Yellow.ai, a conversational CX automation startup, has witnessed a significant increase in clients during the pandemic, according to Raghu Ravinutala, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer.Yellow.ai has 60% of its customers in India including Mi, Food Panda, Tata Motors, Bajaj Finserv, Byju’s, Adani Capital, Sephora, Renault, and Siemens.
“Before the start of the pandemic, we had about 100 customers. Over the last 18 months, we have seen the customers grow from 100 to about 900,” Ravinutala said. “Our technology almost became a must-have solution during the pandemic. There was a sudden a gap in the distribution because the physical stores were not available, and brands needed instant ways of engaging with their customers.”
He went on to say that WhatsApp has emerged as one of the primary platforms via which the company could engage and enable commerce in a short space of time. Furthermore, he added that when employees moved back home, there were many questions about the transition.
“The companies were able to successfully provide business continuity by enabling automation in terms of addressing the employee base, even with very minimal addition of support loads. So that is two virtual assistants inside the offices of these enterprises. So, these have been phenomenal drivers and it’s been a great tailwind for the entire sector, and especially for us as a company,” Ravinutala explained.
He noted that the company has spent close to $25 million developing the platform and would continue to do so to expand multilingual capabilities, voice capabilities, and research and development on natural language processing and compositional analytics.
