Dukaan's chatbot Lina is prompt and efficient but needs human help

The chatbot is being trained to respond to more technical queries in customer, product and inventory analytics

Suumit Shah, founder and CEO of e-commerce platform Dukaan, came under Twitter fire on Tuesday when he announced that his company had replaced 90 per cent of its customer care staff with artificial intelligence (AI). Shah went on to explain in a tweet thread why the move was necessary, how the new AI chatbot — Lina — had solved the company’s cost-optimisation needs, and what the chatbot’s salient features were.

“Honestly, I was as skeptical as a cat at a dog show. Coz I've seen the nature of customer queries on Dukaan, thousands of them. It ranges from ‘how to add multiple warehouses?’ to ‘Mera payout aaj nahi mila to zahar khake mar jaunga’ (if I don’t get my payout today, I will consume poison)’,” he tweeted.

Later in the thread, he implied that Lina was not only capable of handling such queries but had also reduced the time to first response from one minute and 44 seconds to “instant”; the resolution time from 2 hours and 13 minutes to 3 minutes and 12 seconds; and had brought down customer support costs for the company by 85 per cent. Shah also pointed out in the thread that users of Dukaan will have access to their own Lina-like AI- assistant, the Bot9.ai, which will help Dukaan-hosted businesses to respond to customer queries instantaneously.

With its results as promising as these and the cost of its installation as high as 90 per cent of Dukaan’s customer care workforce, Business Standard decided to take Lina for a test drive.

Founded in May 2020, the Dukaan App is a rapidly growing do it yourself (DIY) SaaS platform that enables merchants, retailers and others with zero programming skills to set up their own e-commerce store using a smartphone in barely 30 seconds, according to the company’s website. The e-commerce platform offers several paid plans for business owners to avail stratified packages of its services. 

So we asked Lina for help with setting up an account, and then a website dedicated to delivering fresh green groceries and produce within 10 minutes of ordering.

We began by asking for recommendations for setting up supply chains, connecting with local vendors, and building inventories, before moving to queries regarding managing products and inventories, marketing, payments, and logistics.

Lina did well on these queries. The replies were near instant and comprehensive. Most of the initial responses were a set of numbered steps for setting up product specifications, adding warehouses, and specifying shipping preferences. The response time for longer lists was longer.

Lina also prompts you towards more specific queries regarding aspects the AI might have mentioned but did not explain in full detail in the previous responses.

As long as the solution is available on the Dukaan dashboard, Lina will sort out an easy and quick roadmap for you to navigate through these various options, settings and commands. As with most chatbots or other generative AI services, Lina does require you to carefully phrase your queries, without typos or omittance in key terms.

The bot responds to queries in multiple languages like English, Marathi and other regional languages.

However, it does get tricky with more complex questions.

For instance, we decided to pose the questions Shah mentioned in his tweet: on how to add multiple warehouses and on how to strategise better to get payouts from local vendors.

While the first one brought out a standard list of instructions, the second had Lina stumped. The bot sounded a lot like Siri or Alexa, as it sympathised with us for our distress, but ultimately referred us to customer support.

Moreover, with increasingly prodding queries regarding payments to warehouses and local vendors or managing monthly supply from producers and local farmers’ markets, Lina came up with brief, surficial responses before obsessively redirecting us to the ‘customer support’ button.

When we finally did press the support button, it wasn’t a human representative that responded on chat. The only option given was to email the company’s support department. For most users, this can be a turn-off, given how tardy and longwinded email conversations tend to become with the customer support team. Also, this limits the possibility of an instantaneous response to urgent queries.

In response to Business Standard’s query Shah said, “The customer support crew at Dukaan needs to have a deep understanding of marketing, tech and finance to solve the most standard queries. This meant that the responses were slow and not always accurate. With Lina's help, responses to standard and preliminary queries are now instantaneous. We are of course training the chatbot in more complex and technical queries regarding customer, inventory, and product analytics, but this will take some time. Until then, the customers can connect with the core customer support team over email.”

While Lina is quick, precise and effective for early-stage queries, customers are likely to miss a human representative when it comes to more customised and individual needs and queries.

How does the Dukaan app work

 Founded in May 2020, the Dukaan app is a rapidly growing do-it-yourself (DIY) SaaS platform
 

 The e-commerce platform offers several paid plans for business owners to avail stratified packages of its services
 

 Helps merchants and retailers with zero programming skills to set up their own e-commerce store using a smartphone in 30 seconds