5 Overlooked Benefits of Personalized Virtual Agent Software
By Mike Murphy, VP of Customer Success, Creative Virtual USA
Everyone knows that virtual agents are an excellent customer service resource. A top-notch AI virtual assistant can reduce the load on your support staff, keep your branding consistent, and help prevent tickets from getting escalated to higher levels.
Yet there are some benefits of a virtual agent chatbot that aren’t as obvious. These lesser-known benefits can bring greater success and higher performance to several facets of your business.
- Speed of resolution improves
Over the years, the abilities of AI virtual assistants have gotten closer to the intelligence of live agents. It’s much easier for chatbots to resolve a larger scope of issues, which historically would otherwise have to escalate to a human agent. A key difference in the customer experience between the virtual and human agent is time. A virtual agent is much faster at providing the right answer, which means greater customer satisfaction and less stress on your support staff.
- Support answers become more accurate
With a virtual agent chatbot, there’s no need to worry about a customer getting the wrong answer to a question because an agent was tired and at the end of his shift, just had an argument with someone, or isn’t feeling their best. Your organization decides on the “voice” of your virtual assistant and controls how customers receive help. This enhances your brand consistency and customer satisfaction levels, while controlling costs.
- New sales revenue is created
You might think of your virtual assistant primarily as a tool to deal with existing customers that have issues with a product or service, but a good virtual agent also contributes new revenue. By accessing your billing and sales databases, a chatbot can perform account queries, see when a customer last bought something, and suggest complementary products and services based on their purchase history. This means more sales opportunities in every customer interaction.
- Service reps become more skilled
When you have an AI virtual assistant handling a wider scope of issues like technical malfunctions, lost passwords and email and contact info updates, it frees up your human agents for more sensitive discussions and escalations. This means you can hire a more capable, sophisticated support team that will be more engaged with their work, since they aren’t devoting tons of time to answering basic questions about their company or its product.
- Public relations emergencies and unexpected events are easier to handle
Even if your organization hasn’t experienced it, you’ve heard the stories: that dreaded moment when your business accidentally publishes sensitive material, someone tweets the wrong thing, or a customer levels a serious accusation. These PR nightmares can cause a flood of new support complaints from people asking about the same topic. Instead of having your support staff bogged down by an enlarged volume of inquiries because of a one-off event, you can leverage your virtual agent to have consistent, timely, and infinitely scalable conversations with your customers.
As the leader in virtual customer service, Creative Virtual specializes in the science of conversation.
