An Exclusive Interview with Sarvagya Mishra, Co-Founder and Director, SuperBot

A SaaS platform is a type of software as a service that user's access via the internet. Also called web-based software or on-demand software, SaaS is different from traditional software because it's not installed on computers. When a business wants to buy software, chances are they're looking for SaaS, or software as a service. SuperBot is an intelligent, AI-powered, SaaS-based platform bridging the communication gap between organisations and their stakeholders with easy-to-deploy, easy-to-scale smart conversational solutions.

Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sarvagya Mishra, Co-founder and Director of SuperBot.

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Launched in 2018, SuperBot is an intelligent, AI-powered, SaaS-based platform bridging the communication gap between organisations and their stakeholders with easy-to-deploy, easy-to-scale smart conversational solutions. It operates under the aegis of its parent organisation, PinnacleWorks, and is headquartered in Gurugram. SuperBot has two variants, textual and voice. While the textual version for Education and Healthcare, the voice version can be adopted by any industry/vertical.

The latter is an AI-driven conversational platform that enables smart dialogues with humans over telephony channels that comes with features such as multiple human voice-overs, language support in several regional languages, and customisable speed, pitch, and voice modulation. SuperBot can manage over 1 million inbound and outbound calls, allowing businesses to place and receive over 1,000 calls concurrently.

Our healthcare-centric offering, SmartBot for Healthcare, leverages deep integrations with lead sources, path lab ERPs and hospital management systems to accomplish tasks such as pushing leads, payment collection, fetching patient information and reports, checking doctor availability, and making/rescheduling appointments, etc. The customer never leaves the unified chat window; the system addresses the query and leads them to the most appropriate resolution by utilising smart heuristic algorithms that are trained exhaustively on multiple specific use-cases. This allows healthcare service providers to engage with their patients with greater accuracy and efficacy while optimising costs and delivering a much higher level of customer service and satisfaction.

SuperBot for Education is India's first AI-driven counseling agent that streamlines counseling operations for educational institutions. Built on cutting-edge natural language understanding and machine learning algorithms, this AI-powered chatbot covers 80% of the possible queries that an education institute can receive and responds in 2-3 seconds with the most relevant resolution. It is available 24×7 and can be integrated with 20+ conversation channels such as website, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Skype, Google Assistant, and WhatsApp.

With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Ankit and I had the idea for SuperBot when we were leading PinnacleWorks, its parent organisation that operates in the education space, and noticed that our counselors were unable to respond to student queries in a timely manner despite working for around 12 hours a day. This delay was hurting our business; the time gap between the query and its response was leading to the loss of many viable leads.

Then there was the issue of scalability. The most obvious solution – hiring more certified counselors – would have taken much more time, effort, and capital than we, as a young business, could afford. Moreover, this didn't solve the long-term challenge as we would have been back in the same position soon. It was ineffective, unsustainable, and put a cap on how fast, or how much, we could grow our operations. We knew that technology held the answer to our growth challenge but there was another snag: no solution available in the market offering the kind of personalisation that we wanted to deliver to our users. In view of this need-gap, we built SuperBot for education, an automated chat agent that utilised analytics and AI to understand the sentiment behind user queries and respond to them instantaneously in a human-like manner.

Within six months of launch, we served more than 3 million queries and converted over 10,000 leads. By 2019, SuperBot was being used by more than 50 organisations across India – including top names such as ICFAI Business School, UPES, ApeejayStya University, AISECT Group, BBD University, Parul University, and Bennett University – to streamline all counseling-related tasks. It was auto following-up with potential leads, scheduling campus visits, sending out notices and circulars, and offering integrated online payment options for students enrolling in courses.

The response made us realise that SuperBot had potential beyond just being a chat agent for the education sector. Soon, we were integrating voice capabilities into the platform and expanding its tech architecture to make it the smart, industry-agnostic communication platform of choice for businesses across sectors.

Today, the SuperBot platform has more than 1000 voice bots exhaustively trained on 100+ use-cases for multiple industries and business verticals, as well as to understand regional dialects, intent, and colloquialisms across languages as diverse as English, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telegu, Kannada and Bengali. On the delivery side, the platform is capable of handling over 1 million calls a day – while delivering a query response efficiency rate of 90% and above. The accuracy, speed, volume, and ease of deployment make SuperBot one of the most scalable and impactful communication platforms currently available in the market. As a result, we have been able to steadily grow our year-on-year revenues by 2.5X since our inception and, today, cater to 100+ businesses across more than 5 sectors, including healthcare, education, event management, and MSME and retail.

Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

Ankit and I are both techies since the beginning and have won several awards for excellence and innovation from the earliest stages of our careers. For instance, Ankit was the winner of the CSC Innovation Icon Contest in 2007 and was a TGMC Top 20 Rank Holder. I was a TGMC Rank 2 Holder and, during my time with Ericsson, have won recognitions such as the Best UI Designer Award from ADMS Practice for the CSI ADM Unit, the Jolt Award from the R&D Department of Ericsson AB (Sweden), and the Power Award from Ericsson India. We have also been jointly recognised as part of the 30 Best Consultants to Watch in 2019 by The CEO Magazine.

