How Intelligent Virtual Assistants Provide the Data and Insights You Need to Improve Customer Experience

by Richard Simons, CEO of Creative Virtual USA

Virtual assistant technology is an excellent tool for doing something most companies have a hard time executing consistently and productively – listening to their customers. Every conversation held between your customer and your virtual assistant is a goldmine of information that literally allows you to listen in on every customer interaction with your company. But according to Cynthia Clark of 1to1 Media listening isn’t enough.  She says “Organizations need to first listen to what their customers are saying and then act on the insights they’re gathering.”  And that is the conundrum. Information gathering has become relatively easy, but acting on the data has increasingly become a challenge.

So how can companies actively keep their ear to the ground and make real-time improvements for their customers? Enter virtual assistants. Intelligent virtual assistants have this very cool feature we all know as transcripts that if analyzed properly, provide a wealth of information that is invaluable to your organization. There are four key pieces of information that you can extrapolate from virtual agent conversations. They are:

1) What are the common customer issues?

2) Do we have the RIGHT answers to customer questions?

3) Are the answers that we are providing actually solving their problems in a satisfactory manner or resulting in more questions?

4) What questions are we not answering that we should be?

By analyzing conversation transcripts and customer satisfaction survey responses from virtual assistant conversations you can actively improve performance, and make adjustments elsewhere in the organization to better satisfy customers. For example, virtual assistants can help you quickly identify spikes, trends or catch issues, such as website form errors.  Armed with this information, our clients can be more proactive in resolving issues before call centers are flooded and satisfaction levels decrease.

Moreover, virtual assistants are capable of holding hundreds, even thousands of simultaneous conversations, thereby providing a wealth of data unavailable through traditional web analytics in a relatively short time span.  Using tools like V-Portal™, you can filter data by business or product areas and drill-down to full conversations for a specific transaction. You can also analyze detailed customer satisfaction surveys and quickly identify gaps and opportunities based on customer feedback without the need for sophisticated business intelligence tools to figure out your next step.

In sum, a virtual assistant as a data tool provides customer experience professionals with the unique ability to manage customer experience based on true engagement metrics. It not only lets you listen intently to your customers, but take the appropriate steps to make sure they know they were heard.