SoftBank-backed online shopping site Meesho became the first Indian e-commerce company to deploy a GenAI-powered voice bot for customer support, reducing some of its expenses by 75%.
The Bangalore-based e-commerce startup announced on Tuesday that its AI bots are now fielding 60,000 customer calls every day 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 over 160 million customers in India, 80% of whom live in small cities, towns and villages. The startup is valued at $4.9 billion and has annual sales of more than $5 billion. Customer support has become a key focus. “We get a lot of calls from customer support,” co-founder and chief technology officer Sanjeev Barnwal told TechCrunch in an interview. Getting it right is necessary to “create the best experience for users,” he said.
Rather than developing its own large-scale language model (LLM), Meesho currently combines existing LLMs with custom-built components that understand local context and language nuances. Barnwal said the system includes specialized components for speech recognition and natural language processing.
“We have not built our own LLM because we believe that commercially available off-the-shelf LLMs work well in Hindi and English,” he said.
In his demonstration, he showed how the system needs to overcome several technical hurdles. “Voice quality is very important. Many users have low-end smartphones, and they often have noisy backgrounds, like bus horns,” Barnwal said, adding that maintaining natural conversations is key. However, he said the bot needs to be designed to improve latency and filter out street noise.
He did not elaborate on the cost per call, which has been reduced by 75% with AI bots. However, the e-commerce company, which recently generated positive cash flow, claims that the bot has a 95% query resolution rate and only 5% of calls require human intervention. Customer satisfaction has also increased by 10%.
Meesho also said the voicebot cut average customer call response time in half, but the company insisted the technology was not intended to replace human agents. Agents have been redirected to handle more complex queries and provide seller support, the company said.
Another key challenge he mentioned is ensuring that AI adheres to strict guidelines regarding policies such as returns and refunds.
The development highlights how Indian technology companies are rushing to implement AI to become more efficient, even as they consider whether to build their own models or rely on existing LLMs.
“I don't think we have enough talent right now to build the foundational models,” Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at Lightspeed, said at a recent conference. “Fight a war you can win.”