Prasanth Yerrapragada – Vice President, Technology, Telebu Communications
Telebu is a 15-year-old organization that drives enterprise communication using innovative technological solutions. The company offers ready-to-use communication applications, as well as custom-built communication APIS and SDKS to help developers and enterprises reach their customers via SMS, chat, voice and video. The company works for public, private and government sectors, and has a presence in 15 countries, including India, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman and Hong Kong. Prasanth Yerrapragada, Vice President, Technology, Telebu Communications spoke to Vivek Singh Chauhan about their business model, expansion plans and what role their products play in building communication technology stronger.
What is the USP of Telebu as a company? Telebu Communications as a company is a one-stop shop for any of the corporate who wants to have communication tools in place for their customers or for their internal employees. Interaction with the customers could be through voice calls or any other medium between the customers and the company. It can be a record concept, notification, it can be a reminder, it can be a missed call service, whatever is the communication between the customer and the company, or between the employees like if it’s between the internal employees and departments, across locations, if there’s a communication tool between them so that the operations are streamlined. Where communications are the focus, or anything related to communication, business and employees, we are the one stop shop for them.
Among all your products, which is the most loved one by your customers? I would say grptalk to start with for sure because it has been here for some time and the value addition is standing out in terms of the competition and there is no clear leader in this space for some time. Ahead of the general assembly elections happened recently, communications technology has played a crucial role in enabling seamless communication between the political parties, its workers, volunteers, and prospect voters. Telebu has been working with different political parties to level the playing field by bringing communication technology in political campaigning.
Recently, Sachin Kalyanshetti, BJP MLA, (Solapur Constituency) and Solapur District President BJP faced some communication challenges with the party Cadre. He decided to use Telebu’s product grptalk, in the hopes to communicate with maximum people. And, Telebu’s grptalk app helped him address his party workers and volunteers for the Solapur Bike Rally. The campaign was initiated after National President’s instructions to all BJP states offices. With grptalk, Kalyanshetti was able to connect with more than 3,200 people on a single conference call and address all members about the upcoming bike rally in Solapur.
How does it simplify all the conferencing process? Let’s say there are 10 people joining the call, so apart from them
joining the call it saves the time of those 10 people who have joined. If it’s just 10 people it’s easy to understand, but what if there are a hundred people cross the same time structure? Dialling to a bridge takes a lot more than 10 minutes. As the number of participants increases, the zonal officer has to inform all the branch heads about the call and for everyone to join in at the same time stamp it gets difficult.
For Example, Syndicate Bank is a great example, they started with different zones and now across India, they are using grptalk for their internal communication. Another example would be political parties and the government. The number of people varies from 3,000 people to 15,000 people. So, if somebody gets a call it’s a huge decision and overall the context gets side-lined. So, the value adds here.
As platforms like Facebook, Whatsapp also provides group chat options, how grptalk is different from them? So, when I say grptalk as a product, you know it’s an app. The communication today has two administrators. So the other person should be reachable. If I’m using an app, let’s say Whatsapp. So, everyone should be available on Whatsapp and it is dependent on whether all of the people are on the Internet or not and they should be available all the time. But our module, we reach them through their numbers wherever they are. The participant does not need any other part or education on how to be a part of the conference. Only as a moderator I need the app, with input of all the previous numbers the ones that I talk to. All the recipients receiving the call don’t need any extra app. The whole audio-conferencing methodology was there for a long time and nobody looked at it again. So, if you just want to call a single person, you just open your phone you call that person and talk to them. You don’t need to fix a time to call and say that I will call you at 4 p.m. So here I know all the people I want to talk to whether it is 200 people or 400 people or 500 www.mymobileindia.com people. I just select their numbers and dial on them. The moment I schedule the call that person will get a message that you will get a call at 5 p.m. on this topic and be prepared for it on your own terms. Then they simply have to answer the call and join the conference. In that way, it is very different from all the modes of communication you’re referring to either Whatsapp or Facebook.
What is your business model and how will you generate revenue from this? It depends from product to product, like if we consider group talk, if 10 people talk for 10 minutes those are 100 minutes and they have to pay per minute. We also have an unlimited plan in which you have to pay 10,000 and you can talk to 10 people unlimited throughout the month. So when it comes to chatting, it comes to the number of engagements you are able to celebrate. So’ we try to understand the scope of the product and the competition within the market and try to accordingly to our business and create our plans. In terms of reaching to the customer, because everything was kept online, we try to generate leads online.
Most of our products are engaging. You come to our website, you register, you try our product and you start using. But people try to negotiate, they come to us they tell us that I’m trying to use this product, can you give me a better cost? In India, people prefer face to face so we have many offices in different parts of the country.
What is the company’s year-on -year profit growth? So, in the last three years we’ve grown year-on-year 30 percent but this year we want to break that and looking to take this to a whole 100 percent growth. Since we are adding the number of products to the company and the expanding the geographical reach, we believe to achieve that.
What about the expansion plan of your company? We’ve chalked out a detailed plan for expansion both nationally and internationally. One of our goals is to expand further into governance. We see great value in our services, and this is a sentiment that is reflected by the government bodies that we assist in their operations and functioning. We are in the rapid expansion mode right now. In terms of a start-up we are in the scale-up mode right now, both in terms of the product and in terms of the market we are looking at expansion right now. Now we are working on a video conferencing application where the team is working on it and the early beta stage is already there. It’s like an internal communication tool similar to Whatsapp.
In terms of expansion some major countries we are there in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and were also looking at Southeast Asia right now. We are also launching grptalk in Indonesia, early next month. ■