How CRED's AI Revolution is Creating 10X More Efficient Customer Service Teams

Transforming Customer Experience with AI

Our Executive Function series features perspectives from leaders driving transformation through AI.

CRED is an India-based members-only club that rewards creditworthy individuals for their timely credit card bill payments by providing them with exclusive offers and access to premium experiences. Since 2018, CRED has built its brand on delivering seamless, secure, and beautifully designed digital products for India's most affluent consumers. Today, over 15 million members use CRED each month. As the company scales, maintaining this level of quality has required new approaches to product development, service, and internal collaboration.

We sat down with Swamy Seetharaman of CRED to understand how the company is working with OpenAI to create premium, concierge-like experiences at scale.

Building for Excellence from Day One

"When we started, we were building for India's most affluent households—a user base that expects trust, transparency, security, reliability, and exceptional design. These principles have guided us from day one.

But as we grew—more products, more teams, more data—it became harder to maintain context and move quickly without compromising quality. The question we ask is, how do we make every single member in every function be 10X? For us, AI has become a huge unlock in that journey. It lets us move fast and stay right, without sacrificing our core principles."

"The question we ask is, how do we make every single member in every function be 10X? For us, AI has become a huge unlock in that journey." Swamy Seetharaman, CRED

Introducing Cleo: The AI Conversational Companion

We wanted to move from transactional responses to empathetic conversations, which led us to build Cleo, our AI conversational companion powered by OpenAI models, including GPT‑4.0, GPT‑5, o3.

Cleo handles three common query types:

• Informational: "What is CRED Cash?"
• Contextual: "Am I eligible for CRED Cash?"
• Transactional: "Can I refund to my wallet or original payment method?"

Cleo diagnoses the issue, classifies the intent, maps it to the right SOP, and frames a contextual, accurate response.

Empowering Teams with Internal AI Tools

We also built two internal tools: Thea and Stark. Thea is used for support agents, summarizing multi-format conversations (text, voice, Hinglish) and suggesting next steps. Stark is designed for operations teams, helping them create or update SOPs in minutes instead of days.

Measurable Results and Impact

Broadly, we've had a 14 percentage point improvement in our CSAT scores. In the three months since launch, Cleo has reached a 98% resolution accuracy rate, with 18% more multi-intent conversations being resolved successfully. Average handling times have decreased across all three tools, and session drop-offs have fallen by 31%. These are early results, but incredibly encouraging. Together with Cleo, Thea, and Stark—tailored for customers, agents, and operations with the help of AI—we're moving closer to our goal of creating a true concierge experience built on trust, reliability, security, and exceptional design.

"With the help of AI—we're moving closer to our goal of creating a true concierge experience built on trust, reliability, security, and exceptional design." Swamy Seetharaman, CRED

Overcoming Skepticism and Driving Adoption

As with any new technology, there was initial skepticism. But once teams saw results through our internal evaluation framework (which also uses OpenAI models), confidence grew quickly.

The biggest surprise has been how fast people adapt once they experience real unlocks. They see that they can be exponentially more effective and efficient with AI.

Future Directions and Scaling Impact

Next, we're expanding Cleo across all business lines. We're also building tools that detect "data dead-ends"—cases where user queries can't be answered—and feed them back into our knowledge base to improve our SOPs in real time.

Our broader goal is for every team member, across every function like engineering, QA, infra, compliance to become 10x more efficient.

As the ecosystem evolves, success will depend on how fast and how right we can act, identifying the right insights from noise and making accurate decisions at speed.

Every company must identify what's most important whether it's efficiency, effectiveness, or both, and then leverage AI in alignment with their values.

For us, incorporating OpenAI's technology has been a true unlock across two of our values: compounding and being fast and right. The early results are encouraging, and we're focused on amplifying and scaling that impact.