Himanshu Gupta, CoFounder at QuickReply

Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?

Himanshu Gupta : In 2018, we started IntelliTicks, which is a sector-agnostic Conversational AI Platform. Like, most of our competitors, we were operating as a white-glove service company - we were not only building and deploying chatbot solutions, but we're also managing them. This model requires a lot of manual work and scaling was tough. We were looking for ways to automate and make the process faster. At the same time, in 2020, Covid-19 came up. It affected us badly. We lost around 23% of customers related to the travel domain. However, at the same time, we started getting an inflow of inquiries from ecommerce merchants who wanted to automate their customer interactions. After talking to close to 30 such customers, we realized almost 80% of their requirements were similar. So, we can create a solution for one customer and then package and resell it to millions of ecommerce stores worldwide.

This was the Genesis of QuickReply.ai - A merchant just needs to do few clicks to get advanced AI assistants for their online store that can engage and help customers on their Website, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

Great Companies: What are the various product and services provided by QuickReply

Himanshu Gupta : QuickReply.ai is a plug-and-play conversational commerce platform that helps online merchants to automate their customer interactions on multiple channels such as the Website, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. You can think of it as a LiveChat + Chatbot platform that understands ecommerce. So, right from day 1, it can handle upto 70% of queries related to ecommerce. With QuickReply.ai you get

1. 40+ ecommerce trained bots

2. Omnichannel inbox of the customer interactions across Website, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp

3. Order and customer data pre-fetched right next to the customer query.

4. Canned Responses for quick replies

5. Easy-to-use Custom Bot Builder

6. Ready Integrations with popular ecommerce apps and tools.

For WhatsApp, we also provide a way to send alerts such as Abandoned Carts, Order Dispatch, Feedback, Back in Stock, repurchase, etc.

Great Companies: What makes QuickReply different from hundreds of other AI chatbot platforms?

Himanshu Gupta :

QuickReply.ai is custom made for Online Stores. It comes with 40+ pre-trained ecommerce assistants which can not only understand user query but can also resolve on its own. Other AI chatbot platforms provide you with tools to develop AI chatbots. However, QuickReply.ai provides you those AI chatbots readymade.

Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?

Himanshu Gupta: I think getting those first 20 customers happy is what we have been after. It's a product revamp for us from IntelliTicks to QuickReply.ai, so we are learning and reiterating our product to meet the customer needs. So, to balance between Product Development and Sales has been a challenge for us. We are bootstrapped with a team of 8. So, if we focus on one, the other one suffers. I hope in 3-4 months, once the product has shaped better, we will have more customers and more resources to allocate to both Product Development and Marketing.

Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What do 5 years down the line look like for QuickReply?

Himanshu Gupta: We are working hard to make QuickReply.ai A fully self-serve platform. Once, we have made the platform in a fully self-serve mode, it will be easier for us to onboard customers as compared to any of our competitors. Most of the merchants would be able to just quickly install, try and use the product - much like how everyone uses slack themselves. We believe in 5 years, we will become the Freshdesk or Intercom of Ecommerce World.

Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?

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Starting Marketing and Sales from day one, even if you have just a paper design.

- Himanshu Gupta

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