With its chatbot, Haptik takes on Dream11’s IPL gamers

As the Delhi Daredevils battled it out with the Kolkata Knight Riders, and Royal Challengers Bangalore with Chennai Super Kings, there were a whole bunch of people putting together their knowledge of the game and with their management skills, winning points and making money from it.

No, we are not talking about the team managers, but those logged in to Dream11, a fantasy platform, that allows gamers to create their winning team to climb the charts with each performance at the real match.

While gamers bid for Mahendra Singh Dhoni or Shane Watson or Virat Kohli to be on their team in virtual world, each good move got them cash rewards, and some cashed out big. In all of this, one entity stayed quietly in the background trying to make the processes seamless with ready answers.

Mumbai-based Haptik designed the chatbot for Dream11 during the recently-concluded IPL season.

Says Haptik Co-founder Aakrit Vaish, “We had a customer service chatbot for Dream11, and it went live before the IPL season started. The results were unexpected for us. The volume of queries handled and answered was so high that we had to allocate additional server space.”

He adds that for Haptik, this was a first at-scale chatbot success story.

According to data compiled by the company, Dream11 received around one million customer queries during the entire season, of which around 80 percent were handled by the chatbot. With an average query resolution time of 32 seconds, Dream 11 did not need to hire any additional staff to handle client queries this IPL season, which meant a significant cost saving.

Aakrit added that since IPL is a seasonal event, typically a company such as Dream11 would have to hire a huge number of people for a short duration to man customer queries.

“This IPL, Dream11 could scale to 8x their volume without having a large number of support staff. We are super excited about the results of this application and the impact similar solutions can have across industries."

The queries handled by the chatbot ranged from the winners wondering how they could encash their winnings to rewards and promotions and changes in account details.

Harsh Jain, CEO, Dream11 says user queries on the platform rose 20-30 fold during the season, and were all efficiently dealt with by Haptik’s chatbot.

Haptik was founded in 2013 by Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev and builds chatbots that can be deployed on websites, apps, and other applications.