Africa. 

Want is the importance of business messaging to brands, and how has it impacted business growth in Nigeria and Africa?

When mobile phones were first introduced for communication purposes, Short Message Service (SMS) was used to send brief information to people and at a point, SMS became very popular for sending person-to-person messages. So, SMS became the first successful way of sending messages to people globally. But over the last decade, newer forms of sending messages in a more robust and attractive way, have also been introduced. The newer form of sending messages includes the use of pictures, videos, and the channel through which the robust messages are sent, allowing people to receive messages and send messages through the same platform. Today, WhatsApp, Instagram, Google Business Messaging, and SMS Apps have become popular channels for person-to-person messaging. These newer channels offer much more than what the regular SMS messages used to offer. For this reason, coupled with the fact that people can now upload and add videos to messages, consumers automatically fell in love with business messaging. 

Airline operators, for example, can send the boarding pass of passengers via WhatsApp, and e-commerce companies can send catalogs of their businesses to customers via WhatsApp, Instagram, and Google Business Messaging, among other channels, while customers can respond via the same channels to ask questions or make payment for the purchase of items displayed in the catalogs. 

In Nigeria, many organisations are taking advantage of business messaging services offered by Dotgo to meet the demands of their customers and to grow their businesses.

For us at Dotgo, we call such service which we offer on either WhatsApp, Instagram, or Google Business Messaging, Conversational Engagement, because through our services, businesses can engage with their customers, using conversations over messaging and this makes it a lot easier for customers to discuss business or make purchases of products and services on any of the social media platforms, instead of going to the website or physical store of the company. 

Telecommunications operators in Nigeria are using Dotgo to offer telecom services and to sell their products and services.

What informed the decision to offer business messaging services and how has the service transformed businesses in Nigeria?

At Dotgo, we are motivated to offer business messaging services, based on the need of business owners and their customers. Again, we have a close business relationship with telecom operators in offering SMS messages. We started by providing SMS messages but later saw a huge opportunity to help the Nigerian market upgrade its SMS messaging to Rich Communications Services (RCS), which is the next generation of SMS. We work with Google, which is one of the leading companies in RCS, to bring communication services into Nigeria and Africa. We also have partnerships with MTN, Airtel, and 9mobile. We have been able to put together, a common platform for Nigerian businesses to communicate effectively with their customers. We help telecom operators to manage their communication business from SMS to RCS. So we offer their customers a two-way conversation with rich messaging. We have helped telecom operators to develop the infrastructure for RCS in Nigeria and Africa. We also have a partnership with WhatsApp that enables us to offer business messaging services, using the WhatsApp platform. We saw the need for businesses to upgrade from the usual SMS messages to business messages that will help grow and expand their businesses. So what we do is offer rich business messaging across the popular social media platforms.

What is your view about data protection policy and how secured are the several data that Dotgo manages across the different social media platforms?

Security is key for us because some of the data transactions that we manage on the different social media platforms are financial in nature. The social media platforms that we use, do send one-time passwords to their customers, just to beef up security around their data and this makes our kind of service offering more secure. WhatsApp for instance has end-to-end encryption for person-to-person messaging and such messaging is also encrypted on the Dotgo platform. So, when organisations use our platform to send messages via WhatsApp, they rest assured that their data is well protected and cannot be easily hacked. Again, we have a verification authority, which is the Global System for Mobile Communication Authority (GSMA) and all telecom operators in Nigeria, including Google, work with GSMA to verify every business report before pushing messages to customers. So Dotgo ensures high reliability and trust from the customers. Anytime a business message is sent out to customers, it is accompanied by the logo of the company, the name of the business, and a trust mark that inform the customer that the message has been fully verified.

How do you cope with the different African policies and regulations in the countries where you operate?

Dotgo is a publishing platform that pushes messages to customers of different businesses and any subscriber can read them and be well informed. For example, Dotgo in partnership with MTN Nigeria launched a service that helps customers to link their National Identification Number (NIN), with their Subscriber Identification Module (SIM). So, what we did was use business messaging to address some of the challenges of NIN-SIM linkage in Nigeria. That way, through our business messaging, customers were able to read and understand how to link their NIN with their SIM, and this is just one of the kinds of challenges that our business messaging seeks to address. Our kind of business offering is quite different from the situation where people write an article and send such an article through various social media platforms that could incite others, and which of course attracts policy regulation. Nevertheless, we understand the different policy regulations of different African countries where we operate and our business offering aligns with the different policy regulations of the countries where we operate. African countries have their Data Protection Regulation and we comply with such regulation. 

How can customers of different organisations effectively use their mobile phones to connect with Dotgo business messaging platform?

