Meesho slashes customer service cost by 75% with Gen AI-powered voice bot

Affordable ecommerce platform Meesho has launched a multilingual Gen AI-powered voice bot for customer support with personalised, human-like assistance. 

While the feature is still being scaled up, it already handles 60,000 calls every day, the company said in a media roundtable. 

The voice bot has features like intelligent interruption handling which allows it to distinguish between casual affirmations (like “yes,” “ji,” or “okay”) and genuine interruptions. Moreover, considering that about 45% of Meesho's sales come from Tier IV cities, the voice bot was built to perform on basic smartphones and in noisy environments. 

While the company didn't reveal the data on customer query cost savings since the model is still being scaled, Meesho said the tool has already brought down costs by 75%, along with a 10% higher customer satisfaction score. 

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With the AI-powred tool, Meesho will look to repurpose and upskill its existing fleet of customer service representatives to handle more complex user queries as well as reach out to suppliers for ads and quality checks for catalogues. 

“Over the last two, three years, we have been applying AI across home personalisation, ranking, recommendation, making our searches better, making our address multilingual, a bunch of other things, like fraud detection, and a lot of other use cases. So we'll continue to figure out where else to be applying AI,” Sanjeev Barnwal, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Meesho, noted in the media roundtable. 

The voice bot currently manages to resolve 95% of queries without human intervention and has also contributed to a 50% improvement in average handle time, suggesting quicker support and higher efficiency, the company noted.

Aside from expanding the voice-bot-to-query buckets beyond order, delivery, and refunds, Meesho will now focus on adding more languages beyond Hindi and English. It plans to include Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. 

Meesho is also looking to improve the voice bot's more personalised assistance options with more empathetic understanding.