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ShareChat is India’s largest native social media app. To compete with globally popular social media apps in the country, it relies on high-quality original and aggregated content. Its creator program is therefore critical to audience engagement and loyalty.
However, handling communication at that scale is a monumental undertaking. Agents were using their personal WhatsApp numbers to talk to creators via 1:1 and group chats without clear rules in place about what to say and how to say it.
ShareChat’s priorities were to develop a set of processes to standardize communication methods and messages. It also wanted to enable visibility into these conversations. Ideally, this could all be achieved with a single software or platform.
ShareChat subsidiary Moj was using respond.io for its Moj for Creators training program. ShareChat for Creators worked with a respond.io Customer Success Manager to tailor a set of business messaging solutions.
First, ShareChat for Creators decided to revamp its communication structure. Its key stakeholders are creators and aggregators who produce content in 15 languages across 9 genres, such as Entertainment, Sports, News, Humor and Lifestyle.
It created two Workspaces on respond.io to separate communication for original creators and content aggregators. It then established teams for each genre in every language. Now, 200 in-house agents handle original creators, while 30 agents from an external agency oversee aggregator communication, all on respond.io.
As the internal and external teams have autonomous Workspaces, they send any complex inquiries they receive on respond.io as notifications on Slack for full visibility, collaboration and alignment between both parties when necessary.
Agents were originally chatting with creators and aggregators via their personal WhatsApp numbers. However, the ShareChat for Creators program grew rapidly and soon there were over 200 agents’ phone numbers associated with the brand.
Managers had no insights into these interactions. Chat records locked in personal phones also made handovers impossible if agents were away or left the company.
ShareChat for Creators connected a WhatsApp API account to respond.io for multiuser access and onboarded all agents onto the platform. This gave the brand a single verified WhatsApp number for credibility. To standardize its messaging, it sends updates to creators via pre-approved WhatsApp Message Templates.
To encourage content creation on trending topics for higher engagement, ShareChat for Creators broadcasted daily creator campaigns via in-app messages on ShareChat. It also ran WhatsApp Groups to discuss these campaigns.
However, discussions frequently went off-topic and agents had to follow up with creators individually to address concerns they had.
Now, mass messaging happens solely via WhatsApp broadcasts. This allows ShareChat for Creators to communicate at scale while personalizing interactions and addressing individual concerns. It sends an average of 90,000 to 140,000 broadcast messages a day to audiences segmented by genre and language.
Data analytics offer insights into broadcast delivery times and errors, while Contact replies are easy to follow up on with respond.io’s Messages Module.
Agents used to manually answer frequently asked questions such as how to improve content views and engagement. Not only was this tedious, but it also took time away from more important work.
To minimize these repetitive tasks, ShareChat for Creators uses respond.io’s Workflows automation to automatically direct such inquiries to its in-app guide. This increases time spent on the app and leverages an existing and comprehensive resource for creators.
Uncommon or more complex inquiries are directed to human agents. Creators and aggregators are identified by their content genre and language, and Workflows automatically routes them to the right team and assigns them to an agent.
Consolidating all creator and aggregator communication on one platform enabled full conversation transparency. For the first time, managers could evaluate agents’ performance on a team and individual basis, from the content of all interactions to response and resolution times.
This compelled agents to be more accountable for communication outcomes. In addition to peer collaboration over Slack for complex inquiries, managers can also step in and guide conversations on respond.io in real time if necessary.
“Prior to using respond.io, our communication structure was rather chaotic and we had to rely on agents’ personal reports to gauge their progress. Respond.io introduced communication and performance transparency to our workflow. Its user interface is friendly and the flexibility of its automation caters easily to our use cases. Finally, it's helping us improve creator communication, and therefore their results, at the pace and scale we had in mind.” — Kuldeep Modh, Strategy and Operations Manager at ShareChat
Narrowing its point of contact to a single WhatsApp number and standardizing its messaging enabled ShareChat for Creators to develop a strong brand identity and voice. As the content scene becomes more competitive and the program continues to scale, this consistency will inspire trust among creators and aggregators.
Automating common responses allows agents to focus on high-priority inquiries, lowering the average first response time from 23 hours to 18 hours and the resolution time from 31 hours to 17 hours.
Meanwhile, switching broadcasts to WhatsApp ensures creators and aggregators are more likely to see them as it’s the most popular messaging channel in India. Conversions of inactive creators to active creators rose from 2% over in-app messages to 14% over WhatsApp broadcasts.
Following this success, ShareChat for Creators is building a Customer Management System that can be integrated with respond.io for smoother creator management.
