Meesho launches AI-powered voice bot, reducing customer query costs by 75%

Meesho co-founder and chief technology officer Sanjeev Barnwal

Homegrown e-commerce platform Meesho has launched a dedicated voice bot that will now help resolve customer queries on the platform, co-founder and chief technology officer Sanjeev Barnwal told reporters on November 26.

The launch comes at a time when several e-commerce companies are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI to lower costs and optimise operations. Earlier in the year, Amazon launched Rufus, an AI-powered shopping assistant, to improve customer experience in India and has already seen positive results.

While Barnwal did not shed light on the specifics, he said the cost per call will be reduced by 75 percent with the help of the latest voice bot when compared with a human’s cost per call earlier. “We have even seen customer satisfaction scores improve by 10 percent from earlier,” he said.

The turnaround time for each query will also halve from around 3-4 minutes to about 1.5-2 minutes, Barnwal added.

The voice bot currently handles 60,000 calls per day, less than half of what Meesho receives daily. “While we have a human layer when the customer’s queries are not resolved with the help of a voice bot, our plan is to scale the offering and service all queries through a voice bot at a later point in time,” Barnwal added.

In the future, Meesho will likely expand its voice bot offering and go the Rufus way if it sees use cases.

Meesho’s customer support executives are being accommodated within the company and are being upskilled to take on other functions like cataloguing within the company as their jobs are now being done by robots. By efficiently handling routine queries, the bot frees up human agents time to focus on more complex issues, further enhancing service quality and optimizing overall support efficiency, the company said.

The voice support is currently being offered in English and Hindi and its models will be trained in Gujarati, Bangla, Marathi and other vernacular languages to service all of Meesho’s customers who are largely based in Tier 3 and beyond regions.

Meesho’s Barnwal said the company is aware that a majority of its customers are not tech savvy but added that in the long run the voice bot will be a more effective tool that will result in “quicker and more effective customer service.”