A virtual agent (also known as IVA – Intelligent Virtual Agent) is a conversational chatbot that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to understand user intent, analyze patterns in a conversation and finally use all this to address customer queries. A virtual agent also uses machine learning to continuously learn from various types of questions and can be trained to understand when to transfer a conversation to a customer support agent.
A virtual agent is typically used to start a proactive conversation with website visitors, ask relevant questions to understand context, qualify leads, and provide information on products and services.
If you’ve ever reached out to customer support to check the status of your order, change a password, or book an appointment, chances are you’ve already interacted with a virtual agent without even realizing it. Here’s an example of how a typical conversation with a virtual agent looks like.
Virtual agent vs Chatbot – Debate demystified
Both virtual agents and chatbots are easy ways to ensure instant support and engagement to your customers or website visitors, without requiring a human agent. The key differences between the two are based on their capabilities and the level of customer experience they enable.
A simple chatbot or Q&A bot picks up keywords from a conversation and can respond to common questions from a limited set of pre-registered answers and workflows. Apart from this, a simple chatbot can also provide relevant articles from a knowledge base.
A virtual agent or a conversational chatbot uses AI technology and NLP to mimic human conversation, understand user language better, ask additional questions to get context, respond to the queries in real-time, and hand-off a conversation to a human agent when required.
To better understand the difference let’s take an example of a customer query.
Query: “I’d like to cancel my order”
Chatbot: Will look for the keyword “cancel order” in the knowledge base and provide an article describing how to cancel an order.
Virtual agent: Will ask for the order number, place a cancel request, and will also try to upsell. Here is a live example.
Although both chatbots and a virtual agent can access knowledge base articles, identify keywords, and provide a list of results to the users, a virtual agent always has an edge over simple chatbots because of AI and natural language algorithms.
However, recently, the thin line between the technology of chatbots and virtual agents is fading away with even simple chatbot widgets on websites being upgraded with AI and the right integrations. And because of that, it makes complete sense to say that a virtual agent is nothing but a chatbot with artificial intelligence.
Benefits of a virtual agent
Implementing a virtual agent for your business provides immediate responses to your customers and reduces the time your live agent needs to spend on routine queries. Instead, they now have more time to respond to complex questions.
Here are the top benefits and use cases of using a virtual agent.
1. Automates repetitive tasks
Tasks like booking an appointment, canceling an order, registering for a webinar, upgrading an account are repetitive and can be handled by a virtual agent. This improves the response rate and gives agents more time to focus on queries that require human intervention.
2. Improves customer experience and satisfaction
According to Klaus, to keep customers happy, the FRT (First Response Time) should be within 1 min 36 secs. Customers want quick replies to their questions, and implementing a virtual agent is the fastest way to achieve that. A virtual agent reduces FRT and improves resolution time by auto-assigning a complex issue to an agent and ultimately improves customer satisfaction.
3. Generate leads
Virtual agents collect relevant information like name, email address, organization name, role, and phone numbers (in some cases) to build a user profile and provide contact information for subsequent follow-ups and lead qualification. Here is a quick example to show how it works.
4. Provides 24/7 support and self-service
Offering round-the-clock support is an obvious but essential benefit of using a virtual agent. This 24×7 support coupled with multilingual self-service provided by a virtual agent is critical for businesses that operate in different countries that would otherwise have to hire agents in all the regions to provide excellent customer support.
In fact, according to our What Customers Really Want report, companies with a self-service facility saw as much as 35% lower monthly ticket volumes and 1 percentage point higher CSAT scores. That means, along with making your customers happy, a virtual agent can make your agent happy as well, by reducing the ticket volumes.
5. Scalable and offers long term ROI
Although the main goal of virtual agents has always been to help your human agents serve your customers better and not replace them, using the right mix of automation and human support can significantly reduce hiring costs when you scale your business.
While virtual agents require one-time installation, can be trained and scaled to any numbers without requiring further training, hiring and training new agents on the same repetitive tasks is not the best expansion strategy for your business.
