Customer Service

The role of virtual agents in contact center experiences

The contact centre can be a crucial component of a business's customer experience strategy. When contact centre interactions add no value to customer interactions, the organisation will not be able to meet its customer experience goals. The need for positive interactions led to the evolution of digital or virtual contact centres, which have increased in number and continually revised quality, over the past few years. The use of Artificial intelligence (AI) has helped achieve these goals. The technology used is called "conversational artificial intelligence (AI)." Understanding conversational AI's role in contact centre experiences is critical, especially when using virtual agents or bots. As a result of this understanding, business leaders are able to determine where customers derive maximum value and how fast the value is delivered.


How do virtual agents work?

The virtual agent is a window that appears in the corner of a website when you visit it. It is software that responds to customer questions by following certain specific rules. Virtual agents are much more complex than chatbots. Chatbots gather customer information, respond to basic questions, and perform simple tasks such as setting up callbacks. On the other hand, a virtual agent uses natural language processing (NLP). In NLP, machines read, understand, and derive meaning from human language.

The use of automated chatbots and self-service options can free human customer service representatives from repetitive tasks, allowing them to engage in more complex tasks that automation cannot perform. Additionally, such features challenge live agents to improve their skills, thus resulting in a higher level of employee engagement and a reduced turnover rate.

Powered by cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), virtual agents can conduct intelligent conversations with customers and give relevant information in response to their questions. It is also possible for them to automatically route complex conversations to actual human agents when necessary. Customer engagement with brands can thus become more consistent, interactive, and relevant.

Here’s an example: A person orders a product at her new home. She accidentally enters her old address during the order process. After leaving the site, she realises that she made a mistake, so she returns to the site and asks the virtual agent for assistance in updating her address.

In this case, the virtual agent has a clear understanding of the person's needs and acts accordingly.


Contact centre virtual agents offer the following benefits:

A virtual agent is available 24 hours a day

An important benefit of virtual agents is that they can be deployed 24 hours a day. As customer service representatives are not always available outside of normal business hours, businesses may miss out on opportunities to help them. However, where virtual agents have been deployed, customers will always be assured of assistance.

Data gathering can be improved through virtual agents

Additionally, a bot can be used at the end of a contact centre interaction. You must have encountered this situation. It is technically a bot when you are requested to stay on the line to answer a survey during a telephone call.

After a call, conversational AI continues to play an important role. It analyzes the completed transcript and makes notes for the human representative, assisting with the training process. Another useful role it can play – and arguably the most valuable – is in providing suggestions following contact centre experiences. As a result, admins could be given prompts based on live production data and trends observed from customer questions. As a result, improvements can be made and support can be improved.

A virtual agent improves customer experience

The majority of customers do not wish to spend time waiting on hold for information they can obtain on their own. By enabling customers to obtain information more quickly and easily, virtual agents improve customer experience. Creating a pleasant experience for your customers increases their likelihood of returning to your business in the future. Whether it is providing information about a product order or cancelling a financial transaction automatically and issuing a refund, your customer service agents can provide all the information your customers need, allowing them to focus on more complex customer service problems. Using artificial intelligence (AI), agents can analyse customers’ behaviour and dislikes to personalise the buying experience. In addition, they can provide customers with product suggestions and recommendations as well as assist them with their tasks.

It is becoming easier and easier to use virtual agents than ever before. In addition to reducing contact centre costs, they are increasing operational efficiency. Furthermore, they are helping to meet the evolving expectations of customers by providing quick resolutions, intelligent responses, and proactive service.

Businesses that fail to recognise these facts will find themselves falling behind in their attempts to capture the attention, hearts, and minds of their customers. When organisations leverage these technologies, they will be able to enhance their human agents' performance and provide a level of customer service that is unprecedented in terms of speed, personalization, and efficiency.

*For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.


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