This week, we had the opportunity to speak with Ishay Tentser, the Co-Founder and CEO of
Initech, who was more than happy to introduce Initech to our community.
Please describe the story behind the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
I run
Initech, an Israeli software development company. As Whatsapp is popular in Israel, more than 60% of our clients prefer to chat with us directly. It happened so often that we had a hard time tracking customer relations on Whatsapp. That’s why we created a shared Inbox for Whatsapp that we called
TimelinesAI.
During the development, we learned that using Whatsapp for business communication is a growing trend. It has recently crossed the mark of 2 billion users worldwide, with major market shares in Israel, UK, Spain, Singapore, Italy, Germany, India, Africa, and the Netherlands.
According to Whatsapp marketing success cases published by Facebook, using Whatsapp increases reply rates by 30 to 40%, helps to get 10 to 20% new customers, and increases sales by 10 to 45% depending on your niche. If your readers are interested in leveraging Whatsapp for themselves, we have recently published
a guide on how to start using Whatsapp for marketing your business.
What services do you offer?
TimelinesAI helps teams to collaborate on Whatsapp communication with customers. You can share your Whatsapp inbox with multiple agents and managers, scale support and collaboration, integrate Whatsapp into your CRM, and even set up automation for interactions with your clients.
What separates you from other similar websites
When we talk to our customers, some of them think that we are competing with Whatsapp or Facebook itself. It is easy to think so because TimelinesAI enables teams to integrate Whatsapp into their sales or marketing pipelines. But it is also very different from your regular Whatsapp Web and even API.
TimelinesAI doesn’t require Whatsapp Business API to start using Whatsapp in your business. This means that you don’t need to invest in development, wait for business approval or pay for messaging your customers.
If I was to simplify the concept, TimelinesAI is like Whatsapp Web with plenty of collaboration and business features on top of it.
Who are your typical customers, and what do you think is the main challenge that your product solves for them?
Our typical customers are small to medium business owners who want to scale the support for their customers on Whatsapp. Whatsapp messaging is notorious for being hard to track, share across the team, and collaborate on.
TimelinesAI makes it easy to add Whatsapp into the workflow of your team. The whole setup takes 5 minutes: all you need to do is connect your Whatsapp number and invite your agents to manage the communication.
If you want to integrate Whatsapp into your CRM and sync the communication of your agents under the relevant contacts, we’ve got that too. The best part? Once it’s set up, it is fully automatic.
Which trends and technologies do you find to be particularly intriguing these days?
We are fascinated by Machine Learning and AI capabilities especially in the space of
NLP models.
A lot of work in the modern business world gets discussed and approved informally via messengers. It is important to keep track of such information and easily share it with your teammates or clients on demand. Managers spent their time trying to follow up on the communication streams, resolve conflicts and establish work processes.
We work on using semantic/subject analysis to analyze the message threads and provide signals about the communication state. Identify hate speech, inappropriate language, sexual or racist discrimination, bad vibes.
Managers will receive smart notifications on which communication stream they should put their attention to and save a ton of time by reading only important business messages.
What are the plans for TimelinesAI for the near future?
We have plans to simplify the teamwork on Whatsapp, even more, to help businesses increase their conversions on Whatsapp.
- Focus on integrations with CRM, Project management tools. Provide an easy-to-setup gateway to send/receive WA messages. Robust API.
- Advanced functionality team collaboration, smart filters, templates, contact management.
- Support additional languages in the interface, Spanish, Portuguese first priority.
