In conversation with Sandeep Sridhar, Founder, Home Canvas
Customers are most comfortable interacting on WhatsApp and interakt has also made it really easy for our operating team to respond to customer queries and generate new sales and resolve customer service issues.”
– Sandeep Sridhar, Founder, Home Canvas
Meet Home Canvas
Home Canvas, was launched in 2015 as an online curation platform for exquisite furniture and decor. Sandeep and his team diversified into new avenues and started taking on furniture projects for restaurants, cafes and bars.
Over time, apart from the products listed on the platform – the business began to evolve with customized furniture enquiries pouring in. This was the genesis of Home Canvas’ online business.
According to Sandeep, the pandemic was the game-changer that pushed them to take a new look at their opportunities. They were quick to recraft their B2C strategy and reposition the brand with a new and improved focus on E-Commerce.
Their journey in the E-Commerce space took off to a great start with the brand’s ‘Work From Home’ collection.
Currently, Home Canvas has a whole range of products with two primary B2C offerings. They have an E-Commerce line, where customers can buy products directly from their online platform and even a ‘made to order’ section where users can get products made as per their style and design preferences.
Their Goals
Home Canvas’ Instagram channel has been in the news for growing followers massively. However, the challenge here was in getting their Operations team to interact and support customers on social media channels.
With the ongoing popularity of WhatsApp as a channel for businesses, Sandeep and his team decided to move customer conversations to WhatsApp with the following goals:
- The primary need was to have a shared team inbox, where not just their Operations team but the entire team could have visibility and access the customer chats
- They wanted to be able to notify customers about abandoned carts over a more responsive channel like WhatsApp rather than email
- They wanted to bring down the customer wait time from 1-2 days and be able to resolve queries faster than before
Their Solution
Sandeep got to know about interakt from a D2C brands’ founders group where he had sought recommendations for a powerful WhatsApp business solution.
interakt was their first choice as the solution fit their goals of wanting a lean product that offers a shared inbox – perfectly well. Though there were a couple of other products that were recommended, the team was happy to sign up with interakt from both the pricing and usage-simplicity perspective.
According to Sandeep and his team, the onboarding process with interakt was a very pleasant experience. Right from guidance on the required documentation, to technical support and valuable suggestions from team interakt – Home Canvas was able to get up and running with a WhatsApp support channel in just 3-4 days’ time.
“India lives on WhatsApp and in retrospect it seems like a no-brainer to have a WhatsApp-led customer engagement and communication strategy.”
– Sandeep Sridhar, Founder, Home Canvas
How did interakt help?
Prior to coming on board with interakt, Home Canvas managed WhatsApp conversations with customers using a single mobile device.
With just one person monitoring incoming customer queries and passing them on manually to the other members of the team, this soon became quite an uphill task. Here are a few of the many ways in which interakt simplified the process for Home Canvas:
- interakt’s shared team inbox offers great flexibility, giving the entire team access, in addition to the ability to respond and take customer conversations forward.
- With interakt’s features like Notes, Tags and user details centralized in one place, they can now do away with the back and forth in communicating customers’ information and requirements with the team.
- The team is now able to engage with their customers through the entire cycle of the user-journey. Right from new product enquiries, queries on dispatch and assembly to customization requests and after-sales services, Home Canvas is able to handle all those conversations seamlessly on WhatsApp via interakt.
Looking to spruce up your home or office?
Take a look at the hand-picked furniture and decor available at Home Canvas.
Get talking to the furniture experts on WhatsApp today.
