Meesho launches voicebot to cut customer support costs by one-fourth – Times of India

BENGALURU: Ecommerce marketplace Meesho on Tuesday announced a generative artificial intelligence-powered multilingual voice bot, setting a new standard for customer service in the e-commerce industry in India.
Currently, the feature supports only Hindi and English. However, the Bengaluru-based startup plans to expand this to six additional regional languages over a period of time.
The solution aims to help the company cut costs, deliver a more personalised and human-like support experience while serving a diverse and growing user base spread across urban and rural India.
The company has reduced the per call cost using the voicebot by one-fourth of the cost with a human agent involved. Currently, it handles about 60,000 calls daily. “That is not even half of the entire customer support that we get,” Meesho co-founder and chief technology officer Sanjeev Barnwal told TOI. He declined to share the number of calls the company gets in total.
Using natural language processing (NLP), automatic speech recognition (ASR), and text-to-speech (TTS), the voicebot currently has a resolution rate of around 95%, the company said. It cuts Average Handle Time (AHT) by 50% from about four minutes to two minutes, Barnwal told TOI.
Bengaluru-based Meesho, which competes against giants such as Amazon India and Flipkart, has 80% of its user base come from tier II cities and beyond, and over 45% from tier IV and beyond.
Founded by Barnwal and Vidit Aatrey in 2015, unlike its rivals, Meesho does not charge any commissions from sellers. It generates revenue from advertising and logistics services for sellers. The company’s operational revenues grew by 33% to Rs 7,615 crore in FY24.
Aided by user growth, generative artificial intelligence and machine learning for product discovery, improved in-app experiences and customer service, the company narrowed adjusted losses by 97% from Rs 1,569 crore to Rs 53 crore in FY24. It had also recorded a marginal profit in the second quarter of FY24.