- By Vaamanaa Sethi
- Wed, 12 Jul 2023 12:41 PM (IST)
- Source:JND
Founder and CEO of ecommerce firm Dukaan, Summit Shah, said that the company has sacked over 90% of its staff in the customer support department and has replaced it with artificial intelligence (AI) Chatbots.
Shah wrote in his Tweet, “ We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.”
Dukaan is a DIY platform enabling merchants with no programming experience to establish their own e-commerce stores. As per reports, the company was grappling with customer support challenges. Shah saw the AI revolution as an opportunity to address this issue.
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As the post gained traction on social media, Shah got a huge backlash from users across the platform for his harsh decision which would impact the lives of its affected employees.
He further went on explaining saying that the decision was necessary and challenging as the company intends to turn profitable. He said, “Given the state of the economy, startups are prioritising "profitability" over striving to become "unicorns", and so are we.”
He further went on to say that the response time decreased from more than two hours to three minutes and that costs associated with customer support were reduced by 85%.
“Time to first response went from 1m 44s to INSTANT! Resolution time went from 2h 13m to 3m 12s Customer support costs reduced by ~85%,” he further wrote in his Tweet.
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He even mentioned that the chatbot named Lina had already resolved 1400 support tickets.
The company has also introduced a platform that provides each user with their own AI assistant. Shah elaborated on this concept, envisioning a scenario where merchants would have an AI assistant familiar with their business intricacies, capable of instantly addressing customer queries, and available 24/7, including personalised inquiries.
At the end of his tweet thread, Shah mentioned that Dukaan is actively hiring for various positions in AI, product design, and e-commerce. A post mentioning about layoffs and ending with seeking new people also drew criticism from various users.
