Anthropod / Making conversations count

Problem statement

Imagine that you are a Chief Sales Officer of a Service business with a subscription fee of INR 4,000 per month and you have a team of 50 sales agents constantly on call with your customers. Each of them do about 20 calls a day, this takes the total to 1000 calls a day. Across 25 working days your agents are doing about 25,000 calls. Now as a CXO, you would want your revenue for the month to be 25,000 Calls times INR 4000 per customer, i.e. INR 10 Crores a month, at a 100% conversion.

Amazing no? Well we all know there is one place where businesses can see 100% conversions, in imagination. In reality, your sales agents at best are converting about 1000 to 1500 customers a month, and that too at steep discounts on the 4000 bucks, working out to single-digit 4-5% conversions. What could have been an INR 10 Crore revenue lands up at about INR 30-40 Lakhs.

Now picture the other side of the story, lets say you did landed the said 25,000 paying customers, and between them you have about 25 people in your customer support team. The Customer Support team is collectively responding to about 75,000 conversations and 7,500 calls a month and yet every month there are 15,000 to 20,000 customers who do not renew their monthly subscription. This is a Retention rate of about 20 to 40%.

Every Sales or Operations leader worth his salt makes money by driving a couple of key metrics, Conversions and Retentions. We can do all the funnel conversion analysis, discounts analysis and sales agents performance analysis and yet there is this constant uncertainty and unease when the senior management asks them, “Why are conversions so low? Why is retention numbers lagging?” Despite a flurry of 'reports', 'sales performance reviews' and meetings after meetings key customer insights remain elusive.

The Problem? 

Every CXO knows that the heart of success lies in one thing: understanding your customers. But what if the very conversations that reveal the customer’s preferences and intent are locked in a black box?

Nobody knows how the Sales and Support agents are performing with the customers, Nobody knows if the customer was really interested in buying the product / service, Nobody knows if the customer was interested but agents couldn’t pick up on the intent 

Their Solution?

The businesses found an interesting way to solve this problem.

“This call may be recorded for training and quality purposes”.

But do the math, for a “call audit” / “quality” team to audit 1000 calls a day, they would also need a 50 member team to listen in on all these calls, analyze them, make notes, streamline and create a “Report”. But we all know there is NO company in the world with a 1:1 ratio of sales team vs quality / audit team. So what do they do? They sample. They listen in on 2-3 calls a day, write notes and send inconsistent reports.

The entire workflow from calling to call audits to data analytics to insights to decision making is prone:

• Bias

• Human error

• Prejudices

• Office conflicts / politics

• Inconsistencies (humans fall sick / take vacations)

  
  

And it doesn’t end here, as inefficient as this human-led system is, it is painstakingly expensive as well. Manual audits of call recordings cost ₹12 per minute (salaries, rent and other expenses) and barely scratch the surface of interaction data—1% at best. Training? A hit-or-miss affair. And CRM updates? Agents spent 60% of their time on them instead of focusing on what really matters—engaging customers.

This systemic inefficiency is crying out for a revolution.

What the CXOs need are not lousy and nosy ‘hall-monitors’ (audit / training / quality teams) but a real-time support system that can tell the agents what to do at every step of the way, and can also update the CRM real-time on their behalf at the end of each call.  But it’s not just the sales agent that needs a support system but the CXOs as well. They need solid data driven insights, trends and patterns and not instance reports read in isolation.

Enter, Anthropod

Anthropod, true to its name, scuttled into this chaos.

1. Auditing at Scale: Real-time analysis of calls, chats, and emails. No manual cherry-picking, no sampling, no bias— the full picture coming out of 100% of the calls. 
   

2. CRM Automation: Agents no longer need to sweat over data entry. Anthropod does the heavy lifting, and agents? They sell.
   

3. Predictive Insights: We all know data for the sake of data is garbage. Anthropod’s advantage over the peers is the precision with which they analyze the calls and provide inputs. Businesses can now tell at what point during the conversation did the agent lose the customer and what do they need to do about it.
   

4. Made for India too (Accuracy in Multiple Local Languages): Unlike the human alternatives (and maybe some off-the-shelf products) Anthropod’s magic lies in its ability to learn perpetually. This is one of the only tools that has a very high accuracy score on ~11 languages.
   

5. Bespoke: The KPIs a CSO of a Telemarketing company wants to look at are very different from the KPIs that an Operations Head of a patient support unit of a large vertical wants to look at. Anthropod is one of the only tools that offers this bespoke customization to the clients.

The Market Landscape: A Gold Rush Awaits

The conversational AI space is a glittering goldmine. Globally, the enterprise AI market is valued at $40 billion, with conversational analytics capturing a significant slice. In India alone, there are 1.3 million telecallers generating 70 billion minutes of talk time annually. Most of this treasure trove of data lies untapped—ripe for Anthropod to turn into gold.

India’s enterprises are also embracing digitization, post-pandemic, like never before. From fintech startups to D2C brands, businesses are vying to understand their customers and offer hyper-personalized experiences. Anthropod sits perfectly at the crossroads of this demand, offering a potent mix of affordability and intelligence.

It's 2025 and already nobody wants to talk to AI bots 

Audit and CRM automation are just the beginning. Anthropod is building what we can call an “Curiosity Engine”—a data action assistant that goes beyond insights, empowering leaders to interrogate their data, ask questions, and receive real-time answers.

The year is 2024 and everybody in every street of Bangalore and Silicon valley are building AI calling agents, AI chatting agents, Agents for Agents, Agents within Agents. But nobody is asking if the Humans on the other side really want to talk to these agents. Anthropod sees the pin that’s coming our way to burst the AI agent bubble. One of two things will happen:

A. AI calling / chatting / sales & support agents will become ubiquitous and they will get more and more human. But they are not human, they work on defined parameters and you can’t hold them accountable if / when there’s noise and anomaly.

B. The public is fed up with the AI agents, there is a ramp up in leads but conversions take a nosedive and collectively businesses decide to move back to human agents. 

In either of these scenarios, what businesses will continue to need is a robust system that can analyze these conversations, irrespective of whether they are AI or not - and tell the leaders what’s working and what’s not. Should they go back to human sales and support teams and automate routine tasks using AI or should they go-all in on AI. Only trends and patterns emerging from the conversations with customers can tell them that, and Anthropod holds the keys to the answers.

The market agrees,

Anthropod has generated a lot of traction in the Services and Healthcare space so far. They are currently under deployment with major hospitals and a few ecosystem players, but the team at Anthropod are so excited about the possibilities and use cases that they are willing to let large enterprises adopt this for free for a brief period and their intent is very simple, 'making conversations count' and not just counting conversations. They are also enlisting the help of Management consultants to help with deployment, implementation and initial handholding. This model has helped them find a lot of success in acquiring clients this early in the journey. 

Closing thoughts: Making conversations count Anthropod doesn’t just analyze conversations; it orchestrates them into a symphony of insights, efficiency, and growth. In a world where businesses are drowning in data but starving for insights, Anthropod stands as the guiding light, proving that understanding your customer is no longer just an art—it’s a science.

If you would like to get a handle over your conversions and retentions, or would just like to learn more about Anthropod, get in touch.