the new hr

STARTUP
We provided AAP with Initial journey
the tools to spread the In 2009 while I was pursuing MBA
in the US, the developed market
word through a massive was going through a massive
phone campaign,
recession fuelled by the mortgage
reaching out to more crisis. The GDPs of developed
markets was around 0-1% while
than 12 lakh voters in a
emerging markets were growing at
span of two months. 8-9%. Telecom in India at that time
had an unprecedented growth rate
of 100%—consumers in emerging
markets including India, South
East Asia, the Middle East, and Africa were buying
mobile phones. This planted a thought in my mind
that if consumers are buying mobile phones, then
they would eventually use it to call businesses,
creating a need for comapnies to have more than a
mobile phone to handle the plethora of calls. They
would need a system which could be integrated
with their phone number and would help answer,
route, and record calls, and push call details to
customer relationship management (CRM) teams.
This was the insight which pushed us to start
Knowlarity. India is my home country and a large
market, and hence looked like the right place to
start the company. We started catering to small
businesses as well as large enterprises, and since
then the business has really taken off.
Political and social campaigns helped
gain a foothold
Our first break came when Odisha Chief Minister
Naveen Patnaik used Knowlarity’s Enterprise
Telephony for his campaigns and promotions.
We earned about a crore for calling up 70 lakh
people in Odisha, asking them to vote for Patnaik.
And that is how we got our seed money for
Knowlarity Communications.
Recollecting those days, I believe it is always
better to work with an industry that is growing
because it gives you a lot of opportunities to move
up the ladder, even when you are at your worst. The
objective is to keep looking for that one idea which
would lift the business—to use creativity as much
as one can to improvise and find a fighting chance.
We reached the next milestone in our journey
during the Delhi elections. Because the target
segment was the common man, Aam Aadmi
Party (AAP) used a medium that could connect
users across the digital divide—the phone, and
Knowlarity was the platform they used to make this
connect. We provided AAP with the tools to spread
the word through a massive phone campaign,
reaching out to more than 12 lakh voters in a span
of two months. A toll-free number provided by us
was circulated through social media and elsewhere.
Influencers called on the toll-free number to
listen to the party’s manifesto, get the facts and
to know how to participate in the campaign. The
next time they called, they spoke to a tracker who
verified that the influencer was not an imposter.
Once the tracker gave his go-ahead through an
Integrated Voice Recording (IVR) system, the
influencer was free to call on the toll-free number
to speak to a voter. How did that happen? When
an influencer called on the toll-free number, the
system made another call to someone from its
database of 12 lakh numbers. The two calls were
patched and the influencer talked about why
s/he believed in Arvind Kejriwal’s leadership. The
campaign took off and we found one influencer
had spoken to almost 2900 voters. At its peak,
more than 250 calls were made simultaneously on
the toll-free number. This highly scalable system
was built by Knowlarity’s internal team to AAP’s
specification, using our platform, Knowlus.
During this year’s Kumbh Mela, we facilitated
a helpline through our flagship product,
SuperReceptionist, a virtual IVR solution,
through which visitors can instantly connect and
search for various facilities such as emergency
services, hospitals, chemists, hotels, and also seek
information on the mela timings, routes, and
important rituals like shahi snana.
Overcoming roadblocks
Initially, the biggest problem we faced was
paucity of funds. Investor confidence was at an
all-time low, markets were depressed, customer
acquisition was difficult, and we had to struggle
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