The challenge: a post-purchase experience split across four tools
By its second anniversary, Kaveri & Co. had grown from a small studio to a team of eleven shipping roughly three thousand orders a month across India. The product was strong — repeat rate hovered around 28% — but the post-purchase experience was stitched together from four tools, each bought at a different time for a different reason.
Order confirmations went out as transactional email plus an aggregator SMS. Shipping updates came from the courier partner directly, and rarely matched the brand tone. Abandoned-cart recovery lived in the email service provider. And WhatsApp — the channel customers actually used to reach out — was a single shared business number answered by whoever was free.
“We would get the same four questions about a saree nineteen times in a row on WhatsApp,” Srinivasan recalls. “Care instructions, fall stitching, return window, exchange of size. The human answering had the answers, but the answers were not the same each time, and we were paying a person to do it for ten hours a day.”
The approach: one channel, four jobs
Kaveri chose SMSLocal for the WhatsApp Business API rollout after a trial against two aggregators. The decision came down to how quickly templates could move from drafted to approved — a metric that matters enormously for a brand running weekly drops — and how much of the work their small team could self-serve without a solutions engineer on the line every week.
The rollout sequenced post-purchase first: order confirmation, dispatch notification, delivery confirmation, and a single well-timed review request. Then cart recovery moved from email to WhatsApp using a soft two-touch sequence at ninety minutes and twenty-four hours, with a genuine offer on the second touch for high-intent carts only.
Finally, the team rolled SMSLocal’s AI WhatsApp Agent on top of the same thread. The agent answered care instructions, size charts, return policy, and exchange eligibility using Kaveri’s own documentation — and cleanly handed off to a human the moment the customer said anything that needed one.
The results: a single thread, three meaningful shifts
Abandoned-cart recovery revenue tripled — 3.1x the email-only baseline — within two months of rollout. The gain came partly from WhatsApp’s higher open rates, but more from timing: a cart abandoned at 9:15 pm and nudged at 10:45 pm converts much better than one nudged at 9 am the next morning.
Support load fell from 47 tickets per thousand orders to 28. The AI agent absorbed roughly 60% of post-purchase messages without escalation, and the human team spent the saved time on the 5% of conversations that were actually complex — size-exchange coordination, damage claims, pre-order queries.
The third shift was brand tone. “Every touchpoint now sounds like us,” Srinivasan says. “When the courier updates go out, they are on our WhatsApp, in our voice. When the review request goes, it is written by our copywriter, not a template a third party wrote for an unrelated industry.”
What’s next
Kaveri is rolling SMSLocal’s catalogue integration onto WhatsApp, so a returning customer can browse and check out inside the thread without ever returning to the website. Early tests show roughly 1.8x higher conversion on a catalogue-only thread versus a thread that redirects to the website.
“We are building the brand inside a messaging thread,” Srinivasan says. “That is the honest way to describe it. And for a D2C label in India, that is where the brand actually lives.”
