Mumbai: Exotel, an AI-powered customer experience platform, has launched its new brand campaign #LikeAFriend, using the occasion of Friendship Day to highlight a common customer service frustration — having to repeatedly explain the same issue across multiple interactions.
The B2B campaign focuses on the disconnect customers often experience when context is lost between conversations with customer service teams. Through the campaign, Exotel aims to demonstrate how AI-powered customer experience solutions can bring greater continuity, recognition and empathy to customer interactions.
Exotel currently powers more than 25 billion customer interactions annually for over 7,000 enterprises, according to the company.
The campaign is supported by forecasts highlighting the growing role of agentic AI in customer service. A 2025 Gartner study projects that by 2029, agentic AI could autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention, potentially reducing operating costs by 30%, while close to 40% of customer service interactions could become automated.
Research from PwC also indicates that customers are willing to pay up to 16% more for superior experiences. The survey found that 42% of customers are willing to pay more for experiences that are friendly and welcoming, while one in three customers may leave after a single poor interaction.
Exotel’s #LikeAFriend campaign explores how AI-powered CX can incorporate attributes commonly associated with strong human relationships, including context, trust, empathy and consistency. The campaign depicts fragmented customer conversations to demonstrate how the loss of context can turn a straightforward service journey into a frustrating experience.
The 80-second campaign film follows a customer whose card transaction is unexpectedly declined. As he attempts to resolve the issue, he is repeatedly required to provide his credentials and explain the situation across different customer service interactions. The narrative contrasts this experience with the effortless recognition he receives from his pet dog, leading to the campaign’s central question: if people who know us best do not make us start over, why should brands with which we have relationships do so?
“As a longstanding B2B marketer, one thing I know for sure is that embedded technology is always an interesting challenge to communicate at a broadcast level. But we at Exotel also know that AI is redefining customer experience, which is why leading enterprises such as HDFC Securities, ICICI Bank, Zerodha, Uber, MakemyTrip, Meesho and Piramal Finance are integrating it into their customer engagement and service infrastructure. This campaign deliberately zeroes into one of the commonest customer complaints – of a lack of recognition, recall, and continuity – that comes from fragmented, disconnected conversations. Through this campaign, we want to shift the conversation from AI as a capability to AI as an enabler of stronger, relationship-led customer experiences,” said Udit Agarwal, SVP & Head of Global Partnerships & Marketing, Exotel.
Looking ahead, Exotel highlights the growing role of agentic AI in reshaping how businesses and customers interact. The company notes that the focus is increasingly shifting from replacing human interaction to augmenting it through intelligent automation.
Gartner research indicates that brands that map emotional intensity across customer interactions could potentially achieve up to a 15% increase in retention.
Against this backdrop, Exotel is positioning #LikeAFriend as a campaign that moves the conversation around AI beyond operational efficiency. The campaign presents AI as an enabler of more intuitive, consistent, empathetic and relationship-led customer experiences, combining the scale of automation with the nuances of human-centric engagement.
