AI helps India’s Meesho cut customer call costs by 75%

Softbank-backed Meesho has rolled out what it claims to be India’s first generative AI-powered voice bot among e-commerce firms for customer support, paring down some expenses by 75%.

The Bengaluru-based e-commerce startup, which serves 160 million customers in India, said Tuesday its AI bot currently handles 60,000 customer calls daily in English and Hindi. The startup, which also counts Prosus and Elevation among its backers, plans to add support for six more Indian languages.

Rather than developing its own large language model, Meesho has for now combined existing AI large language models with custom-built components that understand local context and language nuances. The system includes specialized building blocks for speech recognition and natural language processing.

“We haven’t built our own LLM because we believe the off-the-shelf ones available out there were doing well in Hindi and English,” said Sanjeev Barnwal, co-founder and chief technology officer of Meesho, in an interview with TechCrunch.

The system had to overcome several technical hurdles, he showed TechCrunch in a demo. “Voice quality matters a lot. Many users are on low-end smartphones and there’s often noisy background like buses honking,” said Barnwal. The bot had to be engineered to improve latency and filter out street noise while maintaining natural-sounding conversations.

The startup, which recently generated positive cash flow, said the voice bot had cut the per-call cost to the firm by 75%, but declined to elaborate on the expenses. The startup also claimed a 95% query resolution rate through the bot, with only 5% of calls requiring human intervention. Customer satisfaction has also improved by 10%, it said.

Meesho said that the voice bot has reduced its average customer call handling time by half, but asserted that the technology wasn’t aimed at replacing human agents, who is said had been redirected to handle more complex queries and seller support.

Another key challenge was preventing the AI from straying beyond strict guidelines about policies like returns and refunds.

The rollout underscores how India’s tech companies are racing to deploy AI to become more efficient, even as they weigh whether to build proprietary models or rely on existing ones.

“I don’t think we have the enough talent today to build the foundational models. Play the war that you are capable of winning,” said Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at Lightspeed, at a recent conference.

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