File photo of Mr. Sanjeev Barnwal, co-founder and CTO of Meesho.
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Ecommerce startup, Meesho, on Tuesday (November 26, 2024) unveiled the company’s multilingual, Gen AI-powered voice bot. This AI bot offers personalized, human-like assistance in Hindi and English languages.

The Bengaluru-based company claims 80% of its users come from tier 2 cities and beyond, and that the voice bot has been built to perform efficiently even on basic smartphones and in challenging environments, such as noisy surroundings. The company plans to expand to six additional regional languages in the near future.

During the press briefing, the company showcased the bot’s capability on interruption-handling. It could distinguish between casual affirmations and genuine interruptions during customer conversations, which, per the company, has improved the overall user experience.

The bot handles roughly 60,000 calls a day, and has a 95% resolution rate. Since the rollout, the Gen AI bot has dramatically reduced the need for human intervention and minimized escalations, contributing to a 50% improvement in Average Handle Time (AHT), Meesho co-founder, Sanjeev Barnwal, said during a press briefing. The bot has also reported a 10% increase in customer satisfaction scores, he noted. 

Mr. Barnwal did not disclose the total number of calls the platform receives daily. However, he mentioned that the 60,000 calls handled by the bot account for less than half of the company’s total customer call volume. He also highlighted the significant cost advantage, noting that each call managed by the bot costs the company only a quarter of what it would cost if handled by a human agent.

Powered by automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and large language models, the bot is designed to handle a wide range of customer service tasks autonomously, reducing reliance on human agents for routine queries and allowing them to focus on more complex tasks.

In the past year, Meesho has been steadily deploying AI models to enhance customer interaction. The ecommerce company has deployed technology to understand how long its users stay on the platform, their demographic details and category preferences. With the voice bot, Meesho plans even more personalize customer interactions, enhancing the overall customer support experience.