Episode 003: Conversational Commerce

Conversational Messaging Podcast by Gupshup

In today’s episode, Beerud and Srini discuss how the pandemic changed the way consumers shop. Join them as they talk about conversational commerce, the future of e-commerce. Learn what conversational commerce is, why it’s a game-changer, and what you need to know to get started.

Conversational Commerce in a Nutshell

The pandemic made everything digitized, pushing consumers to rely on dozens of applications for different types of activities and transactions. This sparked the need to discuss conversational commerce. But what is conversational commerce? It allows customers to interact with businesses as if they are interacting with friends, creating a seamless experience.
According to Beerud, this can be made possible through a single messaging mechanism that lets the consumers do everything, from ordering, payment, to delivery, and for all sorts of transactions and products.

“The quality of experience is limited, and that’s the challenge in the way app-based commerce works. I think the solution to both of these is conversational commerce based on messaging.” - Beerud Sheth

Why Opt For Conversational Commerce

Even before the pandemic, giants in mobile-based e-commerce and famous brands use their websites and own applications to interact and transact with consumers. However, small businesses can’t do the same right away, and even if they can, customers’ experiences from these platforms are not necessarily ideal.
Ultimately, conversational commerce helps reduce the consumers’ effort from jumping from one website/application to another and improves the quality consumers’ experience.

What You Need To Know

Beerud emphasizes that conversational messaging can engage consumers in a holistic interaction that replicates an experience with a live and smart salesperson. For starters, businesses can start to make their one-way SMS to two-way, where they can be redirected to somewhere for more options, get recommendations, additional support, or feedback. Also, as security is a priority, newer technologies like IP messaging can be incorporated to ensure consumers’ data privacy.

“There could be multiple entry points, could be offline or online in different areas. All of them lead to this one consistent, high-quality conversation experience.” - Beerud Sheth, CEO of Gupshup

To know more about Conversational Commerce, and for more information about Beerud and Srini, listen to this episode.

Bio:

Beerud Sheth

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

Beerud is the co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, the world's leading platform for cloud messaging and conversational experiences. It is used by over 30K+ developers and handles over 4.5 billion messages per month. He previously founded and led Elance (now Upwork, a publicly listed company), the pioneer of online freelancing and the gig economy.

Prior to founding Elance, he worked in the financial services industry – modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and Citicorp Securities.

His graduate research, at the MIT Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning agents for personalized news filtering. Beerud earned an M.S. in Computer Science from MIT & a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal.

Srinivas B Vijayaraghavan

VP Marketing

Srinivas has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

Gupshup.io