AI and virtual agents
The new generation of artificially intelligent virtual agents can prove to be extremely beneficial and cost-competitive, and can efficiently escalate chats to a live agent should the situation arise.
Every business wants to close more sales, sell more to its existing customers, and get close enough to its online users to know what they are thinking. And AI and virtual agents, precisely, lets you do all of this, and of course much more, with your business.
A virtual agent is a chatterbot program that uses a computer generated, animated, and artificially intelligent virtual character acting as a customer service agent. In customer relationship management, these virtual agents with a human appearance respond appropriately to customer questions and lend the semblance of personal service to automated interactions. Virtual agents are a combination of AI and graphical representation, increasingly used in CRM to help people perform tasks, such as making reservations, placing orders, or locating information, and answer questions about a company’s products and services.
AI and virtual agents Every customer, at one point or the other, has to deal with customer service. According to Consumer Reports National Research Centre, while almost 88 percent of the customers they surveyed have resorted to customer service in some or the other way, the majority of them were dissatisfied with their experience. A whopping 75 percent found customer service rude, around a 74 percent were disconnected and were unable to reach a representative again, and about a 64 percent felt their queries were ignored.
Added to all these challenges mentioned above, customers are getting more proactive and resourceful when seeking information about the products and services they intend to buy. It, therefore, necessitates for businesses to innovate and make customer experience simple, fast, and more enjoyable. But the questions are cost vs. satisfaction. Improving customer satisfaction means better-trained customer support staff but, at a low cost. It is this dilemma that AI ends. AI, especially in the long term, provides an opportunity to improve customer services at a reduced cost.
Working with virtual agents
AI in virtual agents combines ‘process ontology’ with ‘neural ontology’. Process ontology is the knowledge of what a customer is going to ask during the course of an interaction. Such information is preprogrammed into virtual agents, much like the IVRs. Neural ontology is unique to AI alone. It is effectively a ‘brain’ that allows virtual agents to bring in a human agent, leaving behind the limits of process ontology. However, there’s more to the conversational dynamics that makes virtual agents so unique. The virtual agents learn the question and answer before and after transferring the customer calls to human agents. Virtual agents thereby, learn these responses so that human intervention may not be required the next time when such a question is asked.
Benefits of using virtual agents Since the goal of replacing live humans with virtual agents is to deliver excellent customer service, virtual agents satisfy the need for web self-service and offer the following advantages over live representatives.
- Fast and efficient response with no putting customer on holds or call drops.
- Lower chances of a language barrier.
- Easy integration with the existing systems, ruling out the need for downloading new programs or finding a compatible device.
- Answering questions 24/7, and not just during business hours.
- With custom-designed avatars and backdrops, virtual agents offer a more fun and entertaining customer experience.
- Virtual agents prevent information overload, manage information, as well as generate it.
Virtual agents are an incredible ROI and support thousands of concurrent users, encourages customer loyalty, and serves as a branding tool for enterprises.