Our CEO, Devashish Mamgainspoke to Siftery, a product discovery platform in an exclusive interview. The following are excerpts from that conversation.
Applozic is a real time chat & messaging SDK for your mobile and web apps. Integrate with its SDK to engage your users with image, file, location sharing and audio/video conversations. The native SDKs and UI Kits are available on Github so developers have the freedom to custom build messaging just the way they want. Comes with a ton of features.
With Applozic, you can enable your application users with Whatsapp like in-app rich messaging and topic/context based chat, push notifications, cross application communication and message broadcast for business. Think about any type of conversation (1 to 1, 1 to many, closed group, open channel, context based chat, application to users messaging). It even has SMS/Email as fall back for offline conversations.
Can you tell us about what you are working on? What is Applozic?
Devashish: Applozic offers a complete end to end communication platform (native SDKs and Backend) so you can quickly enable cross platform real time messaging on your mobile and web apps. The SDK and UI kits are open sourced so developers have the freedom to build custom messaging for their businesses quickly.
Why are you building this? What problem are you trying to solve?
Devashish: IP Messaging is the need of the hour for most app businesses since it not only increases User engagement and Loyalty but also addresses the need for “Context” based Application to Person communication. This being said, developers, these days tend to outsource their non-core functions to third party service providers to focus on their core product. This is evident from Google building Google Maps to simplify navigation, Stripe and PayPal simplifying Payments — which made us realize that Messaging can be simplified in a similar way and thus we built Applozic.
How are you different from what’s existing in the market right now? What’s unique about what you are building and why should your end customers use your product?
Devashish: Unlike traditional Customer Support/Live Chat software, Applozic offers a broad communication platform that offers businesses to build anything they want around messaging, if already not offered. Applozic is your boutique messaging solution. We offer a host of features like:
One-to-one/Group Chat
In-App Messaging/Push notifications that supports Rich Media for Advertisements and Context Based A2P messages.
Bot-Human Integration for process automation via Chat
As we operate in a very niche segment, most of our offerings are unique. There still exists competition and absolutely unique platform capabilities like:
Cross App Chat: To connect users on separate apps into a single communication platform,
SMS/Email Fallback to notify offline users, gives us competitive advantage.
Who are your customers & who are you selling to in a company?
Devashish: It has been more than a year now that we made our platform available to the public and we already have 100+ businesses using our SDKs. Being a White-Label solution, we can’t publicly name all our Customers, but any business that sees a scope of Use-to-User interaction, be it of any type can use Applozic.
We have so far seen Use Cases from multiple industries — Online Marketplaces, Social & Dating, Gaming, Classifieds Portals, On Demand Services and Ed-Tech being a notable few. Ours being a SDK that can be used as a Plug and Play Messaging toolkit, we basically focus on CTOs, Product Managers and developers while selling our product.
MagicBricks, one of our early adopter for their consumer app, has expanded their usage on several other verticals. Other notable customers would be Car Trade — an online portal for buying and selling Cars, Waseet — a leading Classifieds portal of the Gulf & The 8Apps which is a Social Networking platform.
When you started doing sales, was there a segment or industry that you went after? If so, what was the reason?
Devashish: We started with Online Marketplaces that sees different types of users. Marketplaces brings the service/product buyers and sellers together and there was no promising option to allow these two types of uses to interact with each other in real time.
How do customers use your product?
Devashish: Our platform being completely customizable, have been put to use in many different ways specifically based on the industry the customer is from. It has been mainly used for User to User and Business to User communication and more recently is being used for Bot Human interaction as well.
What are some unique cases that your customers have used Applozic for?
Devashish: We have seen many Use Cases and sometimes we are taken by surprise too. A typical Use Case quite prevalent is that of Customers from Online Marketplaces. They basically use Applozic for different types of users on their platform — Buyer to Seller, Lawyer to Client, Teacher to Student and particularly exploit the feature of Context-Based Chat, which allows the same set of users to chat about different contexts on separate chat windows.
Another widely used feature is “Cross app chat”, that allows users from two different apps to chat on a single communication channel, for e.g. any company with separate app for dealers and buyers can connect both parties on a single chat platform. Another recently trending Use Case is that of “Bot + Human” interaction, where Users can chat with Company’s bots, where User inputs will trigger an API call to the Bot through our Chat platform and the response will be populated on the chat screen in real-time.
Early on, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced like while building the product and how did you solve them?
Devashish: Applozic is a custom Messaging platform, which means our platform can be exploited in multiple ways, as best suited for the customer’s business. Hence the initial problem that we faced was informing the market about our platform capabilities and how they are not confined to specific Use Cases, and can be customized to suit the needs of Businesses of all types.
Another challenge that we faced initially was addressing the Build vs Buy dilemma faced by Customers. Therefore we gave enough value both qualitatively and monetarily to customers so that they see advantages in integrating with us. Thankfully, the scenario has changed now and customers are more open about outsourcing their non-core activities.
What are the top 5–10 tools that you depend on the most to run Applozic & how do you use it?
