Original article posted on the CIOL.com website

Customer experience in India has evolved from IVR  and chatbots to dashboards and surveys. Yet for many consumers, support still feels mechanical and impersonal. In this conversation, G B Kumar, President, Global Markets at Voicebox.ai, explains why voice may be the missing layer in enterprise AI and customer intelligence. From Bharat’s linguistic diversity to DPDP compliance and Agentic AI, he outlines why listening literally to customers could reshape how enterprises build workflows, products and retention strategies.

India has moved from IVR to chatbots, yet customer support still feels transactional. How is Voicebox’s tap to talk model fundamentally changing how brands capture authentic human emotion compared to a standard 1 to 10 survey?

IVR and chatbots, by design, are transactional and lack emotional intelligence. The bots struggle with multi layered, ambiguous queries and reach a dead end, not knowing when to hand over to a human.

Voicebox is an always on customer insights and support platform that makes the experience frictionless by enabling voice capture via a tap to talk QR code or NFC tag.

Human voice is a natural medium that is rich in insights, with 140 words spoken per minute, and it conveys emotions, emphasis and intonation. This is a much richer source of insight than a 1 to 10 survey.

Voicebox’s tap to talk approach is frictionless, enabling a significantly higher percentage of customer participation than the 2 to 3 percent seen in survey responses.

Voicebox was founded by Karan M Gupta with early backing from Mark Cuban. Beyond the high profile investment, what was the specific problem solution fit that convinced you to lead their global growth, and why does this model resonate so strongly in India?

Bharat is a large and fast growing consumer market with significant linguistic and demographic diversity. In the moment customer insights are more important than ever for understanding product market fit, customer sentiment, themes and opportunities in this fast changing consumer landscape.

In addition, India has a scalable talent pool for addressing global markets from here.

Prior to Voicebox, I was the Asia Pacific VP at UserTesting. I realised that India has been an afterthought for most survey and insights companies. Voicebox’s India first approach will go a long way in ensuring customisation, including local language support and other critical requirements for Bharat.

You have engaged with iconic brands like American Eagle and Snowflake to discuss applications for their stores and supply chains. What is the biggest insight a global retailer gains when they stop looking at clicks and start listening to the literal voice of their customer?

Voicebox not only captures rich customer insights but also automates in the moment customer actions such as sending coupons via WhatsApp messages, auto requesting Google review uploads for positive sentiments, and integrating with Snowflake, Box, Salesforce, HubSpot and others.

This is a huge positive step for customer retention, growth and promoter identification.

Customer insights are broken today because only 2 percent of customers respond to surveys. Ninety eight percent of customers are silent. The lack of genuine, rich customer sentiments and insights will be a big issue when large retail enterprises build their organisation’s AI workflows. Rich voice led customer insights from Voicebox can proactively plug that gap.

Indian consumers constantly code switch between languages. How does Voicebox’s technology capture intent and nuance in such a linguistically diverse market where traditional text surveys often fail?

Voicebox supports more than 100 languages worldwide and features best in class voice to text and translation engines. Mixing of languages such as Hindi with English words is not an issue because when translated, the themes, sentiments and opportunities are adequately captured and analysed. These themes, sentiments and opportunities trigger the automation workflows.

Using your success with Numeros Motors as a blueprint, how does Voicebox ensure that voice feedback does not just sit in a dashboard, but actually triggers real time operational improvements?

Numeros Motors is a great example of the adoption of our voice led, AI driven customer insights platform, starting with the EV two wheeler launch of the n First bike.

Voicebox was deployed for dealer and distributor engagement, media launch and ride experience sessions. They have used Voicebox extensively to improve the core product value proposition.

With the DPDP Act raising the bar for data sovereignty, how do you reassure Indian CIOs about voice security, and can privacy first AI become a competitive advantage as India embraces Agentic AI?

Voicebox is a privacy and security first voice led AI customer insights platform. We are SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA compliant and on the path to DPDA compliance.

Privacy first AI implementations will be critical success factors in the Agentic AI and conversational AI era.

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