June/July 2020
Interakt
A Robust WhatsApp Business API
Building a scalable and reliable WhatsApp marketing automation platform
1B
Messages Processed in the Past Year
100+
Businesses in India Using Interakt
Overview
Since 2019, CAW has been a trusted engineering partner for Haptik, a custom chatbot platform for businesses. In 2020, Haptik identified a need for a WhatsApp marketing automation platform for businesses to run personalised campaigns and support customers efficiently. With Haptik’s concept and design, CAW undertook the engineering of what is now the #1 WhatsApp marketing tool in India: Interakt.
Technical Requirements
To support targeted campaigns, swift broadcasting, and multi-agent customer support, Interakt needed:
Alignment With Existing Tech Stack
Hapitk provided technical recommendations that aligned with their existing tech stack, such as using Azure and Python for the backend. However, they were open to the necessary alternatives suggested by CAW.
Segmentation and Broadcasting
Interakt required the capability to fetch customer data when a user signed up or placed an order on a business’s platform. Using filters such as shoe size and gender, Interakt was to generate a highly targeted segmentation list and mass broadcast a WhatsApp message. For timely insights, the business needed to receive message delivery status from WhatsApp within minutes.
Agent Dashboard
A single WhatsApp business number can receive multiple customer queries, which can be challenging for a single team member to manage. A solution was needed to allow multiple members to manage conversations. With an agent dashboard, an ‘agent’ can assign themselves to a chat, allowing multiple agents to handle various customer conversations simultaneously using the same number.
The Challenges
Building for Scalability
Interakt needed to be scalable to handle large segmentation lists, sometimes reaching up to hundreds of thousands of entries.
Ensuring Reliability and Speed
When an agent sends a message, it must pass through the entire Interakt system and reach the customer without delay. The message should always be delivered, even if the customer is temporarily offline.
Preventing Database Bottlenecks
The database can occasionally become a bottleneck in systems that are sensitive to scale and performance.
The Solution
The CAW team devised the following solutions:
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Event-Based Architecture
CAW implemented an event-driven architecture to ensure real-time messaging speed and system reliability.
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Communication as a Microservice
Given that communication between the Agent Dashboard and the WhatsApp API is a critical component, it was designed as a microservice within the core marketing automation platform. After consulting with Haptik, a different programming language that was more suited for scalability and reliability was adopted.
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Offline Database Interactions
The communication module was designed so that message exchanges between the WhatsApp API and the Agent Dashboard occurred without round-trip interactions with the database. Instead, database interactions happened offline, ensuring it did not obstruct scalability.
Timeline
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October 2020
Alpha version launch
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January 2021
Scaling with initial customers
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Present
Trusted by 100+ businesses across India
The Outcome
CAW successfully built a fast, reliable, and scalable that has become a preferred choice for brands wanting to scale their business on WhatsApp. Interakt has been built for:
Scale
Manages massive segmented lists using data from business platforms
High Volume Processing
Processed approximately 1 billion messages in the past year