Google speaks in regional languages to woo SMBs

The Indian arm of Internet search giant Google Inc has launched its second call centre in Hyderabad, after Delhi NCR, to provide regional language support to small and medium businesses (SMBs) for its AdWords platform that helps search-based advertisements.

The Indian arm of Internet search giant Google Inc has launched its second call centre in Hyderabad, after Delhi NCR, to provide regional language support to small and medium businesses (SMBs) for its AdWords platform that helps search-based advertisements.

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The new centre will offer support in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam languages, Google officials told a news conference. The company is also planning to support other languages including Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali and Oriya over the next few months.

“While setting up the SMB focus, the challenge for us was to go local. But the localised approach has recorded over 95% year-on-year revenue growth for us,” said Sridhar Seshadri, head of online sales, Google India.

The company targets to reach 7.5 lakh businesses per year through these centres against the current 12,000 per year. To add on, these centres will also handle in-bound and out-bound calls to make SMBs learn how to manage ad campaigns online, choose the best plan to go for and advise on how to grow their businesses.

The company says it is now opening 647 SMB accounts per day and plans to conduct more than 100 workshops in 25 cities to boost the participation.

“We are offering various pre-paid and post-paid plans with an option to pay only if someone clicks their ad” Seshadri said.