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What is Intelligent Virtual Assistants Software?
Businesses interact with clients, customers, and internal stakeholders across various channels which include telephone, email, websites, and social media platforms. Historically, businesses needed to manually engage with humans, who would provide support and communication. However, in this current age of digital transformation, conversational agents of different flavors have emerged which are helping businesses be available and at the ready 24/7.
One particular instantiation of this technology is chatbots. These tools provide a simple conversational interface where users input text (or speech) and receive a canned or scripted response. With chatbots, a company is enabled to scale its functions, such as IT support and recruitment with limited resources, both in terms of money and time. If a company has more time and energy, as well as fiscal resources, it is wise for them to explore intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), which provide the same basic capabilities of chatbots and more. With IVAs, users are enabled to have natural conversations via a host of different channels to solve their business problems. In addition, this advanced software has the ability to use the conversations to update systems such as a CRM, an ERP, or human resource management systems.
Key Benefits of Intelligent Virtual Assistants Software
- Provides a solution which is available 24/7 for internal and external stakeholders
- Allow users to have a natural, personalized conversation with a business
- Provides a key tool for automating core business functions, such as customer service
- Updates front end and back end systems effectively with conversational agents
Why Use Intelligent Virtual Assistants Software?
IVAs should be part of a broader automation strategy, one in which a business considers areas where they increase efficiency with minimal effort and expenditure. For example, for a shoe selling business to be successful, they need to look for ways to increase margins, sell more shoes, and hire in a smart manner. They may want automation to streamline processes through tools such as robotic process automation (RPA) software, and make an effort to dynamically change pricing with retail pricing software. A prong in this automation strategy could be IVAs, which could help automate interactions between the business and customers, current or prospective.
The medium of this interaction is variable, depending on the software being used, as well as the particular use case. Thus, the business may choose to provide an IVA on their website as well as via email and telephone. These virtual agents engage with customers across all of these various channels. At times, they are even able to replace legacy systems such as interactive voice response (IVR), engaging customers for the purposes of identity verification, for example. The impact of IVAs vary greatly based on industry and use cases.
Unified and uniform experience — IVAs help maintain consistency across channels and various touchpoints. This presents business users with a unified experience for all support in areas such as IT and human resources (HR).
Cost saving — Businesses looking to cut costs and handle inefficiencies from operations, call centers, internal functions can look to IVAs. With this software, they can scale in a fiscally smart manner.
Customer satisfaction — Net promoter score (NPS) is a core metric which businesses track to keep tabs on how their customers feel about them. Providing a successful conversational solution in the form of an IVA helps businesses maintain customer satisfaction. With their always-on capabilities, IVAs provide a tailored customer experience. This personalization is likely to improve satisfaction.
Who Uses Intelligent Virtual Assistants Software?
IVAs are impacting all industries across various use cases and are affecting any touchpoint where businesses communicate with people. It is beneficial for businesses to explore how it impacts their industry and particular use case.
Banking and finance — IVAs are a hot commodity in the financial sector in which there is frequently a high volume of interactions with customers. For these industries, IVAs interact with customers on the phone, provide information regarding transactions and deals, and verify identity.
Telecommunications — Within the telecommunications sector, IVAs replace outdated automated voice systems in contact centers to improve resolution times and customer satisfaction. This gives customers a more natural interface for communicating with the business.
Hospitality — The hospitality industry is being transformed by IVAs, with businesses using them to increase customer loyalty through on-demand support and personalized service.
Other uses in the hospitality sector include making reservations, enabling personalized services—preferred room features or local restaurant recommendations—supporting customer engagement and retention.
Retail — Retail and e-commerce stands to benefit greatly from the deployment of IVAs to enhance customer engagement and drive sales. They also deliver a personalized e-commerce experience for customers.
Travel — The travel sector is adopting IVAs to assist in customer bookings and provide customer support and complaints resolution, thus acting as a personal assistant to customize a traveler’s itinerary and experiences.
