Virtual agents are intelligent bots that engage with customers, understand their queries, and respond to them. Harnessing conversational artificial intelligence (AI), these bots interact with customers across most contact center channels. As such, virtual agents can automate a host of customer conversations.
In doing so, virtual agents increase contact center efficiency, lower agent workloads, and often enhance CX by providing immediate responses to routine queries. Of course, some bots are better than others. Yet companies that develop first-class solutions may deploy virtual agents on the website, messaging apps, and voice channel to speed up customer success.
The Business Case for Virtual Agents in 2022
Reports on the benefits of virtual agent technologies vary. For example, according to IBM, 99% of companies with virtual agents have seen a rise in customer satisfaction since implementation. However, Forrester Research claims: “54% of US online consumers believe that interacting with a chatbot will have a negative impact on their quality of life.”
The truth is that virtual agents are a mixed bag. For example, if a company rushes its bot through testing, failures will likely arise and create customer frustration. However, a more measured approach, which targets contact center pain points, can deliver the effortless service experiences that customers demand.
Business cases for virtual agents often depend on calculating the costs of these pain points, which drive simple, transactional contacts. After all, reducing operational costs – not improving CX – is often the carrot that convinces the C-suite to invest in virtual agents. It is quite the carrot too, with Sprout Digital reporting that chatbots alone can cut operational costs by as much as 30%.
However, ROI comes not only through deploying virtual agents to combat routine queries. Many other features contribute to positive business results and more seamless customer experiences.
5 Innovative Applications for Virtual Agents
1. Proactive Alerts
A web-based virtual agent can nudge customers to inform, adjust, or optimize their behavior. To do so, the bot tracks browsing activity and personalizes the conversation accordingly.
For instance, if a frequent website visitor is yet to subscribe to the company newsletter, a virtual agent can pop up – after a specific number of visits – and notify the customer of the opportunity.
Through such use cases, virtual agents can personalize CX at scale, allowing companies to seize
individualized customer opportunities without involving a human being.
2. IVR Automation
Employing virtual agents across the voice channel – aka. voicebots – enables companies to evolve IVR journeys through the power of natural language understanding (NLU) and speech recognition.
Instead of IVR experiences, which often cause abandons, these bots understand intent from just one or two words and route customers accordingly. The outcome is a better first impression of the service experience and lower customer effort.
However, some voicebots go further. Infused with robotic process automation (RPA) – which triggers a self-service flow – many can answer customer queries within a matter of moments. Across the busiest customer communication channel, this results in significant cost savings.
3. Feedback Collection
Gathering customer feedback is critical for CX management and, at a more granular level, assessing contact center performance. However, asking agents to collect such feedback introduces bias, as customers often avoid sharing their honest opinion with an employee.
Then, there are online surveys. Customers frequently shy away from participating in these as they sometimes prove time-consuming. Response rates suffer as a consequence.
A better alternative is for a virtual assistant to ask the customer to say or type in a word or number that summarizes their experience. Add customer journey analytics into the equation, and companies can identify opportunities when customers are most likely to share feedback. Virtual agents then pave the way for businesses to tap into this opportunity.
4. Promotional Assistance
Virtual agents can improve the outcomes of outbound campaigns. As an example, consider targeted promotions for new website visitors. When a customer visits and browses through the online eCommerce store, a chat-based virtual agent can offer a discount code before they leave the website. Techniques such as this drive customer engagement.
Similarly, it is possible to optimize outbound voice campaigns using virtual agents. Even if conversion rates are low, the technology allows companies to target a large pool of prospects at a low cost, which may deliver sufficient returns.
5. Ticket Tagging
Some queries are too complex for virtual agents. However, this does not mean that they cannot automate parts of the query before passing over to human support.
For example, by capturing customer intent, the bot can pass that onto the human agent and streamline the beginning of the interaction. By doing so, it may also automate ticket tagging, speed up after call work (ACW), and give the contact center a better understanding of why customers contact them.
Also, by collecting other information upfront, such as the customer’s order number, companies can further simplify the conversation for agents and keep customers busy as they wait in the queue. In doing so, the virtual agent may reduce call abandon rates.
Getting Started with Virtual Agent Implementation
There are two ways to go about implementing virtual agents for CX.
The first is to develop a fully customized agent using prebuilt conversational engines. Microsoft is one vendor that provides the tools to achieve this as part of its Power Virtual Agents offering. Another is AWS, which – through Amazon Lex – provides a conversational AI engine for voice-based virtual assistants, alongside text capabilities. Finally, Google is another major player in this field with its innovative Dialogflow solution.
The other option is to implement a purpose-built conversational AI solution. Yellow.ai has one such offering and provides a chatbot studio to customize the AI as needed. Genesys also offers virtual agent technology as part of its contact center solution, alongside other notable vendors such as NICE and Talkdesk.
Yet, no matter the design, a virtual assistant must support a strong, overriding conversational strategy. Companies first need to collect the optimal data, map customer journeys, and design the experiences for these powerful AI tools to deliver.
