Gupshup Looks To Automation To Remove The Mess From Messaging

For most consumers, a simple scroll through recent texts will reveal just how active and enthusiastic businesses have become in using messaging platforms to communicate with customers.

The paradox of this shift is that the more crowded the medium becomes and the more cluttered our respective inboxes get, the greater the need for companies such as Gupshup to step in with a fresh dose of automation – only this time, it’ll be on the consumer side.

Gupshup CEO Beerud Sheth told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that his company is focused on “removing the mess from messaging” by letting people know what they need to know – but only when they need to know it.

It’s a capability that holds a lot of promise as messaging is fast becoming the most popular way for brands to communicate. Gupshup just raised $240 million in funding in July, bringing its valuation to $1.4 billion. It now has a multitude of customers on its books, spanning financial services, retail, consumer goods, hospitality and more.

Read More: B2C Text Messaging Company Gupshup Lands Further $240M

Sheth said that Gupshup’s customers have turned to messaging because it’s the simplest way to reach out to people on their smartphones, and is far easier than building a new app, for example.

“The app ecosystem only works for like the top 100 businesses, right?” he said. “Developing an app and getting it adopted, that’s tough. Even though there are millions of apps, most of us use no more than a dozen.”

Messaging, on the other hand, is open to every kind of business, from the biggest brands all the way down to small restaurants and even local grocery stores.

“The best evidence of this is WeChat in China. Now, you see everyone just builds these mini programs for WeChat and you interact with a brand while you’re there, but when you’re done, you just move on,” he explained. “So you just need one super app, and outside of China it’s going to be the same. Because no matter how big the brand is, it’s hard for them to get you to download an app. Messaging is much easier.”

Good Things Come in Small Messages

Another key advantage of messaging is that it allows brands to keep things short and sweet. Sheth observed that people want interactions to be quick and simple, and want to be able to learn what they need to know or get a response in a few seconds and then move on.

You might also like: Attentive Acquires Conversational B2C Text Messaging Firm Tone

“The whole world is suffering from this global attention deficit disorder,” Sheth pointed out. “Everything is moving from long-form to short-form. If you sent a message to your friend in the old days, it was a long email, right? But now it’s just a one-line message. And brands are getting into the same thing, too, because they know we’re all doing so many things, and there’s only so much attention we can give.”

So messaging makes sense, mostly because it feels right. “If you receive a one-line email, it sort of feels very odd,” Sheth said. “But a one-line text message is expected, so it fits.”

But even though brands may keep their messages short, Webster pointed out that as they become more common, so will the problem of spam and inbox clutter. That could lead to a lot of frustrated consumers who may simply choose to ignore those messages. To prevent those headaches from arising, Gupshup is looking to automation to come and save the day.

Separating the Meat from the Spam

Sheth said that at the heart of it, clutter is really just a problem of mismatched expectations. One person’s deal is another person’s spam. The key is knowing what to alert users about, and when to alert them. And that’s where virtual assistants will come in and prove their worth.

See More: Contextual Commerce Expands Beyond Social Media

“If you’re walking in the mall, that’s when you really do want to know about all the deals available, the free pizza or whatever it is,” he said. “But you don’t want to know that in the middle of a meeting. Then, it’s like, wait a minute, this is really annoying.”

So it’s really just a matter of context, Sheth said. In that case, the obvious solution is an intelligent assistant who knows who you are, where you are and where your interests lie.

“If you can put something in there that can intercept these things, something that knows you, then it can send the information intelligently at the right time, and suddenly it’s not that annoying anymore,” he noted.