More Than 1 Bn Users Will Interact With Chatbots In 2023: Exotel

As advancements in Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) continue, regular interaction with chatbots will become a mundane part of daily life. Businesses across sectors are adopting the technology en masse, changing the very face of the customer experience economy. In an interview with Businessworld, Angira Agrawal, Global SVP & GTM, Strategy, Exotel, spoke about the state of conversational AI in 2023, deregulations encouraging the use of emerging communications technology, as well as the enterprise use cases for 5G.  

What is your view on the interplay between bots and human agents for customer support? Do bots provide enough of a cost-cutting incentive to fully replace human interference for customer support? 
There is a lot of excitement on how bots can really help improve customer support, enhanced more so with the recent ChatGPT launch. As of now, my view is that for standard information queries, bots can easily replace human intervention for customer support. And with multiple customer queries being handled at the same time (potentially unlimited, depending on the infrastructure), the costs are going to be significantly lower. Companies can achieve up to 30 per cent customer support cost savings in 18-24 months.

In addition to costs, there is another interplay between bots and human agents that can also help. Bots can assist agents by giving them vital pieces of information during their interaction with customers, thus enabling them to drive more effective communications, resulting in enhanced customer experience.  

How do chatbots affect customer retention? Are customers becoming more comfortable interacting with bots?
A lot of chatbots today are integrated with standard social messaging tools that users use e.g. WhatsApp, etc. With that happening, for the user there is no change in the fundamental interface, and that is really enabling the adoption of chatbots with our customer base. 

One of the biggest advantages of chatbots is that there is no wait time – at any time of the day or night – they are available 24/7. That significantly improves the experience customers get when a company has decided to deploy chatbots as part of their customer support. 

Users are finding this extremely useful. In addition, where there are no emotions in play, and the customer need is for standard information, customers are definitely becoming more comfortable. Also, the NLP and ML tools have brought about significant improvements in the quality of interactions, resulting in more and more customers getting comfortable interacting with bots. 

What are some conversational AI trends that you foresee for 2023?
The global market is estimated to grow between 25-28 per cent in the next 5 years. In my view, 2023 is the year that a lot of digital-native businesses are focusing on getting to profitability, and that means reducing the cost to serve over the customer life cycle.  

Traditional companies are also moving fast and hard into digital transformation, with that being on the agenda of at least 50 per cent of the boards. This means that there will be a massive uptake, with more and more early stage use cases moving into mainstream, and mainstream use cases moving towards scalability. 

In addition to assisting customer support, I also see conversational AI coming into play with various other business functions e.g. employer-employee interactions, training and education, partner ecosystem management, etc. A result of the increase in use cases is that there are estimated to be close to 1bn users using chatbots by the end of 2023.

In November 2022, it was announced that Exotel has received a Unified Licence for Virtual Network Operator (ULVNO) from the DoT, which may signify increasing deregulatory reforms. Can you comment on the outlook for the tech and telecom industry in terms of ease of doing business going forward?

The Digital India initiatives by the Government of India have resulted in multiple newer technologies being adopted, with the Government being a strong catalyst in accelerating this digital transformation. 

The COVID-19 Pandemic played a strong role as well, where the realisation that businesses need to continue operating, no matter where their employees were, further drove this transition.  

Multiple policy papers have been published, seeking inputs on what the next generation of communication technologies should be. The Government has been introducing various reforms to increase liquidity for various players, and also ease up operational issues, aligning India to the global best practices.

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has recently started a process to identify 5G spectrum bands that can be used for captive non-public networks. What use cases do you see emerging for these private 5G networks? 

The process to start rolling this out is going to be a game changer for industries that operate in a very localised area, but have the need for high throughput/low latency communications. 

Use cases include: mining operations, manufacturing, port operations, healthcare, etc. 

There can be instant communications between various industrial machines at these locations, using real-time data to make optimal decisions. 

In healthcare, hospitals can ensure all their equipment and staff are connected, and are not subject to interference from external entities. These networks will be more flexible to specific needs, secured from the broader network, and give telecom companies (if sub-leased from them) the opportunity to utilise their underutilised spectrum.

Multiple technologies will come into play, such as IOT/M2M, edge computing, robotics and Augmented Reality (AR) to take advantage of this technology.