Engaging customers is the biggest challenge brands face during festive season

Engaging customers, whose attention is spread thin across many different channels, “is the biggest challenge brands face during the festive season,” says Shankar Iyer, Director – Business Strategy, India, Infobip in an exclusive interaction with Bizz Buzz.

What unique customer engagement challenges do brands face during the festive season in India?

Engaging customers, whose attention is spread thin across many different channels, is the biggest challenge brands face during the festive season. Shoppers are constantly moving between different e-commerce platforms, social media channels, and messaging apps. If the brand experience is not consistent across these touchpoints, it creates confusion and frustration. For example, a promotion seen on social media but not honored on the website can quickly break trust.

Another challenge lies in personalization. Festive shopping in India is deeply emotional, often tied to family traditions and regional preferences. What resonates with a customer in one city may not feel relevant to someone in another. At the same time, the scale of festive demand needs brands to reach millions. Striking a balance between scale and personalization is a difficult but necessary part of customer engagement.

This is where emerging channels like Rich Communication Services (RCS) are becoming critical. RCS enables brands to deliver visually rich, two-way conversations within the native SMS app — blending the reach and reliability of SMS with the interactivity of digital media. During peak seasons, it enables brands to share personalized offers, carousels, and real-time updates without forcing users to switch apps, creating a more seamless and trusted festive experience. It also offers features like calendar scheduling, which integrates with the native Android phone calendar app, setting automatic reminders for consumers.

Timeliness is equally critical. During festivals, customers expect real-time updates on offers, stock availability, and delivery timelines. Even small delays in communication can lead to missed opportunities or disappointment. There is also heightened pressure to build trust. With the surge of deals and offers, shoppers worry about hidden costs, fake reviews, or delivery delays. Clear, transparent, and proactive engagement becomes key to reassuring them.

RCS also helps address this need for trust and timeliness — with verified sender IDs, read receipts, and actionable buttons built into the conversation — ensuring customers know they’re engaging with a legitimate brand and can act instantly on offers or support queries.

In short, festive season engagement in India is not just about visibility. It is about making every interaction across every touchpoint feel connected, personal, and trustworthy in the midst of the noise and competition.

How can conversational channels help businesses stand out amid festive clutter?

Conversational channels play a crucial role in helping businesses cut through the festive clutter by making engagement more personal, timely, and interactive. Unlike mass campaigns, a conversation feels human-like, which immediately sets a brand apart during a season when customers are overwhelmed with generic messages.

Channels like RCS, WhatsApp ensure reach and responsiveness. SMS remains a reliable way to deliver urgent updates such as offers or delivery notifications, while RCS brings in rich, app-like features — carousels, product cards, and quick replies — that make festive promotions far more engaging. WhatsApp, on the other hand, allows for ongoing, two-way conversations where customers can browse, ask questions, and get the support they need.

When these channels are connected through an omnichannel approach, the experience becomes seamless. A customer might discover an offer on a social media post of an influencer, use the code on checkout, and then continue the journey on RCS or WhatsApp with full context carried forward. This continuity prevents the fatigue that often comes from fragmented festive campaigns.

AI makes this even more powerful by personalizing interactions at scale. It can recommend products based on browsing history, handle FAQs in multiple languages, and even predict when a shopper might need a nudge to complete a purchase. By combining conversational channels with AI-powered orchestration, businesses can deliver festive experiences that feel relevant, effortless, and memorable — helping them truly stand out.

With digital transactions at their peak, what types of fraud risks do you see emerging, and how can brands counter them?

The surge in digital transactions during the festive season also brings a surge in fraud attempts. Scammers know customers are in a rush to secure offers, track deliveries, and redeem cashback. This urgency creates the perfect opening for phishing, fake websites, and fraudulent messages that mimic banks, e-commerce platforms, and courier services. In fact, phishing alone now accounts for nearly a quarter of all cyberattack entry points. For brands, this is more than just a consumer problem — it directly impacts trust, conversion rates, and long-term loyalty.

The challenge is that these scams often look legitimate. Fraudsters use brand logos, urgent language, and fake tracking updates to trick customers into clicking links, sharing credentials, or scanning malicious QR codes. When customers fall prey, they don’t just lose money — they lose confidence in the brand whose name was misused.

To counter this, businesses need to take a proactive, omnichannel security approach. First, they must secure their official customer engagement channels — SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, and email — so customers know exactly where to expect genuine communication. Verified sender IDs, branded RCS messages, and WhatsApp Business APIs can help eliminate ambiguity. Second, brands should use AI-powered monitoring to detect anomalies, flag suspicious traffic, and stop phishing attempts before they spread. Finally, consistent education is key: short reminders embedded into festive campaigns about safe practices — like never sharing OTPs or clicking unknown links — can protect customers in the moment of decision.

By combining secure conversational channels, AI-driven fraud detection, and proactive customer awareness, businesses can not only reduce risk but also position themselves as trustworthy partners during the busiest shopping season of the year.

What role do you see AI and automation playing in delivering personalized festive experiences at scale?

AI and automation are reshaping how brands deliver festive experiences, especially in a market as diverse and high-volume as India. The festive season brings millions of interactions every day across websites, apps, and conversational channels. Meeting this demand manually is impossible, and that’s where AI steps in.

AI enables deep personalization by analyzing shopping behavior, past purchases, and even regional or cultural preferences to recommend the right product or offer to the right customer. Automation ensures these insights are applied instantly and at scale — whether it’s sending a tailored WhatsApp message, surfacing a relevant product card on RCS, or triggering a personalized push notification at the exact moment of intent.

At the same time, AI-powered assistants can handle festive surges in customer queries. It provides real-time updates on deliveries, offers, or returns in multiple languages, while automation keeps journeys seamless by connecting every touchpoint, from discovery to post-purchase.

Looking ahead, what festive engagement trends do you expect will dominate in 2025 and beyond?

Looking ahead, festive engagement in India will be defined by three dominant trends. Conversational AI and messaging-led commerce will lead the season. At Infobip, we recently surpassed 10 billion RCS business messages delivered to consumers — a major milestone that underlines the growing adoption of rich, interactive messaging. India has been central to this growth, fueled by its large base of Android users and the recent expansion of RCS availability on Apple devices. With channels like RCS and WhatsApp emerging as trusted touchpoints during peak seasons, their ability to carry rich media, enable two-way conversations, and maintain continuity across devices makes them powerful tools for festive engagement at scale.

Omnichannel consistency will matter more than ever. According to the Untapped Opportunity of Omnichannel India 2025 study, customers feel less fatigue and higher trust when they see connected messaging across touchpoints for discovery, purchase, and post-purchase. Festive campaigns that integrate these journeys, instead of treating them in silos, will stand out.

Finally, AI-driven personalization will set the benchmark. The IDC AI Advantage report notes that businesses in APAC are rapidly investing in AI and automation to handle scale, multilingual support, and predictive engagement. During festive peaks, AI will power recommendations, automate responses, and orchestrate real-time customer journeys, ensuring experiences are not just mass but meaningfully personal.

Together, these shifts point to a festive future where engagement is seamless and powered by AI — cutting through clutter to deliver trust and delight at scale.

EoM.