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 overlap with telecom companies, and as such, the latter have been urging the government to regulate WhatsApp.
In 2022, the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI, of which Airtel is a member) said that “regulation on communications OTTs, as well as OTTs consuming humongous bandwidth, is a necessity. There is a need to ensure a level-playing field among all technologies, i.e., same service, same rules with respect to OTT communication services so that a fair and healthy competition prevails in the industry.” With telecom companies like Airtel being critical of how apps like WhatsApp affect fair competition, it’s interesting to see them initiate Airtel IQ’s rollout on the platform.
Making the problem of spam bigger:
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has been trying to curb spam calls and messages for a long time. The authority has previously launched a do not disturb platform (for customers to opt out of receiving marketing calls and messages), and even released directions for telecom companies to deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) based spam detection systems. However, these efforts have been focused on curbing messages coming from unregistered senders of commercial messages and fail to take into account that no one really wants to receive promotional messages from companies and these are also equally spam-like in nature. With Airtel making it easier to send promotional messages, the spam issue is only going to get much worse.
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