Instead, a good mix of support agents to handle queries that require human support and virtual agents for repetitive tasks can lead to a more sustainable business expansion strategy and better ROI.
Things to consider while choosing the right virtual agent for your business
1. Installation
A typical Installation of a virtual agent would usually require a person from the IT team to sit with the team and set it up for you. This installation process takes time and also adds to the cost of your virtual agent setup.
While companies would ideally require a virtual agent that can be set up without any external help, with the Covid-19 pandemic where most of the workforce is working remotely, it became imperative to have a remote installation of virtual agents.
So, while selecting a virtual agent, businesses should check whether the installation process is simple, not too time-consuming, can be managed by your team without any training, and should not ignore the capability of remote installation at any cost.
2. Integration
Integrations with your CRM, CMS tool, customer support software, call center (contact center) software, or sales CRM are crucial to track customer activity seamlessly across multiple data sets and close the leads generated by the virtual agent. And for lead generation, it’s essential to integrate your virtual agent into a web page, mobile app, or even messaging platforms like WhatsApp, FB messenger, and your app.
3. Automation features
Although this might seem obvious, not all virtual agents have the same automation features. So while choosing a virtual agent, make sure it checks all the automation features that will help improve your support team’s productivity. These might include –
- Intelligent auto agent hand-off
- Auto-assignment of a conversation to a specific team based on the type of question.
- Search and share knowledge base articles within the chat window
- Proactively trigger messages for website visitors
- Reply to your customers in their language in real-time.
Why Freshchat?
Freshchat’s AI chatbots understand the customer’s intent and can send precise answers, understand conversational flows, engage with customers, and run targeted campaigns.
1. Intelligent, not just scripted
Freshchat’s support and sales bots are built on AI and ML that detect the intent of your prospects and customers to let bots engage with customers and close conversations, or transfer the conversation to a human if required.
2. Smart integrations and omnichannel support
In a survey by Facebook, over 70% of people stated that they would prefer to message businesses with customer service questions in the future.
As more people prefer contacting businesses on messaging apps, integrating with messaging apps to provide omnichannel support is becoming critical for businesses.
Riding the wave of this changing customer expectations, Freshchat provides AI chatbots and integration with popular messaging apps like – WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger along with chat widgets for your website and app. With Freshchat, you can also integrate 3rd party tools, CRM, or CMS you already use to get a seamless integration across all channels and apps.
3. IntelliAssign
With IntelliAssign, you can avoid the hassle of cherry-picking conversations and manually assigning them to agents. You can automatically assign incoming messages to agents or groups (teams) by configuring their area of expertise, skill level, and conversation limit.
4. Run hyper-targeted campaigns
With Freshchat, you can nurture leads, onboard new users, upsell to customers, and re-engage users by sending targeted emails and in-app notifications.
5. Proactive messaging
With Freshchat, you can send proactive messages to website visitors and customers based on their activity on your website.
6. Multilingual FAQ support
Talk to your website visitors in their native language. With Freshchat, team members can create FAQ content in multiple languages, and the chatbot presents the right content based on the user’s local or selected language.
7. SmartPlugs
SmartPlugs brings all the data from your apps and systems to the Inbox. Be it a CRM, helpdesk, delivery tracking, or other third-party applications, with SmartPlugs, your team members can get all the contextual information to recommend better, sell smarter, and support faster.
8. In-app Chat
From order updates and delivery status to support queries and responding to in-app campaign messages, with in-app chat, you can reach out to users proactively and allow your app users to get in touch with you instantly.
9. Generate leads, convert, and increase revenue
Send proactive campaigns that trigger conversational bots based on your website visitors’ demography or behavior. Qualify leads, book meetings, reduce cart abandonment, and crush your revenue goals.
Final thoughts
The terms “Chatbots” and “Virtual Agent” are often used interchangeably and you can consider chatbots and virtual agents more alike than different. But instead of worrying about the terms you should think about your business needs and try to look for a tool that can solve your problem and help you achieve your business goals.
Updated on 6th August 2021
