Manish Singh 2:08 AM PST · November 26, 2024
Collected at: https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/26/ai-helps-indias-meesho-cut-customer-call-costs-by-75/
Softbank-backed online shopping site Meesho has rolled out what it claims is the first GenAI-powered voice bot among Indian e-commerce firms for customer support, paring down some expenses by 75%.
GenAI, or generative AI, refers to artificial intelligence models that are trained on lots of data so that they are capable of producing and parsing content — in this case the human voice.
The Bengaluru-based e-commerce startup said Tuesday its AI bot currently handles 60,000 customer calls daily in English and Hindi. The startup, which also counts Elevation and Prosus among its backers, plans to add support for six more Indian languages.
Meesho has more than 160 million customers in India, with 80% of them in smaller cities, towns and villages. The startup, which is valued at $4.9 billion, processes over $5 billion in annual sales. Customer support has been a significant focus. “We get a ton of customer support calls,” said Sanjeev Barnwal, co-founder and chief technology officer, in an interview with TechCrunch. Getting it right is necessary to “create the best experience for our users,” he said.
Rather than developing its own large language model (LLM), Meesho has — for now — combined existing LLMs with custom-built components that understand local context and language nuances. The system includes specialized building blocks for speech recognition and natural language processing, per Barnwal.
“We haven’t built our own LLM because we believe the off-the-shelf ones available out there were doing well in Hindi and English,” he said.
In a demo, he showed how the system had to overcome several technical hurdles. “Voice quality matters a lot. Many users are on low-end smartphones and there’s often noisy background like buses honking,” Barnwal noted, saying the bot had to be engineered to improve latency and filter out street noise while maintaining natural-sounding conversations.
He declined to elaborate on the per-call expenses that the AI bot had been able to shrink by 75%. But the e-commerce firm, which recently generated positive cash flow, claims a 95% query resolution rate through the bot, with only 5% of calls requiring human intervention. Customer satisfaction has also improved by 10%, it suggested. The voice bot will also ensure that Meesho can offer customer support round the clock, he said.
Meesho also said that the voice bot has reduced its average customer call handling time by half, but the company asserted that the technology wasn’t aimed at replacing human agents — who it said had been redirected to handle more complex queries and offer seller support.
Another key challenge he mentioned was making sure the AI stuck to strict guidelines about policies like returns and refunds.
The rollout underscores how India’s tech companies are racing to deploy AI to become more efficient, even as they weigh whether to build proprietary models or rely on existing LLMs.
“I don’t think we have enough talent today to build the foundational models,” said Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at Lightspeed, at a recent conference. “Play the war that you are capable of winning.”
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