How Rashi’s Rezo is helping transform contact centres

Interacting with a call centre used to be an exasperating experience. The whole process of waiting and waiting, and then talking to people who give half-baked responses – then somewhere in the middle, the call gets disconnected. “Everybody would have gone through that pain,” says Rashi Gupta, cofounder with husband Manish of Rezo. ai, a customer contact centre that employs conversational AI to empower large businesses.

Rezo disrupted this ecosystem through its AI-assisted contact centre. The technology automates repetitive processes, has a smart dashboard that displays calls in real time and provides valuable information about the caller, and allows agents to prioritise crucial tasks to significantly improve consumer experience. Rezo’s customers are mostly in the banking and finance space, including TATA AIG and Bajaj Allianz, but there are also others like Maruti, Airtel, Usha and Dr Lal PathLabs. Some customers have seen operational costs drop by as much as 30%.

“The brand is always worried, thinking, ‘I’m pouring so much money into the call centre and the kind of reporting I get is very basic. I know that this guy does one hundred calls in a day but what is the quality of the call?’” explains Rashi. “Now we bring in the quality for them. ”

Delhivery was Rezo’s first client but it was Maruti that gave the Noida startup the opportunity and confidence to grow. “Initially we were playing around with smaller volumes but with Maruti and its customer base, you suddenly realise, when making calls on the brand’s behalf, the immense responsibility on your shoulders, and also the kind of scale you’re working with,” Rashi says. “But Maruti showed a lot of patience with – and had a lot of faith in – us. ”

Sometimes, she says, you are ready to do ‘small’ and do not think of scale. “Then suddenly the volume that is coming to you daily, 20-30 lakh calls – you have to build the technology so that you don’t fail,” says Rashi, who boasts an MTech and MSc from IIT Delhi, and a PhD in biometry from the University of Helsinki, alongside a background in data science.

Intelligent bots
Then came the test of getting organisations to trust in Rezo. “It’s a risk for any enterprise to give you that kind of data to talk to their customer base on their behalf,” Rashi admits. Today, enabled by conversational AI, bots are talking to customers – when, for example, the system needs to remind them to pay an EMI that is due.

“Capturing and comprehending all of what has been said verbatim, and then bringing everything onto the dashboard in real time in a sophisticated manner, so that we are able to convince large enterprises that the bot is performing beautifully and not making any errors, that the interpretation is not incorrect – these are the challenges we are solving today, through machine learning and AI,” Rashi says.

At present, Rezo employs this technology in English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

Prior to Rezo, Rashi was an assistant professor at JNU and, later, senior group manager at WNS Global Services, where she identified repetitive tasks and designed routines and processes that did away with human involvement. Now, she feels those working in call centres have little option but to improve their skillsets. “Eventually they are dealing with the end customer on behalf of the brand. You have to get them to do more powerful work, to do things more efficiently, so that the brand and the customers are well taken care of,” she says.

In 2021, Rezo raised seed funding from Modulor Capital, Dexter Angels, Veda VC and other prominent angel investors, including Bhavesh Manglani (Delhivery) and Devesh Sachdev (Fusion Microfinance).

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