white paper ::
A Guide to Successful Intelligent
Virtual Assistants
More than ever before, customers expect service that is easy, efficient, and available at anytime, from anywhere. That’s why more and more businesses are choosing to employ intelligent virtual assistants — branded personas that deliver personalized web self-service via a human-like conversational interface to address customer requests quickly, efficiently, and cost effectively.
Designed to emulate your best service, sales, and marketing personnel, virtual assistants provide the ability to converse, serve and listen 24/7 for easy, immediate and successful customer engagement:
• Converse: Engage customers naturally using a human-like text-based conversational interface
• Serve: Answer customers’ questions, guide them to successful outcomes, and connect them to the right
person or place for effortless self-service
• Listen: Monitor every customer interaction and tune the virtual assistant accordingly for continuous
performance improvements
The ability of intelligent virtual assistants to deliver easy, personalized web customer service has captured the attention of both progressive companies and leading analyst firms. Gartner Research predicts that, by 2015, 50 percent of online customer self-service search activities will be via a virtual assistant for at least 1,500 large enterprises.1 And in a recent poll of large companies, 82 percent of respondents cited the ability to provide
customers with timely and relevant answers as the key driver for improving web self-service; 87 percent cited creating a seamless cross-channel experience as the primary catalyst for improvement.2
If your organization is evaluating virtual assistants as a customer engagement channel for marketing, commerce, and/or service it is important to understand that a robust technology platform, while critical, is not enough to ensure success. A truly effective, high performing virtual assistant requires a combination of proven technology, deep domain expertise, and managed services in order to continually delight customers and deliver ongoing value.
Proven Technology
Acting as a personal guide, today’s intelligent virtual assistant leverages existing content on your website or in your knowledge base to provide “the one right answer” so customers can resolve issues or complete transactions with the least amount of effort. Allowing customers to interact with your brand via a familiar text-based conversational interface, intelligent virtual assistants answer customers’ questions, guide them to information, or perform tasks on their behalf for an exceptional self-service experience. The strength of a virtual assistant’s technology platform depends on three key elements: natural language understanding, integrations, and real-time analytics.
Natural Language Understanding
what the customer is saying. But because these channels are unable to extract the user’s intent from the text input, they tend to result in incorrect queries and an overwhelming number of potential responses. This, in turn, can lead to user frustration, low customer satisfaction, and escalations to costly human-assisted channels. With the advanced NLU and predictive intent capabilities of an intelligent virtual assistant, your organization can emulate the dynamic interactions of human conversation while reflecting your brand in both tone and content. Providing the ability to understand slang, acronyms, misspellings, and grammatically incorrect words or phrases that are common in
online conversation, a virtual assistant can quickly determine a user’s intent and direct him to the single right answer for resolving their issue or need. In addition, a properly socialized virtual assistant uses appropriate protocol for greetings and farewells, criticisms, and compliments for more natural, human-like dialog. As important, a properly socialized virtual assistant is able to detect sentiment like customer frustration based on the use of CAPS and punctuation to quickly and accurately understand customer needs and respond accordingly.
Integrations
Your organization can realize the full potential of an intelligent virtual assistant by leveraging existing investments in technology, content, and service channels to deliver a personalized, consistent, and highly effective customer experience at an affordable cost. Integrating your virtual assistant with key systems and data allows you to incorporate relevant, personalized information within the online dialog for higher conversation success rates and improved customer satisfaction.
When evaluating virtual assistant solutions, it’s important to look for a technology platform with built-in integration capabilities for seamless interaction with:
• Enterprise Systems: Integration with your CRM, ERP, or custom back-office applications allows you to
leverage relevant information, such as account profile information, entitlements and contracts, in order to create a responsive and personalized web service channel that enhances customer satisfaction
• Knowledge Bases: Integration with your existing knowledge base(s) extends the value of your corporate
• Human-Assisted Channels: Integration
with other service channels such as live chat or contact center representatives enables your virtual assistant to direct the customer to the most appropriate human-assisted channel — intelligently and seamlessly. The virtual assistant can communicate queue time and send a copy of the conversation transcript to the appropriate representative to maintain context and eliminate the need for the customer to restate his or her request resulting in a better service experience.
