Babajob’s business phone system is powered by Exotel Cloud Telephony

Intro

Babajob is one of our oldest customers. As Roshan Nair, Product Manager at Babajob pointed out, they are Exotel’s customer no. 4.Over the years, both Exotel and Babajob have seen tremendous growth. Our partnership has also evolved over time. We felt that it was time to showcase some of the wonderful work that Babajob has been doing since we last caught up.

A simple missed call to find a job

How do these job seekers get in touch with Babajob?

Telephony plays a very important role, as does mobile web. Most of our job seekers get in touch with us via calls or through our mobile website. About 90% of our mobile web traffic comes through smartphones. In fact, we are constantly surprised by the kind of smartphones that are used to access Babajob by our job seekers. Some of our job seekers also access Babajob through a desktop.

What usually ends up happening, is a combination of the 3 avenues.

When someone gets in touch with Babajob via one of the 3 platforms you’ve mentioned above, how do you take it forward?

Irrespective of how the job seekers get in touch with us, they have one thing to do –

“missed call to a pan-Indonesia number to find a job.”

When they give us a missed call, they receive an automated IVR callback. This IVR callback currently happens in about 8 languages. We ask them a few questions. Based on the answers, someone from our call center gives them a call. After this, based on their skills, we send them SMSes when therefore suitable job openings. Again, to apply for a particular job, they simply need to give us a missed call and we will take it forward from there.

How does Exotel help you simplify this process?

The first automated call that goes out to the customer when they give us a missed call to find a job is very crucial. Unlike a lot of other cloud calling software, Exotel allows us to keep the calls dynamic based on the user’s input. For example, if someone calls us for the first time, what they hear will be very different from what they will hear if they’re calling us for the 2nd or the 3rd time.

This is the communication with the job seekers. How about the communication with the employers?

At the end of the screening process, when we find the right person for a job based on their skill set, we connect them with the employers for a conversation. We do not reveal a potential employer’s number to the job seekers. We use Exotel’s number masking feature to connect them both without revealing each other’s number.

This way, we protect the privacy of everyone involved.

With the increasing popularity of the internet and social media, do you see that overtaking voice and SMS as the preferred mode of communication for job seekers?

We regularly post job requirements on the internet, say on channels like Facebook. We even work with offline partners, like colleges in tier 2 and tier 3 cities for entry level jobs. Whatever the medium, voice is still crucial. It is the last-mile connect that is essential.

Like you mentioned earlier, Babajob is Exotel’s customer no.4 and in terms of scale, you’ve come a long way in the last 4 years. How easy was it to scale with Exotel?

We were the first company to use a missed call for employment in the jobs sector.

We initially built a system internally to handle this. This never really saw the light of the day. But even when we were testing out, we were facing issues of scale. We also realised that managing this internally meant a lot of hassles for us in terms of dealing with telecom partners, monitoring uptimes etc. So when we initially started using Exotel, the idea was to just allow someone else to handle it so we could just focus on the business.

Looking back now, if we had stuck to our in-house system, we would have had to take care a lot of things internally like predicting volumes, figuring out the telecom bit as we grew etc. With Exotel, it has been seamless.

How has Exotel added to the efficiency of operations at Babajob?
With Exotel, we are able to automate a lot of our processes and as a result, work with the limited manpower that we have. We even get calls at midnight and now, even those don’t go unanswered.

What are some of the future plans you have for Babajob?

We plan to utilise voice more efficiently. For example, if there’s an urgent job requirement, we can maybe do a voice blast instead of sending the job seekers an SMS.

We have already started sending tips to job seekers before they go in for an interview.

We are also looking to include better content over voice and SMS and do this in the job seeker’s language.

We have touched 4.5 million people and our aim is to touch 100 million people.