As an organisation, our innovative approach has also won multiple industry recognitions over the years. SuperBot's parent organisation, PinnacleWorks, is an ISO 9001:2015 certified company and is a recognised start-up under the Start-Up India initiative. It was also named amongst 25 Fastest-Growing Marketing Companies in 2018 by The CEO Magazine and the Companies in Focus 2019 by Business Connect.

Brief us about yourself your contributions to the company and the industry.

SuperBot has two founders: Ankit and me. He spearheads technology, finance, and operations and is responsible for day-to-day execution and functioning. I, on the other hand, oversee tech, sales, and business development functions and am responsible for managing the tech stack powering the SuperBot platform, as well as driving new business initiatives and market strategy.

In terms of contribution, Ankit has been integral in motivating and handling the team, solving everyday challenges, and making sure that everything is on track and functioning perfectly. My contribution to SuperBot has ranged from defining the initial go-to-market approach to ensuring customer success through effective technological implementation. As the Co-Founder, I have also ensured that we rigorously test, iterate, and upgrade the tech stack to provide better and more relevant features and functionalities to our existing customers, as well as to increase the number of use-cases, businesses, and sectors that we can cater to. The end goal, for both of us, is to ensure that SuperBot is at the heart of enabling successful and impactful communication for businesses across the country.

Tell us how your company is contributing to the IoT/AI/big data analytics/robotics/self-driving vehicles/cloud computing industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting the clients.

Our strategy and approach, from the beginning, have been guided by a singular vision: ensuring the continued evolution of the Indian IT sector at pace with changing market dynamics. We believe that the technical evolution started with digitisation as the initial step, further moving to automation and now it's time for smart automation. Basically, smart automation can be termed as a synonym of Intelligence. Since communication is already digitised and partially automated, we focused on the Intelligence part that led to the launch of SuperBot. Since its inception, the platform has continued to grow, both in terms of scale and capabilities, in keeping with the latest technological trends.

The biggest shift is in the way SuperBot is redefining communication for businesses across sectors. Tasks that required a high level of manual intervention are now being automated, optimised, and streamlined through the SuperBot platform. By identifying the intent as well as sentiment behind user queries, we enable human-like conversations through chat and voice calls to deliver greater customer satisfaction. For instance, in the education sector, we have trained our voice and textual agents on over 125+ intents to deliver an efficiency rate of 97%.

Moreover, thanks to our cloud-based and tech-driven approach, we ensure 24×7 availability while cutting down on the high infrastructural and operational costs typically associated with customer engagement and service functions. SuperBot offers around 50% lower cost per call in comparison to the current market standards and allows businesses to scale up their customer communication and support verticals without exorbitant cost overheads.

What are the key trends driving the growth in big data analytics/AI/machine learning?

I feel the biggest trend shaping the future of the new-age tech space is the shift from passive data accumulation to active intelligence. Modern enterprises can no longer afford to make decisions manually or rely on just static data in today's digital-first world. Markets shift overnight. Customer dissatisfaction can go viral within minutes. Data sets constantly evolve to accommodate changes in the market.

For a business, this simply means that decisions that would be optimal at a given moment may no longer deliver the most optimal outcomes. To address this, they must utilise real-time data to create a deeper, more contextual picture of their operations that proactively accommodates changes in data triggers. More importantly, since doing so manually is an impossible task, they must implement smart, AI-based solutions that can identify pertinent data triggers to facilitate near-instant decision-making.

The rise of concepts such as Responsible AI, small and wide data and TinyML is indicative of this shift in the market. The dominance of Big Data will diminish in the long run, as enterprises focus on swift, contextual analysis of the most vital data at the point of need for automated decision-making; Gartner estimates that 70% of businesses will move from big data to Small and Wide Data by 2025. Businesses that adapt swiftly to these emergent shifts will reap the maximum dividends of the great digital migration currently underway and will be best placed to achieve exponential growth and market success in the long run.

Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now.

The first challenge that we faced was achieving a breakthrough scale. Having implemented it at PinnacleWorks, we knew the impact SuperBot can have on all communication-related operations, including student counselling. But the Indian market, despite growing more digitised in the past few years, still demonstrates significant resistance to digital adoption – especially in functions such as communication, which are considered the exclusive domain of manual operations. This, initially, made it tough for us to get customers for this unique offering. Not to mention the educational cycle that the sales team had to run in order to make the audiences perceive the technology and the product as most of them don't even have any idea of its existence. To date, we spend the majority of our time differentiating between IVR solutions and AI-based communication.

The second major challenge that we faced was making the solution versatile so that it can be employed by any industry/vertical. For that, we needed to make sure that it was not only multi-lingual but should be able to cater to even different dialects for the same language. For e.g., Hindi itself varies drastically over 25+ regions.