Virtual Assistant: The Future of Customer Interactions

It is a computer program that is designed to conduct a conversation via auditory or textual methods and simulates with human users over the internet. It can manage to reply by exchanging conversation through messaging apps, chat windows or even through voice.

This emerging technology makes it easier for businesses to have smooth first interactions with their customers, lessen the weight on their workload and proactively prevent minor customer service problems from turning into major issues.

Over the past years, chatbots have organized more modern techniques to understand user questions and produce consistent and useful responses. Today, it is able to provide more functions on such platforms all within a messaging conversation.

According to the report of Ubisend 2016, 45.8% of users would rather communicate with a business through a messaging app rather than email. In this mobile-first world, people desire to get information quickly at the press of the button, meaning to say the customer’s demands businesses to interact more with them, whether human to human or an automated response.

A survey by Aspect found 71% of the customer are looking to resolve their concerns without the help of another person. More than 60% of respondents claimed chatbots are helpful, easy to use and fast. These numbers show that it is growing necessity for industries to keep up with this trend in technologies.

In customer service and customer relationship management, chatbots are programmed to work as an agent representative in order to:

1. Help businesses by acting as a touchpoint and handle the first encounter to every user.
2. Reduce human effort and inquiries volume by handling simple issues and automatically escalate the complicated questions.
3. Reduce the average handling time (AHT) and expand the hours of availability, in fact, chatbots can work straight 24/7.
4. Helps the user to get their desired answers promptly especially if the solution they are looking for are well known and predictable such as troubleshooting and other scripted answers which AI can solve without the help of a human.
5. A well-designed system can use a natural language processing to understand a customer’s request that is faster than selecting multiple options to answers customer inquiry such as “What color are still available?” or “Could you rebook my flight to Japan on to the following Friday 1 am and get me a window seat?”.

Chatbots can be programmed to respond templated questions. However, businesses have to understand well how chatbots work.

1. Chatbots are not fitted for every company, as the programming may or may not be suitable it depending on your business type and the needs of your customers.
2. Not all chatbots are up to the stage of keeping in mind the goals of customer experience and retention.
3. Even though chatbots are faster and flexible with the hours of availability they can still make mistakes and not be 100% accurate in interpreting human nuances.
4. There is a lot of time, budget, and effort to spend in the analysis for the development and optimization of chatbots.
5. There are some qualities that are vital for every customer support provider that is hard for a machine to imitate and that is empathy.

Given that chatbots are not fitted for every business, it is necessary to know exactly what your business wants to achieve before initiating a chatbot. Analyzing your business needs is important, for example, do you want to:

• Provide a quick day-and-night answer to the common questions?
• Cutting down the volume of common emails that your business receives?
• Allow your customer service agents to resolve a more difficult customer issue?

Enlisting the task that you want to trust your virtual assistant with will let you identify the goal of your customer service chatbot.