A typical campaign planning process starts by hosting strategy meetings and after many deliberations, a plan of action comes to life. Now, the focus shifts to member registration drives, a game of musical chairs amongst candidates for each constituency, voter outreach and identification, voter education, large scale rallies, manifesto finalisation, and the last leg of campaigning involves personalised speeches, given out by top faces of the said political party.
Telebu is a Communications as a Service company that offers configurable solutions to political parties to amplify their reach, campaign in remote areas, and have a two-way dialogue with their party members and voters alike.
In conversation with Medianews4u, Nisha Parikh, VP, HR & Marketing- Telebu Communications spoke about Telebu’s product portfolios, how they are helping the political parties in enhancing the poll campaigns, marketing strategies and more
Speaking about Telebu’s all-inclusive communication services for political parties, Nisha said, “Our unique solution is a mix of products and services. Telebu offers Text Messaging, WhatsApp Broadcasts, an Audio Conferencing Solution, a grievance redressal system, missed call services, a virtual assistant, and a video conferencing platform that enables social media broadcasting & more.”
Each political party uses their product suite differently. The Telebu product suite enables political parties to connect to more than 50,000+ people on a single call simultaneously. The ability to communicate at scale allows party workers to coordinate, discuss and strategise in real-time. Political parties host virtual rallies and conduct polls to identify and nominate suitable candidates from each constituency.
Missed Call Services double up to drive member registration campaigns, help in voter identification, help identify burning issues, and gather support for election manifestos.
Broadcast campaigns via Text, WhatsApp or Voice are used to remind the public to vote, deliver personalised messages from leaders. Their IVRs offerings are used as grievance redressal systems to have an open dialogue with the masses, and insights from the same are used to tailor personalised communications to each segment, geography and demographic via Voice or Video.
How Telebu is helping the political parties to amplify the campaigns
Nisha further elaborated on how Political parties in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam, and Puducherry use Telebu’s solutions for the election campaigns.
Sharing their election manifesto
By hosting a conference call with their potential voters; Political parties can share their election manifesto. Having a two-way conversation with constituents whilst sharing their candidacy intentions allowed them to have a constructive dialogue with the public.
Election Campaigning: Send Invitation to Virtual Rallies
The voice message (pre-recorded) feature allows political parties to send out virtual invitations to rallies hosted on the web. By doing this, they were also able to convey general information regarding the talking points.
Improving rally participation
Since they could reach many audience members by sending out voice message-based virtual rally invites, rally participation numbers increased.
Driving Voter Registration
By being in direct touch with their constituents and answering questions, they could drive voter registration. Thus, the chances of having a voter choose their candidacy significantly increased.
Connect with Party Workers at Scale
Connecting with other members and workers of their party became more accessible because of grptalk. Pertinent discussions that required a large number of people’s inputs get hosted on grptalk.
Getting public opinion on the pressing issues that mattered
Since there was a direct connection with potential voters and candidates, gathering ideas about pressing issues became easier. Running polls and surveys on the platform helps them stay connected with the ground realities and effectively address the most critical problems in the voter’s eyes.
Voter Identification:
Most political parties have large databases with them. The problem is that these databases are outdated. We help them clean up their databases, trigger messaging on the contact information shared (as per TRAI & Data Privacy) regulations, and verify voters.
Elaborating on their product portfolio, Nisha said, “Our Vision is to be the first CaaS (Communication as a Service) company that solves for both enterprise & customer communication. We flagged off our journey in the enterprise communication space with our foray into Audio Conferencing with grptalk. grptalk is a cutting-edge audio conferencing app that allows 3-10,000+ people in <30 seconds.“
After tasting success with grptalk, the company developed Telebu Hub that acts as A Virtual Cloud Office with a built-in CRM that serves as your customer communication hub. To take it one step further – they added AI-powered bots to Telebu Hub’s infrastructure named Telebu Pop. With Telebu Pop, use live chat & create bot flows to automate responses, offer support, and qualify leads on the websites or App.
“Then came Telebu Join. A cloud video meeting platform lets you connect, discuss & build relationships from anywhere, on the go. The fundamental value proposition we are looking to add to Telebu Join are- Video Communication at Scale, Host Virtual Events, Generate Leads, Maximise Reach via Social. Next in line is Telebu Ping. Our first big step into UCaaS space. With Telebu Ping, you get An End to End encrypted organisational chat platform that keeps your conversations private & lets you connect via Voice or Video over VoIP,” said Nisha.
She continued, “Telebu Blocks – Our foray into CPaaS space. With Telebu Blocks, build what you want & never build from scratch. We offer APIs, SDKs & Prebuilt solutions that you can configure, test & iterate. We offer Text Messaging, RCS, & WhatsApp solutions to more than 1 million registered users in over 200 countries via Web, SMS Gateway & API solutions.”
Speaking about Telebu’s marketing strategies and plans, Nisha said,” Telebu has a unique strategy. We do not cater to a single market but multiple markets simultaneously. These can broadly be called the Team Communication, Team Collaboration, and Customer Communication markets. Put together, the size of these markets will reach $150 billion by 2024. The COVID-19 pandemic has created another segment called the “work from home or Virtual Office segment”. Over the next five years, we at Telebu are looking to capture ten per cent of this soon to be $350 million markets.”
“From a long term perspective, we would like to challenge the industry leaders like RingCentral, 8 by 8, Microsoft, and Google to become the preferred UCaaS solution providers amongst Enterprise, SMEs, MSMEs & Startups,” she added.
Telebu look forward to venturing into the newer market segments – CRM, Marketing Automation, ERP, Business Analytics & Reporting etc
“As an organisation, we take pride in the fact that our products are 100% Made In India. We hope to continue pushing boundaries and help startups, SMEs, enterprises, and government organisations truly embrace technology and complete their digital transformations,” said Nisha.
Speaking on their hopes and plans for 2021, Nisha said, “This year is not just about growth. It’s about the impact we make. We want to enable large scale communication for our government and tackle the challenges in healthcare, education, and technology via our solutions. We want to help businesses in the BFSI space to complete their KYC online. We want to protect privacy, offer security, and allow enterprises to scale without fear. We want to help organisations connect to thousands & improve connectivity in remote areas. We want to empower SMEs with solutions that will help them grow faster without investing in infrastructure & are easily deployable.”
“For FY 2021 – 22, we are looking to add a whole new set of customers from various industries, breakthrough into unique markets like Srilanka, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia & Indonesia. And set up our operations in untapped markets like – Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, Sudan, Morocco in Eastern Africa. At the same time, continue to build on our existing markets, namely Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait etc., in the GCC region,” Nisha concluded.