Unleashing impact through digital interactions: Tanla-Truecaller partnership

Partnership Context

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In India's rapidly evolving digital interactions landscape, business messaging has experienced remarkable growth, witnessing a 10x increase in volume over the past 4-5 years. And it was Truecaller, the undisputed leader in caller identification with over 1 billion global app installations and a staggering 240 million+ users in India alone, who saw the immense potential nestled within this burgeoning sector. 

To seize on this opportunity, Truecaller and Tanla formed an exclusive partnership in August 2021. This collaboration aimed to introduce a compelling value proposition that harnesses Tanla’s enterprise access, deep tech, and operation capabilities, thus paving the way for Truecaller’s distinctive product.  

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The Impact and Success of Our Collaboration

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Powered by Tanla's unwavering commitment to innovation and proactive identification of whitespace in the ecosystem, Truecaller has carved out a niche in the business messaging arena, even amongst established channels such as WhatsApp and RCS. This journey has been marked by some transformative outcomes:

• OTT Penetration: OTT business messaging has seen a dramatic rise in volumes from <1% penetration in 2021 to ~15% in 2024.
• Enterprise Adoption: We witnessed a steady increase in repeat purchases and volume growth due to widespread enterprise adoption, where we now serve 200+ enterprises through Truecaller and demonstrate our partnership's broad market appeal.
• Differentiated Value Proposition: Truecaller’s enhanced native user journey, coupled with advanced capabilities such as conversational and rich media messaging, has improved conversions and engagement without a significant cost uptick. This has led to an increase in Truecaller usage by ~20%, indicating a heightened level of customer engagement.
• User Intelligence: We’ve seen a remarkable 1.5X increase in CTR, empowered by AI/ML-driven user intelligence that’s derived from click data in conversations and conversion propensity, thereby improving targeting and promo effectiveness. Additionally, our automated feature engineering pipelines continuously update customer behavioural insights, ensuring our strategies remain up-to-date and effective.

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How we Built a Partnership that Endures

After sealing the partnership contract, Tanla initiated a comprehensive integration process, merging the messaging platform with Tanla's middleware while simultaneously training the sales and customer success teams on the platform's intricacies. Over the past few years, we have jointly worked on 5 key elements to set the partnership up for success:

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Product:

• Focused on identifying the optimal product fit across various use cases and customer segments, through a detailed market mapping analysis.
• Set up a product development war room, conducting thousands of iterations to curate persona-specific user experiences and facilitate intelligent feature prioritisation.
• Truecaller's unique features made it a preferred choice among enterprises - smart notifications that highlight key information with specific CTAs, displays of brand names and logos within sender IDs, fallback on SMS, and a streamlined onboarding process for enterprises.

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Performance:

• We enabled operational efficiency with a throughput of 10,000 transactions per second and a latency of <1% for 99% of transactions, ensuring reliable and fast service delivery.
• Established 99.99%+ platform uptime.
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Marketing:

• We co-invested in both user-facing and enterprise-facing campaigns, which included launch events and roundtable discussions. Moving forward, we have a detailed marketing plan budgeted for 2024.
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Legal & Compliance:

• We conducted continuous audits and renewals of security certifications to ensure 100% security compliance at all times.
• We maintained compliance with external regulations by consistently updating and monitoring the regulatory landscape, preemptively managing requirements for adherence.
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Market Feedback:

• We strove to make developments that met market expectations - feature demands and better CTRs - through rapid POCs.
• Tanla and Truecaller jointly attended select enterprise meetings to understand the voice of customers for commercial scale-up, starting September 2022.
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With a shared commitment to elevating the customer experience, Truecaller and Tanla have joined forces to develop and introduce rich media features at an economical rate. The goal is to boost customer satisfaction by 20-25% and bolster business outcomes, potentially achieving a 1.5x increase in CTRs while reducing the cost per conversion. 

As the partnership evolves, both teams remain dedicated to industry-defining innovation, all while optimising operations at scale and aiming to capture a larger share of the rich media market of 5-6 billion messages per month in India, over the next 18-24 months.

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_{Sources: Truecaller reports, Internal research and Expert conversations}