Meesho Sees 75% Reduction In Customer-Call Costs With Gen-AI Voicebot

Meesho has launched a multilingual, generative artificial intelligence-powered voicebot to automate all of its customer-facing calls, as the e-commerce marketplace strives to optimise costs.

The voicebot currently operates in English and Hindi, with plans to expand to six additional Indian languages. It offers human-like assistance and is currently handling about 60,000 calls daily, and has achieved a 75% reduction in costs compared to human agent calls and a 95% resolution rate, according to Chief Technology Officer Sanjeev Barnwal.

The average call handling time has also gone down from 4 minutes to 2 minutes, a 50% reduction, Barnwal said.

On whether there will be layoffs at Meesho's customer support team, Barnwal said there were no plans as of now and the existing workforce was being upskilled to use for more complex conversations and escalations if needed.

Given that 80% of Meesho's users come from tier 2 cities and beyond, the company said the voicebot was built for performing even on basic smartphones and noisy environments.

In August, Meesho announced the appointment of four independent directors, shoring up its board ahead of an imminent initial public offering. The Bengaluru-based firm named Hari S Bhartia, chairperson of Jubilant Bhartia Group; Rohit Bhagat, chairperson of the board of directors at PhonePe; banking veteran Kalpana Morparia and former Google Vice President Surojit Chatterjee to its board.

The SoftBank-backed e-commerce firm had achieved a remarkable 40% year-on-year growth in total orders during its annual festival sales from Sept. 27 to Oct. 6. The company recorded 145 crore customer visits during the 10-day 'Meesho Mega Blockbuster Sale 2024.