Exclusive Interview with Gaurav Singh, CEO and Founder of Verloop.io

Customer support automation is a form of customer support that is provided to the customers using automated technology such as voice assistants, AI chatbots, etc. It’s basically a streamlined process that reduces or eliminates the amount of human involvement while delivering advice or assistance. Such as booking a ticket, general queries, refund-related questions, etc. Verloop.io is the world’s leading customer support automation platform that enables businesses to deliver delightful support experiences to their customers across channels. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Gaurav Singh, CEO & Founder of Verloop.io.

 

• Brief introduction about Gaurav Singh, what’s the journey behind getting this particular idea.

I started coding when I was 13 years old. As I grew up in Rewa, Madhya Pradesh (a small town about 400 kilometers away from the capital Bhopal) getting access to the right information was a challenge. It was my passion for technology that helped me to stride on. Another thing that I was clear about was that I wanted to start something of my own. However, I did not dive right into it. After my graduation, I worked in companies such as TCS, LT Research, and Vizury to understand the functioning before starting my venture GoDeliver. GoDeliver was acquired by MagicTiger and shortly after this, I founded Verloop.io at the age of 25.

The biggest challenge that all companies and brands face in this age of instant gratification is engaging with customers and building loyalty. The challenges become even more pronounced in mature markets. Verloop.io was started with the objective of plugging in this need gap. I realized that there needs to be a far superior technology solution in the market — one that can bring an unprecedented level of personalization in customer interaction. Verloop.io through its Conversation AI helps brands to connect better with their customers and solve their queries more efficiently in lesser time and cost.

 

• Can you explain about Verloop.io

Verloop.io is the world’s leading customer support automation platform that enables businesses to deliver delightful support experiences to their customers across channels. Founded in 2015, Verloop.io has been instrumental in supporting global brands to effortlessly, and accurately scale up their customer support in a secure manner. We provide a Conversational AI product for Customer Support Teams. What this means is that we are hyper focussed on creating features that enable B2C brands to automate, personalize and scale support conversations with their customers.

Our messaging layer is equipped to handle over 100k concurrent connections and processes over 4.3 million messages per second. We started automating chat in the year 2017-18 and we have seen great adoption with brands like Nykaa, Decathlon, Lido Learning amongst other global brands such as ADIB and Landmark Group.

 

• We have been seeing AI-based chatbots across many industries, what are theTOP 5 industries, and what its advantages are in terms of revenue growth 

In terms of the top industries: Banking, Insurance, eCommerce, EdTech, Real Estate have seen the largest deployment over the last couple of years. Although travel and tourism brands have been negatively impacted, we are seeing as the world opens up, a lot of travel & tourism brands are looking to optimize customer journeys. There are two-fold advantages in terms of new growth

1. Pre-Sale: When any new customer is searching for information or product, a bot would be able to build personalized recommendations to ensure a smoother experience and acceleration towards revenue

2. Post-Sale: This is where the new moat or differentiation is being built with B2C brands. Customers today want their queries resolved on the channel and time of their choice. And with Conversational AI, forward-looking brands are able to deliver on the same, leading to higher retention and thus higher profitability

 

• What is the success rate of introducing Conversational AI to the conventional approach?

Verloop.io helps brands enable them to answer data-driven queries without interfacing with customer support, enabling live agents to access all information from a single platform and increasing agent efficiency through historical and contextual customer information

Brands that have adopted Verloop.io have seen a 2x increase in their Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT) and a 5x increase in the agent effectiveness within 3-6 months. This has also resulted in a significant drop in call volumes to call centres, as automation deflected a lot of queries. This in turn has resulted in annualized cost savings of more than $1Bn dollars across our clients.

 

• What’s the USP (unique selling point) of Verloop.

Verloop.io is Conversational AI for Customer Support. Our USP is that we are super focused on the Customer Support space. Our product is built ground up for Customer Support, whether it is the data that we surface (Agent Effectiveness, NPS, CSAT, Bot Performance, Average Handling Time amongst others) or the narrow ML models we have for multiple industries that ensure brands get higher precision and coverage when they deploy Verloop.io out of the box.

We ensure brands that use Verloop.io are enabled to deliver delightful support experiences to their customers at scale. Given Customer Support functions have a lot of silo tools, Verloop.io offers integrations to 140+ products across ticketing, CRM, marketing, and analytics that help support agents to develop rich user-profiles and build campaigns that increase customer experience.

 

• Funding received (if any)

In 2020, Verloop.io leapfrogged to become one of the biggest chat automation processors in India. To pave way for further growth, we have also established a new office in Abu Dhabi office and established Verloop Labs Limited. Continuing on the growth chart, we had raised Series A Funding in August 2020. At that juncture, we had raised $5 million through Falcon Edge Capital along with existing investors IDFC Parampara, Kris Gopalkrishnan, and K Ganesh.

We are also investing as much as $2.5 million into developing super bots that can understand natural languages, called NLP super bots, for improving support automation.

 

• User base you have achieved till now.

Verloop.io has been adopted by 200+ brands across India, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. In the course of its journey, Verloop.io has processed over 4 billion queries from customers across its clients, with over 100 million unique users having interacted with its platform.

 

We are looking to expand both in terms of markets and product. With the launch of our Voice bot, we are looking to build an Operating system for Customer Support. Our first and second phase of growth was in the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East from which we have seen great adoption across India, GCC (UAE, Qatar, Saudi, etc.), South Africa, and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand) with new countries adding to 30% of growth.

Our third phase of growth will be marked in terms of expansion in the Americas (North and South America) and Europe. We aim to establish a global footprint by 2022 and enable brands to build a truly delightful support experience for their customers.

 

• How do you see the chatbot space panning out amid the pandemic?

As brands mature, the chatbot space will also mature with it. Simple rule-based FAQ bots with limited language capabilities will not be able to help brands a lot. Similarly, hard rule-based chatbots that do not have a narrow set of machine learning models for specific industry use-cases will fail to show the impact brands truly require to digitally transform their customer support. We foresee chatbots getting industry-specific. As per the data that we have, we have seen that the industry-wise queries differ substantially. We see current chatbot providers maturing into other channels.