The Kabadiwala

India's problem with waste is no secret. In recent years there has been a spike in awareness around this issue and even the government has introduced multiple initiatives to make the surroundings clean and to manage waste in an effective manner.

As Anurag Asati was finishing his last semester in college, he was trying to get rid of old newspapers and other waste and found it very hard to find a kabadiwala (waste picker). This is how he got the idea of a single platform, where one could sell all kinds of waste easily and maybe even get paid for it.

The Kabadiwala was launched in 2014 and after the initial struggle, Anurag and his co-founder Kavindra Raghuvanshi began to see that they were actually making a change and decided to scale up. Eventually, they on-boarded 50,000 customers and are currently expanding their services to three more cities.

Talking about how the WhatsApp Business app helped them, Anurag says, "A lot of people use WhatsApp and find it very easy to communicate, so we thought we'd make the booking process easy and allowed our users to send a message to our WhatsApp Business account for the pickup request. WhatsApp is very user-friendly and ubiquitous."

Anurag said that they use different features of the WhatsApp Business app, mainly to broadcast, send automated replies, get message statistics and for document sharing and communicating with customers for pickups. About 60 percent of their pickup requests come through WhatsApp. And he also said that they have seen a 40 percent increase in their sales after using the WhatsApp Business app.

Talking about how WhatsApp has helped them resolve customer issues, Anurag shares a specific case when an old lady was finding it difficult to use The Kabadiwala app. However, she easily made the request on WhatsApp and is now a regular customer.

He says, "We have helped so many people to contribute to [helping] the environment and create a social impact to the society using WhatsApp."