When India was grappling with the deadly second wave, Verloop.io joined hands with KVN Foundation’s Mission Million Air bot to help people with the procurement and distribution of oxygen cylinders. To use this, a customer just had to send a “Hi” message to a WhatsApp number and the chatbot would help users find the help they needed. Indeed, a simple process! 

Now, with the pandemic slowly fading away - we have already transitioned into the new age of digital engagement. Here, customers' experience (CX) relies heavily on how smoothly they can engage with the brands across channels. 

Back in 2016, Gaurav Singh led the foundation of Verloop.io as a customer support automation platform. Gaurav is the CEO & founder at Verloop.io and the company is enabling businesses to deliver delightful support experiences across channels in a secure manner.  

Trends to look for in the Conversational AI domain 

Conversation AI, according to Gaurav, is changing the customer support landscape and giving brands an edge in customer engagement. The tech is proliferating across industries and the trends are quite observable, 

• Businesses are increasingly relying on conversational AI to automate basic, time-consuming tasks such as level 1 support queries and frequently asked questions.  
• Gaining acceptance as a tool to minimise human errors in the customer service space, offer a quick resolution to the queries and help complete transactions smoothly. 
• With the evolution of technology in this space, chatbot conversations are now becoming more human-like. It can gauge customers’ intent and respond accordingly. Conversational AI is also now pivoting from a text-based service to a voice-enabled one. 

The rise of conversational commerce is another major trend as it allows interaction between brands and customers with the help of digital messaging and voice-assisted technology. It is not only a cost-effective tool but offers a personalised experience to every customer.  

Integrating AI for better solutions 

To date, Verloop.io has worked with over 5,000 brands including ClearTrip, Nykaa, Decathlon, Dar Al Arkan, Fetchr, Livpure, Adani Capital, DSP Mutual Fund, Rentomojo, and Scripbox.  

“Conversational AI interacts with customers through chatbots and voice-bots and enhances their experience by offering timely resolutions when they want. These contextual, natural conversations, allows customers to find relevant information, resolve queries, transact and even track orders,” said Gaurav. 

It allows brands to be available 24×7. In addition to this, conversational AI is able to respond quickly to customers and offer resolution on a real-time basis. Customers in this also have the option to choose their channel and language of communication at their convenience. 

Conversational AI is not just limited to the private sector, but government bodies such as electricity boards with the help of chatbots enable consumers to check their billed/unbilled amount, make payments, register complaints and also get a duplicate copy of their bill if they need one. Also, municipal corporations across Indian cities can use Conversational AI to handle grievances across their citizens and reply to queries 24*7 without the need to scale Customer Support operations.  

Challenges at hand 

Over the period of time, Conversational AI applications have become simple to use and standardised for everybody but there are still a few challenges that they need to overcome, 

• People like to interact in their native language. While the new-age chatbots are supporting multiple languages but there are still limitations in this regard.  
• In the case of Voice AI, handling different dialects can be a challenge, especially when there is a lot of ambient noise as it can impact the comprehension capabilities of the AI.  
• Further, tonalities and feelings such as sarcasm are hard to gauge even for humans.  

 So, what’s next 

“Our vision is to become the Operating System for Customer Support. What this means is that tomorrow any organisations (brands, govts, not-for-profits) that are consumer-facing can plug in the Verloop.io system on top of the existing systems to build and deliver delightful support experiences,” said Gaurav. 

“Not only that, but we will also enable them with data insights that are actionable through which they can positively impact their customer’s experience,” he added.  

Towards this vision, the company has now developed their Voice AI which is a plug and play voice bot that enables brands to deliver seamless customer support through inbound and outbound calls.  

“We are also putting a substantial effort in terms of research and engineering behind developing NLP super bots that can go up to high levels of accuracy and coverage,” concluded Gaurav.