BHARATMATRIMONY, the brain child of Murugavel Janakiraman today occupies an important position in the Limca Book of Records for registering the highest number of members online and facilitating the largest number of marriages. BharatMatrimony took shape in 1997. Janakiraman who completed his MCA from Madras University before pursuing his career in online technology talks about the success of the site in an exclusive interview to merinews.    

BharatMatrinmony is the pioneer of the matrimonial sites.... What is the secret behind the success?

I would attribute the success of the matrimonial site to four main things, customer focus, innovation, dedication and our in-depth involvement.

What triggered the idea of BharatMatrinmony.com?

I had a community portal for friends when I was in United States. In that we had different forums, like discussion, friends, products, matrimony etc. But the forum that got maximum response was that of the matrimony. This was way back in 1997. So looking at the response, I started Bharatmatrimony.com the same year.

What was the approach you adopted after you came up with the idea of a matrimonial site?

From the beginning we believed that India being a country with diverse languages, we should make a language based approach. So we have portals targeting each and every a community based on language. People would always want to get married to a person who speaks the same language. As we believe in India, it is a wedding not between two individuals but between two families. And this has made it easier for the people to search for their life partners online.

In this era, when more and more people are opting for free mixing and the youths preferring to choose their life partners on their own, why do you think people are opting for matrimonial sites?

See… this has become a busy world now. And most of the families are nuclear families these days. Another factor is that because of nuclear families, there is stress and the expectation levels have also risen. So people love to have a wider choice… Here is where matrimonial portals come to play the role. Also with the mindset becoming broader, most of the prospective bride and grooms prefer to talk to each other before going ahead with the alliance.

Do you keep a tap on the success of marriages made on your website?

Yes, we definitely keep a track on the success of the marriages made through our website. But it is very difficult to keep in touch with them on a long-term basis to know how well they are fairing in their marriage.

With a number of major players in the field, what do you think about the competition?

It is good competition. The market is expanding but we being the leaders will continue to be so. We have 10 million members and 10 years of experience. We have a wide range of features like products, scope of matching horoscopes etc. So we welcome new players in the market but we will continue to be the leader.

Do you have any kind of counseling session for prospective brides and grooms who register with you?

Yes we do that whenever the situation demands. And recently we have also introduced free counselling for those who are going through some kind of problem. And we have in-house counsellors to address their problems. We maintain strict confidentiality in such cases.

Apart from matrimonial services what other offers does your site have?

See we are doing very well and to take advantage of the wide popularity of our site, cannon partners last year had put in 8.65 million US $. Yahoo matrimony today is powered by us. We also have clickjobs.com, indiaproperty.com, indiaAutomobile.com, Indialist.com and BharatBloodBank.com. BharatBloodBank.com is a non-profit initiative.