Kinds of Intelligent Virtual Assistants Software
Business leaders of all stripes can reap the benefits of IVAs, transforming their strategy with digital transformation. Focusing on sales and marketing, IT support, HR, and customer service use cases, businesses can communicate with their internal and external stakeholders in a supercharged manner. A successful deployment of IVAs can help businesses scale with the ability to engage in thousands of conversations.
Scale is not the only important factor to keep in mind. Intelligence is also key—the ability for the virtual assistant to respond to queries in a personalized fashion based on past interactions and stored data. Budget holders exploring different solutions should evaluate this level of intelligence through sustained conversations across various areas. Below are some prevalent use cases:
Customer service — Similar to IT virtual assistants, virtual customer service and customer success agents are able to resolve issues, problems, and concerns at scale. By conversing with current and prospective customers, IVAs quickly defuse difficult situations and reach resolutions. Frequently, they interact with both customers as well as human customer support teams. When an IVA does not have an adequate response at the ready, they escalate the conversation to a human agent. All of these benefits lead to faster response time, personalized self-service interactions, 24/7 support, and a unified automated experience across channels.
Sales and marketing — IVAs help engage buyers by initiating contact, empathizing intelligently to interpret replies, and responding with a tailored response. These assistants are useful throughout the entire customer journey, from determining interest to activating unresponsive demand and to winning back former customers.
HR — Businesses are able to deliver immediate, simplified, and intuitive access to HR applications with IVAs to improve employee experiences. They help employees find resources and information quickly, improving efficiency and user satisfaction.
Specific use cases within the HR function include travel and expense management, benefits management, and absence management. For example, an employee can converse with an IVA in a natural manner and ask them about vacation days or benefits. The benefits of this deployment include improving employee net promoter score (eNPS) and allowing the employee success team to focus on higher-level strategic engagements.
IT — Employees always have IT-related problems. In a typical organization, they submit a ticket to an IT professional (whether internal or outsourced), who takes time to evaluate the problem and respond properly. With IVAs, tasks such as password resets, access permissions, server diagnostics for IT support personnel, and more can be automated end to end.
IVAs help eliminate jammed ticket queues and provide quick resolutions for end users. These agents are trained to handle IT services use cases to ensure IT support staff remain one step ahead of the most common issues employees face. They handle queries at any time of day, meeting demand, and improving ticket processing times.
Intelligent Virtual Assistants Software Features
With the use of machine learning and deep learning, IVAs grow intelligently and understand a wider vocabulary and colloquial language as well as provide more precise and correct responses to requests. In addition, IVAs are able to provide personalized answers based on segmentation or other information provided. Below are some features:
Personalization — IVAs provide personalized responses to interlocutors based on segmentation or past responses.
Route to humans — The software has tools (e.g., dashboards and reports) to better understand conversations IVAs have had.
Natural language understanding (NLU) — With NLU features, the software can have a natural, human-like conversation with an interlocutor. The degree of intelligence and understanding differ between IVAs. For example, some providers have built robust sentiment detection capabilities that allow the assistants to communicate in a tailored way based on the person’s sentiment. This gives it some degree of emotional intelligence which is key for a successful conversation.
Conversation editor — This feature allows businesses to edit conversations to meet their unique needs. This includes aspects of process design, along with some tools that empower intelligent process execution to enable more dynamic conversations.
Integration — The integration feature gives users the ability to update systems, like CRM, based on conversations.
Human-in-the-loop — The software allows users to maintain and observe the accuracy and viability of IVAs by keeping human agents in the loop.
Additional Intelligent Virtual Assistants Software Features
Avatars — Some IVAs provide life-like avatars, which communicate in a strikingly human fashion. These avatars come in various forms and formats, such as on-site customer support agents. Some companies even choose to roll out these avatars in store as shopping assistants. In terms of the look of these avatars, some providers provide the ability to customize them to fit a particular business.
Other features of intelligent virtual assistant software: Alexa Capabilities, Google Assistant Capabilities, Microsoft Teams Capabilities, Skype Capabilities, Slack Capabilities, SMS Capabilities, Social Media, Video, and WhatsApp Capabilities.
