I Have Live Chat. Why Do I Need an IVA?

By Karen McFarlane, VP of Marketing (Americas)

Great question and glad you asked! The answer is quite simple. To start, think about why you employed live chat in the first place. Was it to:

• Reduce volume to your contact center?
• Provide online customer assistance?
• Increase customer loyalty and reduce barriers to engagement?

All of the above reasons have significant monetary benefits – reduced costs, higher retention, increased sales – and demonstrate that live chat is a wise investment. In fact, a Forrester survey showed that “44% of respondents said that having a live person answer their questions while they were in the middle of an online purchase was one of the most important features a website could offer.” This is a great stat., but how can you make live chat work better?

Another great question! To find the answer:

• Think about the human resources that are needed for your current live chat system and determine ROI. (You probably have this figure.)
• Identify how many customers your live agents can handle at one time, and determine how that affects your wait times. (Check out this blog: Live Chat Is All Too Human.)
• Analyze your live chat transcripts to learn more about the questions that are being asked by your customers, and ask yourself what portion can be answered by an automated system? 10%, 20%, 30% or more.

This is where an intelligent virtual assistant provides tremendous value. What if you employed an IVA to answer 10, 20 or 30% of your live chat conversations? IVAs can converse with thousands of customers simultaneously in virtually any channel – web, mobile, SMS and IVR – and effectively “partner” with live agents to answer customer questions. Using sophisticated machine learning and natural language technology, an IVA can hold meaningful conversations with a customer and oftentimes resolve any issues without involving a live agent. However, if the issue requires human-assisted service, the IVA can easily escalate the customer to a live agent passing the entire exchange through so that the customer has a seamless experience.  To that end:

• All interactions are personalized and relevant
• All interactions are seamless no matter the channel or escalation path
• Inquiries can be answered quickly, accurately and with great satisfaction anytime, anywhere

Now that’s what customers want. And when you pair live chat and intelligent virtual assistants together – you not only give your customers more of what they want, you can exponentially increase call deflection rates, decrease call handling times and improve the productivity of your workforce. Ah ha – more monetary benefits to your business. Now, that’s how you make live chat work better.

So now that I’ve piqued your interest a bit, here’s your next step. Download our 10 Point Checklist: 10 Ways IVAs Complement and Support Live Chat Systems. If at least three of the points speak to you, then your next action is to contact us. We’ll give you a demo, help you estimate ROI for an IVA, and answer any more questions you have about pairing live chat with an intelligent virtual assistant.