Oppo India Partners With Skit.AI To Introduce Voicebot To Deal With Customer Queries
Oppo India has introduced a new AI-based robot for customer service in the country. The smartphone maker has partnered with Bangalore-based voice AI SaaS (software as a service) company Skit.AI to launch the service. As part of this new partnership, Skit.ai's digital voice agent will now help the brand answer customer queries in real time.
Oppo's new voice bot is trained to answer questions in English and Hindi. You can answer questions about parts, new equipment, the nearest service center and appointments. The idea behind a voice bot is to handle basic questions and customer service representatives will focus on more complex issues.
"We are also adding an appointment service for this particular route. So if you don't have time now and want to visit later, Voicebot can also schedule you," Customer Care Manager Sarab Chaturvedi told indianexpress.com. One, adding that they have a baby with the new service.
According to Chaturvedi, one of the problems customers face is asking for the address of the service center.
Of course, building a voice bot especially for the diverse Indian market is not an easy task. According to Sourab Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Skit.ai, there are many challenges when building such a bot. "The way people speak in India is very different from the rest of the world. And by that I mean the number of accents and dialects, how our addresses are created, etc. We had a lot of work to do before talking to clients like Oppo," explained Gupta. Skit.AI claims to have built all the technology from scratch.
Gupta explained that with a client like Oppo, Skit.AI needs to be very hands-on. We spend time with the internal team, understand what the questions are, why people are calling. "Our team listens to call recordings and then we design our workflow and continue to optimize," he said.
Oppo and Skit.AI hope that using voice bots will bring more efficiency in handling customer calls and reduce customer wait times, which is disappointing. “No, we either want to use the bot or we don't. Whether the customer wants to chat with a bot or wait an hour to talk to an agent, they may be frustrated because the agent has been on the line for the past six hours.
And while Voicebot is a complementary tool, it still doesn't completely replace a customer service manager. "I've always believed that all questions are difficult to answer. That's why we've gone step-by-step and we're going with the easiest ones, the closed-ended answers that say, OK, give me the answer. There's the 'direction' of Oppo Chaturvedi."
For more detailed questions, Oppo always relies on customer service managers. The company plans to upgrade the system next year to see if the bot can handle more sophisticated and complex queries.
