By [24]7.ai
An AI virtual assistant is an application program that understands natural language voice commands and completes tasks for a user, while providing a variety of remote services to a business. AI virtual assistant chatbots combine virtual assistant services with chatbot functionality. Also known as intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) and virtual agents, they upgrade the traditional AI virtual assistant experience to be more advanced and personalized than ever before. In fact, you may have already interacted with this virtual assistant technology if you’ve ever used Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri.
This article will provide an overview of virtual assistant chatbots and describe different types of virtual assistants, benefits of virtual assistant chatbots for your customers and your business, and how our AI virtual assistants can drive agent productivity and enhance the customer experience.
As noted above, Alexa, Siri, and Google Home are all at-home virtual assistants that help with various items such as making phone calls or delivering news.
Businesses also use AI virtual assistants, but instead of using them for personal tasks they rely on them to help automate customer service as chatbots. For example, a virtual chatbot can help a business allow for increased call volumes while reducing operating costs.
Simple chatbots use a preconstructed set of questions and answers through an answer tree, where questions that the chatbot cannot resolve are routed to live customer service agents.
Smart chatbots go a step further: beyond a simple answer tree, smart chatbots leverage AI including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning to both better understand customers’ questions and improve the way the chatbot responds to those questions.
Benefits of using AI virtual assistant chatbots for customer service include:
Chatbots can help your customers whenever they need assistance. For example, if you have a retail site, an AI virtual assistant chatbot can help answer questions about issues like payment and checkout.
By programming answers in your chatbot to common questions, you can avoid using customer service resources until an issue requires escalation. Chatbots can also allow you to offer help 24/7, rather than having set hours with an in-person representative.
Chatbots can help customers feel more connected and engaged with your brand. They’ll feel like your company is available for them anytime, not just when they’re making a purchase. You can also program your chatbot to suggest different products based on the customer language, giving them a more personalized customer experience.
When your chatbot can successfully solve customer queries, you can improve your customer’s experience, which can support building trust as customers become more engaged with your brand.
Chatbots can be programmed to give automated answers to your most common questions. Your customers can receive the correct answers they need instead of being forwarded to different teams.
Your chatbots can also be programmed to understand which questions are more complicated and need to be relayed to an in-person customer service representative. If your goal of customer service is to quickly and successfully resolve customer problems, AI virtual assistant chatbots can both resolve and escalate issues faster than some direct conversations.
Some of the key benefits of using a AI virtual assistant chatbot for your business include:
Chatbots can give your live agents the opportunity to focus on high-value transactions instead of smaller, routine questions. Improving your customer service team’s call-time numbers can drive gains in efficiencies across your business.
Your chatbots can gather sophisticated analytics from customer conversations to understand what your users may want but aren’t finding on your website or with your business.
Chatbots can help with the buyer journey by providing personalized messaging depending on where in the sales funnel your customer is on your site.
Your AI virtual assistant chatbot can be programmed to ask different questions and provide answers to help improve customer conversion rates.
[24]7 Digital Assist™ empowers your agents to engage in personalized customer conversations with an intuitive interface that can support all levels of messaging across multiple digital channels.
Our AI machine learning technology allows our AI virtual assistant application to become even more efficient through multiple customer conversations. Your customers will get routed to the best agent for their issue through prioritized queuing and smart routing. In addition, it collects analytics that can be tracked by management such as queue status, agent queues, interactions, and more.
Our chatbot products have received multiple awards. Most recently, the company was recognized by Ovum as having one of the leading IVAs in the industry. The firm called out our digital solution leadership, bot-agent collaboration, and deep intent prediction, among other accolades.
Ovum noted that our AI models are trained on large data sets of human agent conversations, providing enhanced communication between customers and businesses. Check out [24]7.ai Industry Recognition to view the Ovum Decision Matrix.
Contact us today to see how AI virtual assistant chatbot technology can improve your customer service and business offerings.
