Download Liam Ryan's Presentation (ppt - 8MB)

Customer Service 24/7 with Virtual Assistants - Liam Ryan, Creative Virtual

Virtual Assistant Summary:

Key benefits

  • Significantly reduce customer service calls and emails (available 24/7, and able to ‘chat’ to thousands of users at the same time)
  • Help users find information quickly (as part of understanding a question, the Virtual Assistant can navigate the user to the appropriate web page or document)
  • User journeys (rules can be defined in the underlying knowledge base to control user journeys; e.g. drive users to particular products or registration process)
  • Cross-sell/up-sell (as part of the conversational capability, the Virtual Assistant can make sales suggestions based on predefined rules)
  • Create a virtual person to represent your brand values (the Virtual Assistant can have it’s own personality; users build a relationship with your brand through the interaction with the Virtual Assistant)
  • Marketing (the user interface can contain context sensitive advertisements and/or customer service messages – and these can be controlled based on what questions, or category of question, the user asks).

Additionally, it’s possible to deploy the Virtual Assistant as part of a banner advertisement campaign: see www.creativevirtual.com/banner for an example.

ROI

  • Significant reduction in human live chat interactions
  • One of our clients (‘one’ railway) saw a 1,000% increase in users getting to target web pages
  • Within the UK, Virtual Assistants are currently answering over 2.5M questions per month
  • BT estimates that their Virtual Assistant (Emma) is saving them over 250,000 calls per annum
  • Typical ROI is under 12 months
  • All the UK Virtual Assistants are operating at an accuracy rating of over 90% (by far the most accurate and consistent Virtual Assistant technology in the world)

What makes our Virtual Assistant solution unique

The key differentiator of our Virtual Assistant technology is the ability to hold the context of the conversation, in natural language; this means that the Virtual Assistant is able to emulate the way people interact with each other (this technology is about creating virtual people, be that a virtual customer service agent, virtual sales agent, or a combination of both). You can see examples of the conversational capabilities by visiting the Sky (ask: “I’ve got picture problems”) and BT (ask: “I’ve got a problem with my line”) websites.

User interface/Avatar

The user interface/Avatar is fully customisable, and there are a range of different front-ends.

Integration with databases/third-party applications

It’s possible to integrate the Virtual Assistant with databases and third-party applications, providing the ability for a fully personalised virtual conversation with the user (e.g. if the customer is logged in, the Virtual Assistant could deal with billing transactions and make use of the account information for cross-selling/up-selling purposes).

Managed service

The fully managed service offering is the most popular option for deploying the Virtual Assistant. We have developed a solid (proven) methodology for all aspects of delivery and on-going maintenance. This managed service solution means that there is minimal impact on your internal resources.

Start simple and evolve

- Start with simple FAQs - then use the analysis of the questions to add the ability to answer more sophisticated questions/decision trees
- Integration into back-end systems (e.g. databases, CRM systems)
- Integration with other customer service tools (e.g. live-chat, call-back)
- The Virtual Assistant can help to fill in forms (or eliminate the need for forms altogether - information can be collected by the use of decision trees)

Statistics

The online/real-time reporting module provides a comprehensive view of the questions/answers/conversations. Reviewing the questions/conversations in this way gives a unique insight into customer behaviour. One of our customers said: “It feels like we're getting an insight into the people not the clicks”. It’s also possible to download the statistics in XML and Excel formats: the XML option provides the ability to load the statistics into third-part reporting tools. The statistics module helps drive the development of the "conversational" elements (reviewing the questions that people ask helps to define the more advanced conversation/decision tree elements, as well as improving the accuracy by reviewing the questions that cannot be currently answered).

Futures

- More sophisticated Avatars (3D, text-to-speech, lip sync. etc.)
- Multi-platform (e.g. mobile, interactive TV)
- Voice recognition


Liam Ryan's Biography

Liam RyanLiam is the Sales Account Manager for Creative Virtual. He has over 20 years experience in Sales and Marketing, the last 11 of which have been in the online arena having started his own .com in 1997 which he later sold in 2001. He then spent the next 6 years working freelance, advising clients on their internet marketing strategy and sourcing innovative new content to enhance the user experience on their websites.