Truecaller looks to replicate India success in other markets

Driven by success for its ‘Truecaller for Business’ offering in India, the Stockholm-based caller identification platform Truecaller plans to double down on newer markets such as South Africa, Egypt and Israel to grow the service, a senior company official said.

The company had launched ‘Truecaller for Business’ in India in 2021, under which genuine businesses are marked with ‘green’ Caller ID to differentiate them from spam. The company has since then acquired over 1000 active business customers across India.

“India is our biggest market at this point of time, powered by over 220 million user base in India. However, we are also currently scaling across other focus international markets such as South Africa, Egypt, Israel and parts of SouthEast Asia,” Priyam Bose, Global Head, GTM, Truecaller for Business, India, said.

He added that Truecaller for Business is now looking to introduce a set of complementary features that will allow users to respond to business calls without even answering the phone. “The upcoming features would allow the customers to let such businesses know whether they are interested in their offering or not. And for the first time, this creates an efficient two-way communication cycle between the user and businesses and enhances trust,” he said.

“The new business unit is shaping up well since there was a dire need to bring in more trust in communication when businesses communicate with their customers. Truecaller for Business helps brands connect with their customers better by helping businesses to add identity, trust, safety and context to their communication workflow,” he added.

Mr. Bose added that Truecaller for Business has grown at a good momentum and achieved the milestone of serving over 1,000 active business customers.

The company is seeing traction across categories of businesses with use cases around service, support and fulfilment, ride hailing, logistics and delivery, marketing and sales and security and fraud management. The company’s customers in India include Ecom Express, Unacademy, Udaan, NoBroker, Swiggy, Uber, Ola and Acko.

According to a Truecaller report, India was among the top five countries affected by spams calls and messages in 2021. Interestingly, over 202 million spam calls were made by just one spammer in India last year – that’s over 6,64,000 people that were disturbed by spam calls every day and 27,000 people every hour – from just one phone number, as per the company’s blog.