Companies around the world are leveraging AI (artificial intelligence) to interact with customers. This inclination indicates that customer support significantly depends on AI.

Recent research indicated that India’s call centre customer support market is $33 billion as of December 2024. Additionally, AI-powered systems will directly handle over 50% of customer communications. This will help companies significantly reduce operational costs by more than $400 million per year.

In an interview, K Kirthivasan, CEO of Tata Consultancy Services said “In an ideal phase, there should be minimal incoming call centres. At present, the technology should be able to predict a call and proactively address the customer’s pain point.” He believes AI could significantly impact the traditional call centre model.

The Indian AI-powered customer service market has seen significant growth, with eighteen startups collectively raising over $600 million in funding in the past four years. Gupshup, a conversational messaging platform founded in 2004 has been a major contributor, securing over $400 million in investments.

Several leading payment platforms and e-commerce companies have adopted AI customer support. Meesho, one of the leading e-commerce platforms have launched its gen AI-powered voice bot that handles up to 60,000 calls daily, 95% queries and observed a 50% improvement in response time.

AI-driven chatbots handle 90% of PhonePe’s customer service. This leading payment company has cut its customer support team by 60% in the past five years.

However, an EY report earlier this year indicated that 78% of consumers still prefer human customer support over chatbots. Additionally, 60% of people are not comfortable sharing their personal information with AI-enabled systems as they prefer human interaction more.

While the considerable inclination towards AI suggests that customer support in India is likely to be transformed, these reports indicate this technology will not replace human agents completely.

Source: https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-features/will-ai-end-indias-30-billion-customer-support-industry/