Devashish: We use MailChimp for email newsletters. Our newsletter has 5K+ subscribers and are mostly developers and product owners. MailChimp’s easy drag and drop designer helps us big time to create campaigns quickly. We use PersistIQ, particularly for outbound reach outs. Our sales team just loves it as it offers email cadence and trigger points to bring smartness into email automation.
Google Analytics helps us understand what happened when we did a particular campaign, did that result in good traffic or not. So it helps us optimize our campaigns better. Calendly has been very helpful in scheduling organic meetings. We have about 80% meetings scheduled on Calendly.
We use Amazon services since the time we started building Applozic. Our backend is on AWS and has been amazing with 99.99% availability, just as they promised. This is crucial for us as we are communication platform as service and it cannot take rest anytime.We have built our messaging around MQTT as its the “lightweight” messaging protocol and consumes very less of device batteries. SumoMe brings a good amount of intelligence when it comes to users behavior on our website. Heatmap in particular helps us understand the big deal of what needs to be taken care of.
Please note: This was originally published on Sifery’sblog. Our product is trending on it currently as a number of our customers recommended us, in case you have missed out, do it now!
On-Demand Marketplaces are synonymous to spontaneity and responsiveness. Here users are accustomed to transactions taking place at the push of a button, hence their engagement level is always on a tumultuous slope. A slight nudge and they most certainly would go down that slope, only to be lapped up by one of your competitors.
Consider your own case for instance. What happens when you turn on your taxi app and see a 10 mins ETA? You turn to its competitor. This is why On-Demand Marketplaces need to reduce the friction between users and suppliers. The key to this is to keep the user engaged by means of an ongoing conversation throughout the purchase journey.
Having powered In-app Communication across hundreds of On-Demand & Marketplaces applications, we realized that leveraging the transformative power of Messaging Technology is a key to success here. In-app communication drives Marketplaces to Attract Users, Build Trust and Deliver Exceptional Service, ensuring spontaneity at all steps.
We have powered Messaging across many On-Demand and Marketplaces applications, and have hence witnessed numerous Use Cases that they have benefited from immensely. In this blogpost, we will highlight the Top 8 Use Cases and the benefits thereof for each.
Customer Support:
The two most important priorities for a consumer, while seeking support are getting through to an agent quickly and the speed with which the issue is resolved. For both these reasons, In-app Chat is the preferred mode for your customers since Chat as a communication channel is less time-consuming and more convenient. A recent survey conducted by analyst firm Ovum clearly demonstrates that 44% consumers consider Messaging as a less time-consuming alternative to others for Customer Support.
Order Tracking:
The digital natives today thrive on everything real-time. Timely updates on order status hence keeps the user engaged to your application. Keeping the user in the loop also plays a major role in improving the User Experience, as the user being aware of the status never feels neglected at any point. The same survey mentioned above, suggests that 48% of consumers are interested in Messaging for Order Tracking.
Collecting Feedback:
Customer Feedbacks are a great way to measure how you are faring. It also goes a long way into uncovering areas of concern, into understanding customer sentiments and ultimately chalking out the product roadmap. In-app Chat Survey widgets to collect Service Feedbacks or the Net Promoter Score makes it convenient for customers to put up quick responses, thereby increasing survey response rates.
Buyer – Seller Chat:
This is more relevant for Online Marketplaces which offers Listing and Directory Services. A seller makes a listing here expecting more leads and faster conversion rates. A typical buyer is more likely to chat with the seller before making a purchase decision. The number of chats initiated hence acts as a counter for the number of leads generated. Typically if an inquiry is answered within 5 minutes, the probability of conversion is 100 times higher. Therefore Chat being a quicker and non-intrusive alternative to phone calls and emails, gives a higher probability of conversion. A win-win for all 3 stakeholders. Seller gets more Leads with faster conversion rates, a Buyer gets the convenience of real-time messaging making the purchase process seamless and the directory service provider gains more engagement due to operational efficiency.
Bot based Concierge:
Conversational Commerce has taken the world by storm. Today there is a bot for almost everything that you can think of. Buyers on your application can quite naturally prefer to ask a bot to make a personalized recommendation over manually browsing through hundreds of product catalogs. By deep-linking the Checkout Page with the CTA in each product card, the overall purchase process becomes faster and convenient. Its personal shopping as easy as texting.
Modifying/Cancelling Order:
Imagine, you have placed an order for a Pizza but forgot to add your favorite fries. The moment you realize, you make a call to the support agent to make the modifications, but alas you are put on wait. By the time you reach the agent, your order is already out for delivery and making modifications is not possible anymore. Not a good experience right?
A simple guided user flow by means of In-app Chat and Messaging can make the overall process of making modifications to an existing order much more efficient and seamless. We have witnessed use cases where both Bot agents and Human agents have handled order modification requests and also cases where a combination of the two is used.
Broadcast In-app Offers:
In-app Message Broadcasts unlike SMS broadcasts makes use of the opportune moment, when the customer is actively engaged with the app to announce giveaways and offers. Hence the CTR of In-app broadcasts is higher than SMS broadcasts.
