Infobip has concluded a partnership, under its recently-launched Partner Connect Programme, with Praekelt Consulting.
Praekelt designs and builds human-centred digital interfaces that leverage technology to transform businesses. The company delivers products that aim to reach everyone in Africa and push the boundaries of digital user experience. Its clients include some leading South African brands in the telecoms, media and health and beauty industries.
Under the partnership, Infobip supplied a WhatsApp Business Application Programming Interface (API) channel to Praekelt, which needed a WhatsApp aggregator solution to allow some of its customers to utilise the chat app for customer interactions.
Dawood Patel, MD of Praekelt Consulting, says Infobip’s WhatsApp API solution was rolled out across a number of its customers, who have identified the channel as a popular platform for their end user engagement strategies.
“We are seeing more and more end users moving to digital channels and for us, in terms of conversational platforms, WhatsApp is the leader. It’s ubiquitous and the end users are already there, so taking WhatsApp and linking it to a customer’s use case was a no-brainer. It’s an obvious choice from a conversation perspective and from a user engagement perspective.”
Shaun van Rooyen, strategic accounts and partnerships manager for Africa at Infobip, says the collaboration with Praekelt is particularly meaningful as it was the first partner that Infobip onboarded to its Partner Connect Programme since the initiative was launched in January, in South Africa. The partnership was officially concluded three months ago, but the two companies have been working together for about 18 months.
“This is a special relationship for us, as Praekelt is our first partner. All of our framework that we’ve built up is largely due to their contribution in the early stages of our Partner Connect Programme.
“Praekelt’s team is so far ahead of everyone else and they were the first to approach us and consider a partnership to deliver our communications platform and consumer APIs into their services.”
Patel explains that there were two main drivers behind Praekelt’s decision to partner with Infobip: Firstly, Infobip is one of few official aggregators for WhatsApp in South Africa, which means that Praekelt can count on local support for its platform. Secondly, Infobip has devised a brilliant commercial model to suit the local market.
Praekelt also expects to collaborate with Infobip on the introduction of other communication channels in future, but this will be driven by customer demand.
“We want our customers to ‘meet’ their users on their preferred communication channel and in their preferred language, rather than forcing them to use a specific one. Infobip and their ability to help us deliver on our multichannel, multilingual offering, will give us that leverage, so when the customer journey moves, we’ll move with it,” Patel adds.