Companies with high customer engagement are increasingly employing artificial intelligent (AI) chatbots for multiple reasons — primarily to cut costs, to automate repetitive tasks, simplify procedures and reduce time consumed. Most companies that have deployed AI representatives in dealing with customer issues and queries boast of over 90% resolution rate. “Currently, 93% of customer queries are resolved with complete closure through our AI chatbot, 6Eskai platform,” Indigo airlines told FE. IndiGo launched its AI conversational booking assistant 6Eskai in June last year on WhatsApp to offer travel solutions to flyers, who can use it to book tickets, check-in, generate boarding passes, check flight status, besides other queries.
Air India launched a virtual travel assistant called AI.g in May 2023 for customer service and the company claims that the bot autonomously answers 97% of enquiries without any human intervention. AI.g has expertise on over 1,300 topics and has answered over 5 million customer enquiries so far, with close to 40,000 queries a day, says the airline. “Its vast repertoire of knowledge and unique reasoning skills in the airline domain makes it the trusted go-to adviser of choice for our guests. Overall, on a daily basis, AI.g handles around half of the total customer query volume, on a par with our call-based contact centre,” said Satya Ramaswamy, chief digital & technology officer, Air India.
Recently, online shopping platform Meesho too deployed a multilingual, Gen AI-powered voice bot to service customer support calls in line with its companywide aggressive cost-cutting measures to reach full-year profitability. Its co-founder Sanjeev Barnwal was quoted in media reports that the bot has reduced the cost of each customer service call down to 25% of what it would cost to service by humans. Meesho spokesperson told FE that its voice bot handles 60,000 calls daily with a 95% resolution rate, improving average handle time by 50%.
These advancements of AI use in customer services are in line with predictions. As per a report by Zendesk, a software as a service company, 89% of surveyed industry leaders in India anticipate an unprecedented overhaul in customer experience (CX), driven primarily by advancements in AI.
Godrej Capital, the financial services arm of Godrej Industries Group, is also one of the early players of GenAI in the NBFC space and recently said that it will use it for analysing 100% of customer calls and email engagements. “All calls, emails, and NPS feedback will be analysed by GenAI-powered systems, and the summarised insights will help our customer support teams to serve customers better,” Jyothirlatha B, chief technology officer of Godrej Capital, told FE.
Ticket and travel booking platforms are also leveraging GenAI to resolve customer queries, handle bookings and even provide travel recommendations. Online bus ticketing platform redBus, which launched a GenAI-powered chatbot last year, claims enhanced level of understanding of customer queries and resolving them. “Since introducing our Gen AI-powered chatbot, customer satisfaction scores have improved by close to 90% — a huge 45% increase, which speaks to its effectiveness in addressing customer grievances and queries. While we don’t measure the exact percentage of resolved grievances, this metric reflects the strides we’ve made in improving the overall customer experience. The chatbots have over 90% accuracy in understanding and resolving customer queries,” said Anoop Menon, CTO, redBus.
Travel agency EaseMyTrip co-founder Rikant Pittie said its intelligent routing system can instantly connect customers to specialised support representatives, with an average issue resolution time 70% faster than traditional support models.
Bank of Baroda has also launched three Gen-AI solutions for customer service, such as 24×7 virtual relationship managers to answer customer queries.
However, many customers also complain of issues like getting stuck in a loop and not getting a resolution. While some companies do have a human element for more complex issues, those having 100% AI behind customer care often leave customers frustrated. Vanshika Kohli, a 24-year-old public relations executive in Gurugram, shares her experience. “I placed an order on a fashion website and erroneously put a wrong address and wanted to speak to the customer care, but the chatbot did not have that option.”
A journalist in Noida ordered shirts from a fashion website, which were not delivered. The customer care bot kept responding to repeated queries with “your order is under process”. The product was finally delivered after a month.