Ok, let me explain how it works. From an android mobile phone, customers can receive business messages accompanied by videos and pictures. Organisations use the platform to push messages to their customers directly to their mobile phone devices, via different social media platforms like WhatsApp and others. Many businesses in Nigeria are using Dotgo to send messages to their customers directly through their mobile phone devices. Any message sent through the Dotgo platform has our logo on it and customers can see the logo and know that such message is verified and safe for their use. The messages are meant to educate customers and also to introduce new products and solutions to customers, and this makes customers become well informed about certain products and solutions. Most of the messages show different support services from organisations and it gives consumers the opportunity to make informed choices. Customers also have the opportunity to chat with organisations about different concerns that they may have.

How does Dotgo control the contents that are pushed to customers via the Dotgo platform, to ensure that customers are protected from harmful and unwanted messages?

Yes, we have control over the contents that are pushed through the Dotgo platform to customers. Before any message is sent through our platform, we must first carry out our onboarding and verification processes. The processes help us to identify what the organisation wants to achieve with the business messaging, and the type of business messaging that they want to send. It will also help us to know the identity and operations of the organisation that is sending the message. We also ensure that the business messaging is in conformity with the policies and regulations of the country where we operate. For example, we do not allow business messaging that promotes gambling, illicit trading, and pornography, among other things that are not in conformity with a country’s policy regulation. Some of the social media platforms that Dotgo works with, also have features in the platform that allows customers to complain and report any objectionable messages and spam messages.

How will you describe the business growth of Dotgo in Nigeria and how has it impacted businesses and their customers?

Our business messaging has been growing at a very fast pace. In the last two years, we have experienced a ten-fold increase in business messaging globally. Every month, we send over one billion WhatsApp business messages globally, and several hundreds of million RCS business messages every month globally. Our projection this year is to see our business messaging exceed five billion monthly on a global scale, the reason being that there has been an increase in the use of smartphones. In Nigeria, we have also doubled our traffic in the last two years. Businesses need to be digitised and taken to the consumers who are now using smartphone devices to access information on the go. 

In the area of business growth, Gupshup does business with enterprises in almost every vertical like banking, insurance, telecommunications, eCommerce, hospitality, restaurants, airlines, and government, because they all have the need to deliver business messages to consumers. Gupshup alone runs over 44,000 businesses globally and the number is still growing, and Dotgo subsidiary is used in enabling the RCS business for telecom operators. 

What is your business model, and what kind of partnership arrangement do you have in Nigeria?

We have a business model with operators, that allows us to manage their infrastructure and the mobile operators in Nigeria are our business partners. We also partner with other aggregators who further resell our communication services to enterprises. WhatsApp for instance charges certain fees for business messaging, and any organisation that patronises our business messaging platform via WhatsApp will pay the WhatsApp fee and additional fee to Gupshup for the service that we render to the organisations’ customers. On top of our services, we also provide a marketing dashboard and support dashboard, which are additional layers of support from our business offerings. 

Do you have a provision for the distribution of bulk messages from your platform?

Yes, we do provide bulk messaging capabilities. In fact, we provide multiple tools that enable businesses to send bulk messages. We enable the entire lifecycle of a consumer journey, from pre-purchase, which is marketing, to the actual purchase, which is commerce, and to post-purchase. With our bulk messaging capability, we enable tens and hundreds of thousand messages to customers. Our platform gives room for business conversation between the customers and the organisations.

So what are some of your business challenges in the African market and how have you been able to overcome them over the years?

Businesses Messaging is a very fast-growing business, but not without some challenges. We are faced with some challenges as we try to expand the business into Africa. For example, we are faced with the challenge of different price points in different markets, some of them very expensive. We also face the challenge of increased investments in technology, that will allow for easy migration from SMS to WhatsApp and RCS, but in all of these challenges, we try to ensure that organisations have good returns on investments in their business. 

To address these challenges, we developed a single Application Programming Interface (API) that allows businesses to invest once and be connected to different social media platforms, instead of investing in different social media platforms.

What makes business messaging services unique and attractive?

It is unique because it offers services from a variety of platforms, and connects the customers to different social media platforms. The model comes with an app that is already downloaded on the smartphone, and it removes the stress of developing new apps. It uses a single app to push messages across different platforms, and this makes it unique and attractive. 

How will you describe the rate of emerging technology adoption in Africa?

In the last 20 years, Africa has been seen as followers and slow to the adoption of new technologies, but with the emergence and growth of smartphones, the situation is fast changing. Africa, which has a high growth rate of smartphones, is fast adopting new technologies, through the use of mobile phone devices. We have seen that the adoption of new technologies has helped Africans in growing their businesses in a much faster way. The widespread of mobile money in Africa, beginning with Mpesa in Kenya, and its fast spread in Nigeria and other African countries, is a good example of how technology adoption is growing fast on the African continent. Again, the cost of adopting technology has really reduced globally.