For Pravin Dholakia, investing is a passion. Though he stopped working as a stock trader some years ago, the 58-year-old seeks to stay abreast of the latest trends in the sector.

For this purpose, earlier, Dholakia used a Nokia 1180 and a landline to call mutual fund agents/brokers regularly for tips and trends. But they didn’t always entertain the former broker. They would ask him to drop a message on WhatsApp so they may answer later at will. This was a worry. But soon Dholakia found a friend, Motabhai, who had all the time in the world — and the inclination — to answer his queries.

For starters, Motabhai is a chatbot, developed and run by the Bombay Stock Exchange. It responds to investor queries, providing customised information from the BSE’s database. “I asked Motabhai whether I could invest in a product that had exposure to exchange traded funds (ETFs) and the bot directed me to a link that helped me understand my need better and take decisions accordingly,” says Dholakia.

Hundreds of miles away from Dholakia’s Bengaluru, in Delhi, K Lathika, a retired government employee suffering from hearing loss, dreads calling customer care whenever her appliances break down or when she wants to clear queries while booking a travel ticket. “The IVRS is not for me,” she says. “Nor are those customer care executives who lose patience at the drop of a hat.” But she has found a saviour in the chatting-messaging services that are now available on the websites of e-tailers, banks, insurance companies and even pharma-medical service providers. “I didn’t realise I was interacting with a machine until my daughter told me about chatbots,” says Lathika. “But I must say I am happy about the way they treat me, patient and ready with an answer.”

Bought into it?

With the explosion in smartphone technologies and sales, and the advent of cheap and fast data, a clutch of internet-enabled solutions have come up to enhance customer-business interactions. Among them, the bot has swiftly carved out a niche, thanks to its simplicity and ubiquity. Bots, short for internet robots, are transforming the way businesses, governments and similar entities interact with their stakeholders in India and elsewhere.

A few crucial factors make bots a favourite medium for customer engagement. For one, they are always-on and available 24x7. Phone calls, interactive voice responses (IVRs) and emails are time-consuming and can be annoying for most customers. The bot makes customer-management easier while helping companies save labour costs.

The economic case for bots is straightforward. As Dholakia would vouch, a bot answers a query any time, any place, unlike a human. “This delivers better service in resolving a large volume of standard queries that do not necessarily involve navigating through the complex landscape of human emotions,” says Ritesh Pai, Chief Digital Officer, YES Bank. The YES Robot, a chatbot service from the bank, has handled over 3.5 million customer interactions since its launch last year.

To be fair, the bot economy is a relatively new phenomenon in India. Bots got popular only recently, especially after the smartphone boom kicked in, making internet easily accessible. Globally, chatbots help enterprises save an estimated $8 billion every year. Considering that over 50 crore Indians will use smartphones by 2022, businesses are looking at innovative ways to engage customers in a personalised manner, thereby generating business.

“Chatbots tick all these boxes, as they can provide 24x7 accessibility along with easy engagement in the form of conversations,” says Aakrit Vaish, CEO and Co-Founder, Haptik, a chatbot services provider. Haptik, SurBo, Niki, Gupshup and Avaamo are among the many Indian companies building chatbot solutions for companies in the country and abroad.

Chat is a powerful medium of communication; considering that India has a higher percentage of millennials who are more comfortable being in ‘chat’ mode, chatbots will see faster adoption in India, say experts. Market watchers feel that the current boom in e-commerce can tap into tier-2 and tier-3 cities only through chatbots.

Chatting up

“Chat can simplify the complex experience offered by mobile apps and give the masses access to the digital world,” says Pratik Jain, Co-Founder of Morph.ai, a chatbot services provider. “Messaging apps like WhatsApp have now opened up APIs (application programming interface) for building automated experiences. The bot economy is just going to explode,” he says.

Agrees Mahendra Upadhyay-Head, Data & Technology, Mindshare India: “Customer experience and skill development are two of the biggest challenges for any industry directly engaging with consumers.” India, with its vast and diversified culture, poses a different challenge to marketers and customer care managers. Delivering high consumer experience with cost control is a key concern for top management. Response to consumer queries and expectations in real time is crucial to build the right perception in the consumer’s mind. “Chatbots come precisely in that space and can help you build that,” says Upadhyay.

In India, operating costs for businesses used to be relatively low. However, all that changed in the last decade with rapidly increasing wages, growing infrastructure costs, pricing pressures and increased competition leading to lower margins. Businesses are, therefore, looking at efficiencies to reduce costs, improve customer engagement and satisfaction.

