Pindrop Commercial Product Manager Corrie Lotter.

Infobip, a global cloud communications company that enables businesses to build connected customer experiences across all stages of the customer journey at scale, has implemented a WhatsApp Business API solution for Pindrop. Pindrop is a leading South African telecoms solutions provider or “connectivity matchmaker”, that uses geo-location technology to allow customers to compare connectivity providers.

According to Pindrop Commercial Product Manager Corrie Lotter, the company has developed a unique platform on which it integrates all of the country’s telecoms carriers, wholesalers and service providers into a single interface.

“The platform allows our customers to search for and compare telecoms services and prices within seconds. It has changed the scope of how connectivity choices are made in both South Africa and the greater Africa region,” says Lotter.

“You could say that we are an enabler that sits between large network providers and the customer base. Here we assist with the workflow and sales interaction between the customer and the network provider.”

Driven by pandemic

Andre Joubert, Senior Sales Manager at Infobip South Africa, says that the partnership with Pindrop using its WhatsApp API solution, is underpinned by the digital transformation strategies organisations had to adopt due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“A lot of organisations required and still require some of their staff to be home-based, with no certainty of the connectivity of the employee’s homes. While organisations were willing to subsidise connectivity for staff, they needed to understand the connectivity available. Pindrop saw this as an opportunity to use a frequently used platform like WhatsApp to make this process a lot easier for organisations.”

Staff can now interrogate the Pindrop systems and report on the connectivity options available to them at their locations. This engagement can be managed centrally.

The decision for Pindrop to choose Infobip as its solutions provider was simple, as market research revealed Infobip as the common denominator for providing the best experiences in terms of WhatsApp Business API implementation.

Infobip provided ample consulting and guidance to deploy a WhatsApp Business solution with access to its API features and database functionalities.

Almost simplistic

Pindrop expects to onboard a significant number of carriers, wholesalers, and service providers, which will see an estimated engagement with around 200 000 end users in the first month.

“It is an easily accessible and simple to use service. We have a massive platform and system in place to ensure that customers can search for telecoms services in seconds. In this day and age, it is important that any engagement with customers happens in real time,” says Lotter.

While Pindrop initially looked at building mobile apps, it decided to implement a WhatsApp channel, which is the most popular app in South Africa to make the customer experience as easy as possible.

“We need to meet our customers on the channels they are comfortable with, that they trust and are already familiar with. Talking to large network providers can be cumbersome, so we’ve simplified it into a few conversational messages that anyone can engage with and get a response to in seconds,” Lotter concludes.