Haptik’s Conversational AI Success Story with Global Brands

Aakrit Vaish, CEO and co-founder of Haptik, joined us at VOICE Global 2021 to discuss how and why chatbots became his company’s main focus. He also shares insights from a recent survey on conversational AI in the FinTech space and details his vision of the future direction voice tech will take.

Finding your voice and growing it

In the beginning, much like the voice tech industry itself, Haptik was involved with many different initiatives at once. Vaish knew voice tech had a promising future, but it wasn’t immediately clear which avenue would be the best fit to provide sustainable growth.

“Back in 2018, there were a bunch of different conversational AI-related offerings in the market. There were skills; there were actions; there were direct-to-consumer products. Then there was voice search and various chatbots: chatbots for commerce, chatbots for support, chatbots for mid-market, large enterprise, do-it-yourself chatbot builders. There was just a lot. And at Haptik, one of our fundamental challenges back then was we found ourselves doing a little bit across too many things,” remembers Vaish.

Haptik finally settled on conversational AI. For Haptik, that means developing chatbots for mid-market enterprises in the customer service space. And that strategic decision has paid off in both the e-commerce and the telecommunications industries - providing Haptik with massive growth in these market segments.

One of the secrets to Haptik’s success in these spaces is zeroing in on industries with simple products. Chatbots are particularly well-suited and provide value to standardized transactions, standardized experiences.

As Vaish explains, “The e-commerce buying experience is now fairly standardized. There’s less complexity in figuring out what shot I want. I mean, it’s more a matter of choice. If you think about the telecommunications industry, you broadly have few plans to pick from, and then you know which plan you want. On the other hand, if you think of complex categories, like, financial services and insurance, we’ve had some success, but I think that’s still waiting to play out a little bit.”

Conversational AI in the financial services space

Shifting his attention to FinTech and financial services, Vaish shares some probing statistics from a survey jointly conducted by Modev and Haptik, entitled Conversational AI in the Financial Services and FinTech Space.

One statistic that stuck out for Vaish is that close to half of the people surveyed had already produced at least one implementation in the voice tech space. Not only that, 70% of those surveyed planned to further invest in voice tech in the coming year. It looks like financial services and FinTech are poised to become significant drivers for growth in the voice tech space.

The report is filled with interesting statistics. For example:

• 48% of those surveyed agree or strongly agree with the statement: “Chatbots are a requirement for any company that engages end-users in customer service.” 26% disagree or strongly disagree.
  
  
• 48% of those surveyed agree or strongly agree with the statement: “Voice and text chat should both be deployed vs. one or the other.” 26% disagree or strongly disagree.
  
  
• 48% of those surveyed agree or strongly agree with the statement: "Companies do not need to develop their own custom assistant because major platforms like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and others can be leveraged.” 20% disagree or strongly disagree.

Clearly, conversational AI is on a path towards growth.

Turning to the future

Asked how he sees conversational AI evolve in the future, Vaish tells us that the Covid-19 pandemic unequivocally accelerated its adoption. He believes that we’re now at a point where most analysts would have expected us to be in a year or two in terms of customer awareness and customer demand for conversational AI. The pandemic really fast-forwarded the adoption of voice tech, and that trend will only get stronger.

“Every single brand or enterprise of any meaningful scale globally, in every market that we operate, has a mandate for either implementing something in voice or something in conversational AI or chat. We’re now seeing dedicated product managers emerge in this space” says Vaish “We now find ourselves very often talking to people involved in voice tech development with a job title of Product Manager, Conversational AI, which again is a great sign of the market maturing.”

The game has changed. And there’s no turning back.

Missed VOICE Global live? Watch Aakrit Vaish as he discusses Haptik’s beginnings, provides some surprising statistics on voice tech in financial services and shares his views on where conversational AI is headed in the future at VOICE Global on-demand here. View the VOICE Global speaker lineup to see what other engaging speakers joined us across various industries.