On August 1, Airtel launched a self-serve marketing platform called Airtel IQ Reach which allows businesses to send personalized messages to specific customer segments. The company says that the platform offers real-time insights and comprehensive analytics on a centralized dashboard for businesses to check the effectiveness of the marketing campaign. According to the press release for Airtel IQ (as reviewed by MediaNama), the platform is currently active for sending marketing messages over WhatsApp and the company says that it will roll out the platform’s services over SMS, voice, and other channels shortly. What does this platform offer: Simply put, this platform allows companies to send people promotional/transactional messages over WhatsApp, voice calling, and SMS. Airtel says that it is “the first telecom company in the world that serves as a Business Service Provider (BSP, these are companies that aid the operations of other businesses) for WhatsApp. Based on its website, it also provides other services such as call masking (hiding the phone numbers of the business/customer from each other) and WhatsApp chatbots that can be used by companies for providing services like customer support. The choice of WhatsApp as the starting point for Airtel IQ: Bulk messaging (made up of marketing and transactional messages) is the mainstay of the telecom business. However, when WhatsApp introduced the same service in 2016, it effectively created a new way for companies to engage with their customers. Besides the bulk messaging aspect, other services such as calling and messaging offered by the platform also…
