From slow collections to prepaid wallets: How Jio Haptik's Interakt grew with Zoho Billing
India
Conversational AI / SaaS
We've had a great experience with Zoho Billing as our billing partner. The product is quite stable, it's quite reliable, and we get great support on time, always catering to whatever complex requests we tend to have.
Associate director, Jio Haptik
Jio Haptik builds enterprise conversational AI agents for customer service, sales, and support. Founded in Mumbai in 2014, and now part of Jio Platforms, the company helps some of the world's largest brands across retail, fintech, healthcare, and travel automate customer interactions at scale.
Interakt is one of its products, built on the official WhatsApp Business API. It enables Indian small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to run sales, marketing, and support on WhatsApp, Instagram, and RCS. Interakt pioneered the adoption of WhatsApp APIs for business communications in India. At 20 million messages sent daily, Interakt has grown into one of the primary channels through which Indian businesses reach their customers on WhatsApp.
The challenge
Interakt was Jio Haptik's first product built specifically for SMBs. The operating requirements were different from the enterprise business the company had run since 2014. There were higher customer volumes, per-message billing, and a customer base distributed across India's payment landscape. The international subscription platform the team started with was not built for those requirements.
Indian payment gateway gaps
The existing platform did not support the payment providers most Indian SMBs relied on. Customers unable to pay through their preferred method created friction on both sides of every transaction.
Reporting that served one team
Finance could extract the numbers they needed. However, product managers and support staff had no straightforward path to theirs, which produced manual workarounds and delays across the business.
Support hours that didn't match operations
The vendor's team operated outside India. Billing questions that required real familiarity with Interakt's setup waited until the following business day at the earliest.
Per-message billing that couldn't scale
Interakt collected message fees by reviewing weekly usage, raising invoices, and waiting for payment. Collection cycles stretched past 30 days, revenue slipped through the gaps, and the finance team's workload grew with every new customer. There was no version of that model capable of supporting tens of thousands of SMBs.
The solution
Jio Haptik chose Zoho Billing as Interakt's subscription and payment infrastructure. Three things drove that decision: support for Indian payment gateways, the ability to run a prepaid wallet model on the platform, and reporting tools that every team in the business could use.
Indian payment gateway support
Zoho Billing's integrations covered the payment methods Interakt's SMB customers relied on, including UPI. The compatibility gap that had constrained the previous tool was gone.
Prepaid wallet model
Zoho Billing gave Interakt the infrastructure to run a prepaid wallet. Merchants loaded credits in advance and message charges were deducted in real time as campaigns ran. Payment collection shifted from a weeks-long invoice cycle to near-instantaneous, and revenue leakage from uncollected fees fell sharply. The same billing model that handled Interakt at 2,000 businesses handles it at over 25,000 today.
Cross-functional reporting
The reporting tools in Zoho Billing could be configured by function. Product teams tracked subscription metrics, finance teams monitored collection performance, and support teams could check customer account status and wallet balances without manual exports or escalation.
Flexible subscription structures
As Interakt's product expanded, customers asked for billing arrangements beyond the standard tiers (custom plans, add-on subscriptions, and mixed models). The platform accommodated each without requiring the underlying setup to be rebuilt.
Billing and support unified via Zoho Desk
With Zoho Billing and Zoho Desk connected, support agents could access a customer's plan, wallet balance, payment history, and add-on details without switching tools. Resolution time on billing-related queries decreased in response.
FAVORITE FEATURES
Multiple payment gateway integrations- Prepaid wallet and real-time billing
- Advanced reporting and dashboards
- E-invoicing and tax compliance
- Zoho Desk integration
- Flexible subscription and add-on management
Benefits and Return on Investment
By replacing postpaid invoicing with a prepaid wallet model on Zoho Billing, Jio Haptik was able to:
- Reduce payment settlement time from over 30 days to near-instantaneous, with collections becoming fully self-serve.
- Scale Interakt from approximately 2,000 businesses to over 25,000, with the wallet model as the direct enabler of that growth.
- Free up the equivalent of one full-time role on the finance team, with billing overhead reduced by approximately 10%.
- Process over 40,000 wallet transactions per month, with near-zero collection failures.
- Reduce support team resolution time on billing queries through the Zoho Billing and Zoho Desk integration.
Looking forward
Interakt is building an AI interface into its own product, a conversational layer through which users can access campaign insights and manage their accounts. The team has started using a similar capability in Zoho Billing, querying subscription data directly rather than navigating dashboards. As Interakt tests new markets and new pricing models, the billing infrastructure supports those experiments without needing to be rebuilt each time. The business's stated target is at least 10 times more growth, without having to change billing platforms to get there.