Providing personalized customer service experiences across industries and product types are no longer a novelty but crucial to maintaining excellent customer relationships. In today’s digital-first world, customers are increasingly connecting with brands through digital channels. That makes it imperative for brands to invest in self-service and round-the-clock Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) to service customers better. IVAs help to deliver customer service and build detailed customer personas in an attempt to personalize the whole experience, as we will soon discover.
What is an Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA)?
Intelligent virtual assistants are self-service applications—often called chatbots or bots—that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to generate human-like interactions. As a result, IVAs can respond dynamically to human input, allowing them to address more complex customer service queries. (You can read more in our glossary.)
A sufficiently advanced chatbot or voice bot can not only hold human-like conversations with customers but deflect calls from high-value human agents and make decisions without human intervention. Thanks to intelligent bots’ ability to have enough context awareness and grasp human speech’s nuances, bots are the future of the human-machine interface for delivering personalized customer service. Let’s learn more.
Who Benefits from Customer Service with Intelligent Virtual Assistant?
Customers across all demographics benefit from intelligent virtual assistants. Because IVAs “learn” through engagement, they can quickly tailor each interaction to unique needs and preferences of the person they’re speaking with. Here are two common scenarios where IVAs pivot to deliver a more positive, personalized customer experience:
Scenario 1
An enterprise AI-based chatbot is engaging with a customer in English. Just minutes into the conversation, it is evident that the customer struggles to sound coherent, thanks to English being his second language. The bot runs a background check in real-time and finds evidence that the customer’s first language is Spanish. The bot immediately makes a polite request if the customer wants to switch the conversation on the go from English to Spanish. Bingo! The customer is not only relieved but delighted to learn that the bot can speak and comprehend Spanish. Personalized customer service delivered by quick-thinking ‘polyglot’ bot!
Scenario 2
A voice bot on a company’s website chat window is conversing with an older customer. The bot learns that this customer has always stuck with voice chat and seldom used text-based chat. So, the bot asks the customer if she wants to connect with the brand the next time via a landline phone rather than a digital touchpoint. The customer is thrilled to learn that she can experience the same level of personalized customer service via her preferred channel. Another customer feels at home thanks to Intelligent Virtual Assistant!
Building customer persona with smart bots
Building specific customer personas or profiles is crucial to any business. Intelligent bots can play a pivotal role in building detailed customer personas, as illustrated briefly in the above scenarios. With more real-world data and live training, bots can learn about customers in a more intimate way and the types of questions that they usually ask. The best part about bots is that they get better with more customer interactions. Thus, bots can make sense of customer preferences, find patterns, discover hidden relations, and organize customer data in a way that is comprehensible to humans to take timely action. The bottom line is that intelligent chatbots can build realistic customer personas for improved customer service.
Why Invest in Customer Service with Intelligent Virtual Assistant?
There are many benefits of an IVA beyond merely driving customer satisfaction. On the business side, IVAs offer an incredible return on investment. Because they offer dynamic, human-like interaction—with higher accuracy and at a fraction of the cost of human agents—IVAs represent considerable cost savings and process improvement. Here are a few of the biggest business benefits of IVAs:
Scalability
The hallmark of conversational AI-based chatbots is the extreme scalability that it affords without losing any of the bespoke edge it offers. A bot that can provide personalized engagement to 100 customers at once and can easily engage 1,000 customers with little or slight change to the underlying infrastructure. It has enormous implications for businesses that need to scale customer service at short notice or businesses that experience sudden spikes in customer calls.
Economics
Barring queries that require human thinking to resolve, IVAs do a satisfactory job of diverting conversations from humans. That translates to significant cost savings in hiring, training and retaining additional human agents.
Convenience
Today’s customers expect their queries are resolved in almost real-time. They might call your customer service in the middle of the night and still expect a swift query resolution. By offering customer service with Intelligent Virtual Assistants, you can provide extreme convenience and personalization to customers, taking your brand image a notch higher every time a query is resolved satisfactorily.
Consistency
Providing the same level of customer service to thousands of customers day in and day out might not be feasible with human agents in your contact center. The same is not the case with virtual agents. Machine Learning and NLP ensure that bots deliver consistent customer service without any room for error. It reflects on your brand and creates a strong brand recall associated with great customer service.
Considering Upgrading Your Customer Service with Intelligent Virtual Assistant?
Uniphore’s U-Self Serve is an AI-based omnichannel Intelligent Virtual Assistant that understands natural human language and delivers personalized customer service. You can explore U-Self Serve here and learn how it champions personalized customer service across channels.
with Uniphore to learn more about U-Self Serve IVA now!
