Haptik — Amidst the booming chatbot market

A recent report by TMR has revealed that the global chatbot market is projected to attain a valuation of US $0.94 bn by the end of 2024 progressing from US $0.11 bn earned in 2015. The market is expected to rise at an excellent CAGR of 27.8% by volume between 2016 and 2024.

The chatbot market is perceived to be highly consolidated with few players in the market holding 90% of the share. The leading players in the market are the bigwigs Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, but there are certain startups that have made their mark with their chatbot services. From India, Mumbai-based Haptik is one among those several other global players that contribute to the complete development of the Indian chatbot market.

Haptik has emerged as a significant player in the enterprise bot integration space providing a complete conversational AI platform for customers facing user cases such as Lead generation, Support, Engagement, and Customer feedback.

The upswinging bots market

Aiming to clock a revenue of$2 million by March 2019 as a chatbot service provider, Aakrit Vaish, co-Founder of Haptik nails down few details for Voice&Data on how chatbots are bringing a new paradigm to the customer service as a smart communication platform and how chatbots form the crux of AI-assisted digital marketing strategies.

Aakrit Vaish understands the chatbot market in and out! He says large enterprises are increasingly looking to introduce business process automation activities and implement new age solutions such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning etc. in optimizing critical business functions. Chatbots, according to Vaish, are being implemented across domains such as fin-tech, banks, e-commerce, healthcare, travel etc. and entrepreneurs are choosing them to tap in the numerous benefits bot-based engagement provides.

Cashing on this, Haptik aims to ride on the wave of chatbots revolution and further strengthen its position as the leading global provider of conversational AI solutions by collaborating with a large number of clients across industries and geographies (US, UK, Canada) and focusing on developing innovative user cases for bot deployment.

Vaish reveals that Haptik has associated itself with some of the biggest global and Indian brands, assisting in customer service and support, brand development, enhancing operational efficiency etc. An accelerated uptake of the chatbot technology was strongly sensed as Indian enterprises were gradually opening up to the idea of incorporating bots in their operations. Another strong reason for the surge in demand for chatbots was observed when the immediate positive outcome of business growth with chatbot deployment by some of the enterprises actually piqued the curiosity of their competitors. Simply put, the flexibility, scalability, cost-efficiency and consistency of communication generated by chatbots have made India’s top enterprises and entrepreneurs actively involved and interested in the chatbot revolution.

As a testimony to the advantages of chatbot services, Haptik showcased an example. The company’s support bot was integrated with India’s premier fantasy gaming platform, Dream11, to cater to the rising number of queries during the one-month long IPL tournament. The bot helped the platform manage 30 times the growth in traffic, handling 80% of the 1 million queries at a substantially lesser cost than required to train a large number of human agents on the job.

 Chatbot trends in India

Increasing technological advancement has contributed to the evolution of chatbots and has propelled their demand. Vaish says that chatbots have ceased to remain just an automated conversational tool without much use to become state-of-the-art interactive solutions that record, analyze and interpret data to aid the management’s decision-making process.

The Indian start-up ecosystem is experiencing a period of upsurge after going through a lean phase, and the entire ecosystem is very excited about implementing new age solutions such as AI, Machine learning, Data Analytics etc. and to see how they improve their enterprise’s performance.

Tracking the trend, Vaish expresses that domains such as fin-tech, banking, e-commerce, travel, hospitality etc. have particularly expressed immense interest in implementing these technologies, and have even experienced great results. These segments have a lot of dimensions involved and it becomes difficult to streamline the operations and manage them through conventional ways. “The intervention of automated technologies has had a massive impact on this front, managing multiple interactions, recording information to draw actionable insights and offering consistent communication standards to generate great end-user feedback. As a result, these solutions have been in high demand, and the numbers of automation inclusive organizations are expected to rise significantly across the globe in the next few years,” outlines Vaish.

Chalked out scale-up plans for Haptik bots

Haptik is investing significantly to comprehensively enhance across its platform capabilities and develop evolved offerings for enterprises. Vaish says the company is currently focusing on developing vernacular language based bots and voice assistance bots to establish a strong base among users from tier-II and III Indian cities. “We aim to develop the most robust framework of vernacular language based and voice assistance/text-to-speech based bots to help a major segment of the population use the internet to their fullest advantage,” envisions Vaish.

Apart from adding multi-lingual and voice capabilities to Haptik’s bots, Vaish reveals that the company is also investing substantially in its chat management platform, so that enterprises get a holistic platform to manage all of their customer interactions using Haptik’s agent chat interface and analytics dashboard.

All said! The chatbot market though looks lucrative there are certain factors that may hamper the growth of the chatbot market. Vaish indicates that one of the major factors is lack of expertise and little awareness about the use of chatbot and its benefits. In addition, to develop a tech-savvy surrounding involves high cost for deployment, security, management, and have integration complexities that might discourage individuals to use chatbot facility. Thus, these factors are responsible for deterring the market growth across various economies. However, Vaish suggests that by confronting these issues and resolving these issues might minimize these restraints and create high growth opportunities for the market in the near future.