Trends Related to Intelligent Virtual Assistants Software
Off-the-shelf solutions — Developing and implementing a robust IVA strategy is time consuming and costly. Therefore, some vendors are providing readymade, off-the-shelf solutions that provide a level of customization and intelligence without a vast amount of development time. This type of solution also typically costs less money, and businesses might opt for more of these types of digital employees as opposed to one more expensive, more robust option.
Voice-based interactions — The most natural means of human communication is via one’s voice. Now, with the rise of smart speakers and various on-device virtual assistants, voice is becoming a tool for human-computer interaction.
IVAs are not immune to this trend. Indeed, they may be some of the most affected technologies, precisely because of their strong communicative component. Just as people expect to be able to talk to their devices for ordering food or checking their bank balance, they are seeking to interact and engage in the most natural way possible by using their voices. The channel for these voice interactions include IVR, smart speakers, websites, and more.
Automation everywhere — IVAs are a type of automation, in a conversational human-like form. It should be noted that they should be part of a larger automation and digital transformation strategy. Winning companies do not just decide that they need a conversational solution. Instead, they evaluate a broader automation strategy which includes a conversational component.
Moving away from rule-based chatbots — The beginning of conversational solutions were largely comprised of rule-based chatbots, which allowed for a scripted or template-based conversation between a bot and a human. This easy-to-deploy software helps companies ramp up quickly and in a cost-effective manner. However, these rule-based bots do not allow for the personalization and intelligence that many companies are looking for.
Companies as well as users, are interested in communicating via text and speech with their devices. By extension, they are looking to communicate in said manner with businesses to get answers quickly at any time of day. This desire has led to the rise of IVAs, that provide these features and more.
Potential Issues with Intelligent Virtual Assistants Software
Preference for human agents — Although IVAs are great at many tasks, some contexts, such as those which require a significant amount of empathy, may be better served by a human agent.
Transparency — Despite the fact that IVAs might be better suited for repetitive tasks, users still deserve to know that they are speaking to an IVA, not a human. Legislation is catching up to this human desire and is requiring bots to state that they are not human in certain U.S. states like California.
Effective handoffs to humans — Sometimes, IVAs do not have an answer to a question from the user. It is critical that the system is designed in a way to successfully resolve this problem. Typically, the best way to solve this issue is to transition the user to a human agent.
Software and Services Related to Intelligent Virtual Assistants Software
As mentioned, IVAs are making an impact across industries as well as business functions. Therefore, it is only natural that they integrate with a host of different software solutions. Here are some different types of software that are either directly related to or can be integrated with IVAs.
Chatbots software — Businesses need to evaluate the type of solution that works best for their particular problem, budget, and use case. Though chatbots provide less intelligent conversations and not as robust integrations with systems, they may be a good place to start as they are frequently less expensive and take less time to deploy.
Bot platforms — IVAs are a great solution when users are looking for a customized or customizable solution, that they can either use off the shelf or require little to no development or coding experience. However, companies looking to build their own conversational agents benefit from bot platforms, which are tools used to build and deploy interactive chatbots. These platforms provide development tools such as frameworks and API toolsets for customizable bot creation.
AI sales assistants software — AI sales assistants are great tools that help salespeople get intelligent notifications or information around sales leads. These assistants help with lead qualification and follow up, pipeline management, forecasting, meeting scheduling, and data entry.
Help desk software — As customer service is a major use case for IVAs, help desk software, which is designed to provide a customer with information and support regarding a company’s products or services, is increasingly including IVA functionality or the ability to integrate with IVAs.
Productivity bots software — Users looking to increase the productivity of software they are using should look to productivity bots to help them achieve this goal. Productivity bots work as add-ons to software tools, providing additional features, organization, or automation on top of the foundational features of the product.
When a bot is connected to a software platform, it boosts the utility of the existing tool that the team already uses.
Natural language processing (NLP) software — NLP allows applications to interact with human language using a deep learning algorithm. NLP algorithms input language and give a variety of outputs based on the learned task.
NLP algorithms provide voice recognition and natural language generation, which converts data into understandable human language. Some examples of NLP uses include chatbots, translation applications, and social media monitoring tools that scan social media networks for mentions.