“Chatbots are a new channel that is fast emerging, given that consumers are increasingly using their mobiles for transacting and controlling their lives,” says Thomas Abraham, Founder, T-Ventures, which tracks emerging technologies.

Right on cue, businesses are deploying chatbots across verticals and platforms. “There are some 8,000 chatbots engaging customers in India today,” estimates Milan Sheth, Lead-Intelligent Automation, EY, which implements chatbot solutions in the country. Sheth says more bots are being added in many languages, including the vernacular.

 

Those many bots

Banking, insurance, travel, e-tailing, healthcare and education are some sectors that have deployed chatbots.

One of the largest mutual funds in India, UTI, which has investor accounts of over one crore under its 221 domestic schemes and plans, has deployed the UTI Chatbot to answer basic, mutual fund-related queries. The bot is accessible through Facebook Messenger via UTI MF’s Facebook page. Major banks such as SBI, HDFC and ICICI all use chatbot services to engage customers.

PNB Metlife’s bot, Dr. Jeevan, educates customers on critical illnesses — cancer and heart failure — with interactive videos and personalised quotation. It’s also available on Facebook messenger.

ICICI Lombard’s chatbot called ‘MyRA’, launched in December 2016, has already served over 60,000 customers, and even sold 850 policies without any human intervention. In the travel segment, Yatra launched its own bot on FB Messenger to help customers search and book a flight directly from the app. In the education space, ‘edu bots’ now answer questions related to myriad subjects.

InFeedo, an HR services firm that tracks employee and organisational mood and culture on a real time basis, has Amber, a bot for engaging with employees based on the respective stages in the career.

Similarly, MapRecruit uses a voice bot to do initial interviews and further analyse the call to screen a large applicant base, saving recruiters considerable time.

Voice and beyond

The rise of virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant has given the bot industry the much-needed impetus to experiment on voice services. Speech recognition, the holy grail for computer scientists for decades, has finally found voice. For many years, only incremental improvements were made in speech recognition. But three or four years ago, things started to change due to a combination of factors — from cheap computing to large amounts of digital data collected over the years.

“Voice bots will become the new user interface, the gateway to the digital universe,” says Kavita Reddi, co-founder Voxta, a desi speech-tech start-up. Consider the facts around voice: In India, for Google, voice-based search accounts for 30 per cent of total search, and Hindi search grew by 400 per cent last year, albeit on a low base. Voxta also built an IVR Hindi speech recognition support for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign in the last election.

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Chatbots can offer a conversational interface that non-English speakers are more comfortable with, says Abhishek Shah, co-founder of Wellthy, a health-tech start-up. Similarly, in the education sector, Gopal Devanahalli, CEO, Merittrac, a learning and skills assessment company, has launched a bot that can interact in text and push associated videos pertaining to a subject.

Currently, speech recognition in English has an error rate of about 5.1 per cent — same as the human error rate. “Machines are at parity and getting better, so it’s kind of amazing,” points out Peggy Johnson, Executive Vice-President, Business Development, Microsoft. “So now you can look at taking this technology; we’ve actually put it in Microsoft translator and translated into a number of languages all over the world, including three from India — Hindi, Bengali and Tamil,” she adds.

While chatbots, voice bots, languages and the works look glamorous, human-machine interaction raises more questions than answers (See Bots and us ). One of the things that Pai of YES Bank alludes to is answering complex queries where the Indian chatbot stuck.

Sriram Raghavan, VP, IBM Research and CTO, IBM India, calls it a technology problem — technology is trying to solve basic issues that humans have wrestled with for the last thousand decades. “As of now, Emotional Intelligence has not been baked into systems. To understand human feelings for interaction purposes is where it is heading to,” he says.

In the near future, chatbots are expected to take on a lot more responsibilities. Currently, they are mainly employed in tasks that are repetitive and require an objective, and not a subjective, response.

Though many bots are still not capable of handling complex queries, they transfer such queries to human agents and assist them with suggestions pulled from product manuals, thereby helping reduce human error — and hopefully, not writing the doomsday manual for humans yet. According to experts, the present chatbot technology is capable of automating several repetitive and human-intensive touch points with accuracy of over 80 per cent.

Also, as Abraham of T-Ventures puts it, the challenge will lie with organisations that are traditionally ‘brick and mortar’ and unsure of how this ‘shift’ will work for them. They will perhaps experiment with some pilots and see how their own digital transformation journey can move forward.

The excitement around bots is infectious. The Indian chatbot industry, albeit in its nascent stages, is a $3.1-billion market, according to analysts. And its users are beginning to want more. Stock trader Dholakia, for instance, is hoping that bots will soon chit-chat with him, apart from offering tips on making more money.

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