Social Commerce:
Data is the new oil, and companies across all domains are leveraging data to make better business decisions. Now, imagine the plethora of data you are losing when users of your application talk about products available on your platform on say WhatsApp. Wouldn’t it be great if all that conversation could take place within your application? A typical example: A group of colleagues chatting amongst themselves to decide what to order for lunch. With all the data about specific user interests that you can collect from these conversations, making customized offers would become easy. Also it is a proven fact that conversations build engagement. The more people talk, the more likely are they to purchase.
eCommerce and mobile commerce has changed the way we shop. Whether you are a veteran ecommerce marketer or an amateur one you might have wondered, why some portals have been super successful while some have shut down in months. A good way to understand and learn what to do and what not to is by following some experts in this domain and get their wonderful insights.
Since Applozic is tailored for eCommerce portals, it is important for us to be abreast with the latest developments in this domain. Below is the list of blogs (in no particular order) which we follow for this purpose, and since Sharing is Caring we thought it would be best to put it up for you.
It is the blog which you must follow for all latest eCommerce tips and news. It covers a wide variety of subject such as user experience, marketing strategy and conversion rate optimization. It has a global following with more than 17K followers on its RSS feed. One of its latest articles speaks about ways of increasing sales and engagement rate (which we loved, check out for sure). It is a blog penned down by Harry Chemko (@hchemko), digital strategist known for his ROI centric works.
It is a blog published by Richard Lazazzer (@RichardABLS). He is known for sharing real life experiences of creating an effective digital business. He provides a holistic overview of the industry by covering a large number of subjects such as what eCommerce frameworks you should choose, when and how you should focus on SEO, etc. With an average monthly visitor of 285K and 38k+ subscribers he is a blogger you should never miss out.
This is a portal which you should use to understand the do’s and dont’s of search marketing. The blog lists a number of ways on how to focus on CRO based tools and how to use them for effective results. The best part of the blog is its unique way of creating content keeping in mind that it is interesting for both veterans and beginners. The author of the blog is Hamlet Batista (@hamletbatista), CEO of Hamlet Batista Group LLC.
We generally focus only on ways to improve our sales and customer engagement but this is a website which can help you think beyond it. Merchact is a portal which can help you prepare for mitigating risks and frauds in your payment procedure and assure you to be scam proof. The blog is an attempt to educate eCommerece enterepreneurs on ways to reduce credit card chargeback’s, international payment methods etc. One of its key writer is Patrcia Carlin (@Sheispayments), who is known to help eCommerce portals across the globe.
Volusion is an organization which has been designed for helping every beginner and eCommerce enthusiast in the field of execution and planning. It was started in late 90s and since then has helped a number of entrepreneurs globally. You must follow its blog to learn on how to sell on platforms like Instagram and Facebook or to learn about some interesting tools for creating unique designs and user experience all together. It was started by Kevin Sproles (@kevinsproles) in 1999 and since then it created a good number of loyal followers. We recommend bookmarking it right away!
It is a blog published by Ian Cleary (@IanCleary) with a clear focus on sharing strategies for effective social media use. Ian is known to some great growth hacks and tools which can help any eCommerce business to use social media effectively. We found a unique aspect to the blog which is the tips and tricks shared by him on how to create a synergy between social media and new age marketing techniques like influencer marketing, marketing automation.
This is a blog which has a growth story worth knowing. It was started as a personal blog by Brian Rice (@briansrice) and today has more than 15,000 contributors. It has now become a platform to know about all the aspects of running an eCommerce business. It has quite a number of interesting takes on strategy building which can really be helpful if you have just started your business. Today, it has been qualified a must follow blog due to its versatile and diverse subject areas.
If you are struggling with landing pages this can be a portal which should follow. It has number of writers but a good one to follow is Fahad Muhammad (@MuhammadFahd7). He is an expert in creating the best landing pages. The blog has articles from end to end management of a landing page. Fahad is known to do a comprehensive analysis of more than 100 best landing pages every year and share his insights. You can also check out this portal on future of media and trends to plan your future objectives.
Roger Dooley (@rogerdooley) is known worldwide for explaining ways of neuromarketing and how it can be used in the eCommerce industry. In his blog he shares unique insights on gender intelligence and how to target users if your website is not that great. He has some great podcasts on building effective teams and mental preparation which you should try for sure. His ideas are little different from rest of the digital gurus.
It is a blog started by Andrew Youderian (@youderian), a successful entrepreneur who reached 1 million dollar profit in a short time. In his blog he shares relevant tips and lessons he has learned from his own experiences. With this blog he has created a close community so that he is able to reach out to only those users who are like him and will benefit a lot from his expertise. In order to join the community, one is expected to take membership $49 per month but before that you need to build a successful eCommerce venture. A challenge which you must accept!
Andrew Youderian
eCommerce marketing changes every day and following thought leaders can help you stay ahead. We believe that the future of Commerce is Conversation and at Applozic we have innovative Messaging solutions for specific eCommerce Use Cases.
Let us know if we missed out on your favorite blog, by dropping your comments below.