Real-Time Analytics
Hundred, thousands, or millions of virtual assistant conversations capture the “voice of the customer” in a way that is equaled only by social media discourse. Some virtual assistant solutions come with real-time analytics that allow you to:
• Evaluate your assistant’s performance by monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as Engagement, and First Contract Resolution via intuitive dashboards
• Learn more about customer interests, understand their behavior, and filter out the semantic noise so that you can respond to the most cogent issues
With valuable new insights into customer behaviors, interests, and concerns, your organization can market, sell, and support your products and services more intelligently and respond more directly to the evolving needs of your customer base and target market(s).
Highly Skilled Domain Expertise
When implementing an intelligent virtual assistant solution, you need to choose both a technology platform and a deployment team with proven track records for success. In order to ensure that your virtual assistant delivers results that meet or exceed your expectations — and those of your customers — it is in your best interest to partner with an organization that offers:
• A history of deploying successful, enterprise-class virtual assistant deployments on global websites of a comparable size and scale
• Engagement best practices for avatar and UI design, assistant integration and placement, content design, dialog strategies, cross-channel integration, and more
Seek a team of specialists, including professional linguists, content specialists, designers, and project managers, who will engage with your organization as a partner — not just a vendor — to ensure your virtual assistant is continually optimized to meet the need of your customers and your business. Access to established best practices enables you to avoid common pitfalls that might otherwise delay deployment and slow customer adoption. In addition, it allows you to deploy a virtual assistant that performs well and delights customers from live-to-site and beyond.
• Comprehensive training and consultation on virtual assistant analytic tools
In order to provide ongoing value, your intelligent virtual assistant needs to meet customers’ evolving service needs while delivering ever-higher levels of performance. That’s why it’s important to choose a strategic business partner that offers comprehensive training and ongoing consultation to help you take full advantage of your virtual assistant’s analytic tools. With proper training and consultation, you can gain actionable insights for driving continuous performance improvements and optimizing the web customer service experience.
Managed Services for Ongoing Value
While superior technology provides a strong foundation for success, the way your virtual assistant is developed and managed over time is equally important for maximizing performance and minimizing implementation risk. Too often virtual assistants are poorly implemented, resulting in less-than-optimal performance, low adoption rates, and customer satisfaction hits. Other times, they are built with custom software that is time-consuming to develop and costly to maintain. By using the managed services of a trusted partner, you can significantly increase the likelihood of a smooth, successful implementation while ensuring that performance continues to improve over the life of your virtual assistant.
Managed services are critical to achieving the operational value and business return on investment that you expect from your virtual assistant. When evaluating managed services providers, you should give top consideration to strategic business partners that offer ongoing optimization services. That way, your organization can gain access to best practices and proven processes throughout the life of your virtual assistant for reduced operating expenses, higher performance, and increased customer satisfaction.
By taking the time upfront to understand your customer service mission and virtual assistant objectives, a managed service provider partners with your organization to identify and prioritize ongoing opportunities for improvement such as:
• Addressing content or performance gaps based on customer engagement metrics and trending
customer topics to ensure your virtual assistant stays relevant
• Expanding the scope of your virtual assistant to handle new topic areas, incorporate additional access
points, or address a wider range of geographies
• Applying best-practice improvements in UI and dialog strategies to ensure your virtual assistant
A Winning Combination for Virtual Assistant Success
When customers contact your organization for service they want you to understand their request and address it quickly and efficiently — at anytime, from anywhere. They also expect to be treated in a courteous, responsive, and personalized fashion throughout every interaction. That’s why more companies are turning to virtual assistants as a means to deliver high-quality web customer service and operational excellence at an affordable price. An integral part of your customer engagement strategy, an intelligent virtual assistant combines the convenience and accessibility of self-service with the effectiveness and personalized touch of human-assisted service channels to consistently meet customers’ service expectations and drive higher levels of satisfaction and loyalty.
While a robust technology platform provides a strong foundation for your virtual assistant, best-in-class technology alone is not enough to ensure ongoing success and continuous value. If you want to deploy a virtual assistant that will provide a true competitive advantage, you would be well advised to team with a strategic business partner who provides industry-leading technology, deep domain expertise, and managed services over the life of your solution. This winning combination will result in a smart, effective virtual assistant that provides an exceptional web-based service experience — even as your customer and business needs evolve over time.
About Nuance Communications
Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.
