Ok. By now you’ve probably come across terms like virtual assistants, intelligent virtual assistant, virtual agents, VAs, online avatars, etc. Don’t panic! We understand your confusion. But you should know that all those terms pretty much mean the exact same thing. Virtual assistant / virtual agent. Tomayto / tomaato. Potayto / potaato. Forrester calls it a virtual agent, Gartner calls it a virtual assistant. Same difference.
Mind you, there are a few people that try and academize the difference between the terms, by suggesting that a virtual agent is a customer-facing deployment and virtual assistants are some kind of online personal assistants. But regardless of which term is used by vendors, industry analysts or organizations, what’s important to focus on is how they function. Virtual agents, virtual assistants, an intelligent virtual assistant or any knowledge management tool used in a customer service capacity must have some ‘brains’ behind them – essentially be able to understand the intent of the question being asked. The technology shouldn’t have keyword matching as the basis of its ability to match a question with an answer.
Virtual agents, virtual assistants, or intelligent virtual assistants should also be capable of deployment on digital channels like websites, mobile apps, and social media sites, assisting consumers in performing online tasks, asking natural language questions, and receiving answers to their questions. So whether a customer uses their bank’s online intelligent virtual assistant to ask a question about their credit card or they ask their cable company’s virtual agent about a recent bill, the important thing to remember is the outcome: did that customer receive an immediate, accurate answer to their question in real-time?
So Why Have VAs Been Getting a lot of Buzz?
One word. Siri. Siri showed us that we can have a pseudo-human interaction with technology. Think about it. Before Siri, asking our technology questions was something from science fiction (Star Trek, anyone?).
Other Than Our Siri Craze, What’s So Great About VAs?
They’re available 24/7. If your customer has a question at 2 a.m., they can just go ahead and ask. They no longer have to stay up all night, waiting for your call center to open at 9 a.m.
On that note, they also allow your customers to ask questions online in natural language (across any digital channel you have). Remember how you had to try and guess a specific keyword or phrase, so the search results showed exactly what you had in mind? Well, no more! Now customers just ask their question, phrased any way that makes sense to them, and the technology will give them an accurate answer (except maybe if you ask Siri about the meaning of ‘life’).
Have I convinced you to start interacting with a VA? Good. For those of you that still need a little more convincing, check out this video on Virtual Agents …the term that we at IntelliResponse use to refer to this amazing technology).
P.S. Just want to make sure that you remember that there’s no real difference between a virtual assistant, an intelligent virtual assistant or a virtual agent.
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