Consumer is King, Proves India's Biggest Ticketing Platform The platform will now WhatsApp your ticket

Many believe that once a start-up sees success, it's an easy road from thereon. But for start-ups to truly succeed, the milestone isn't just acquiring an overwhelming amount of consumers or securing a whopping number of downloads on the play store anymore. The trick lies in sustaining these consumers even after the initial success.

One of India's biggest success stories, bookmyshow.com, has become synonymous with the booking of movie tickets. From movie to events, everyone turns to this app or the website version to book tickets and the company's success is raging. But it's their constant endeavour to innovate and bring up new products that make the end-user experience better. It keeps them alive in the market.

Goodbye SMS?

Earlier, when you booked a ticket through the website or mobile app of bookmyshow, you would immediately get a SMS alert that confirms your booking and also offers you the M-ticket. But if you are like me, you wouldn't open the SMS until you have reached the movie theatre and then get jittery over connectivity issues. Acknowledging that millions of their users would often face this issue, Ravdeep Chawla, Product Head at Bookmyshow explained that this triggered their move to Whatsapp, albeit they haven't abandoned SMS completely.

Currently on their pilot phase, Chawla explained why they ditched SMS. "SMS is a little bit clunky, not super-reliable anymore. There were a few fundamental problems with text messages. The biggest problem being that we weren't able to figure out whether the message has actually hit the device. That was primarily the reason why we had backup SMS gateways," he said.

Consumer is King

With millions of users in India alone, WhatsApp has been fast growing as the most popular mode of communication. BookMyShow has become one of the early test partners of WhatsApp for business's first roll out. Chawla, an avid user of the messaging service himself, said switching to WhatsApp almost seemed like the most apparent transition. "It's a simpler mode of communication and a better tool," he added.

But the focus for this move is all on the consumer. "Switching to WhatsApp comes with a lot of hidden advantages. Most users of WhatsApp have an auto-download feature for images. So, it becomes easier for the end-user. Now, that the image is stored in their phone as soon as they have booked the ticket, they don't have to worry about network issues or the SMS not reaching them," explained Chawla.

While their app already has added the offline mode feature, where one can access the M-ticket even without internet connection, the WhatsApp feature makes a much bigger difference for the user who uses the desktop version to book tickets.

The new move is supposed to make way for a better post-transaction experience for the consumer. "We aren't just a portal for users to book tickets, we are selling them the whole experience," he said.