Tata 1mg is is India’s largest healthcare platform, founded in 2015 and part of the Tata Group. Its platform covers online pharmacy, lab tests, and doctor consultations, and serves over 6 million consumers a year.
Two very different teams there run their daily work inside WhatsApp groups. One looks after patients enrolled in care programmes; the other keeps last-mile delivery moving.
The patient programme team
Tata 1mg runs care programmes where each patient is assigned a unit of three people: a doctor, a dietitian and a concierge. A team of 25 to 30 people runs these programmes day to day.
Patients reached their unit through personal WhatsApp groups. That meant a patient had to know which staff member to message for which kind of question, and if that person was away, the question waited. When somebody left the team, their patient relationships went with them.
The last-mile delivery team
The delivery team runs WhatsApp groups with delivery agents, region by region. Agents post their progress in those groups and flag problems when a delivery goes wrong, and internal teams sit in the groups and reply.
But every one of those problems then had to be typed into a separate system by hand. Turnaround time was worked out the same way, which meant it was rarely worked out at all.
With Periskope, both teams moved their WhatsApp work onto shared numbers with a system behind them.
Multi-number WhatsApp Inbox: Patients and delivery agents message a team number, so no personal phone is the point of contact.
Query routing: Each patient is mapped to their assigned unit, so a diet question reaches the dietitian, a clinical one the doctor and an order query the concierge, all inside the same thread.
WhatsApp Group Management: Every regional delivery group sits in one workspace.
Tasks and Tickets on WhatsApp: A message becomes a support ticket, with turnaround time tracked automatically.
AI Agent and message flagging: Routine questions get answered automatically, and anything needing a person gets flagged for the team.
A patient sends one message and the right specialist answers, so nobody has to work out whose question it is. When a staff member moves on, the patient relationship stays where it is.
On the delivery side, an agent posts a problem and the system raises the ticket there and then. Nothing waits for somebody to notice it inside a busy regional group.
Managers can open turnaround time and read it off the screen. Earlier, they had to piece it together from two systems.
Less chasing, fewer dropped requests, and both teams getting more done in a day than the old setup allowed.
