Intelligent virtual agents (IVA) can help businesses improve their customer service, automate processes, reduce excessive workloads on agents, and increase profits. In the current technological landscape with artificial intelligence becoming more prevalent, IVAs have an important role to play helping contact centers enter this new era.
In this entry, we will discuss what IVAs are, how they work, benefits, use cases, what to consider before implementing them and more to help you assess if the time is right for IVAs.
What Is an Intelligent Virtual Agent and How Does It Work?
An intelligent virtual agent (IVA) is an AI-enabled communication tool that generates personalized responses to users. IVAs are intuitive and can understand natural-language requests through natural language understanding (NLU) or natural language processing (NLP). NLU and NLP are learning algorithms that try to identify and grasp various patterns and make decisions or predictions independently, relying on collected data and sometimes human input.
How IVAs Are Different From Other Solutions
Many customer service managers ask for some type of AI solution, but understanding the differences between intelligent virtual agents and other solutions such as chatbots, voicebots, and intelligent voice response (IVR) software is an important first step. Outlined below are some key differences to paint a clearer picture.
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Chatbot |
A chatbot is a program that uses a text-based chat interface to communicate with a user automatically without help from an agent. Simple chatbots have limited capabilities. They are rule-based and task-specific. A simple chatbot poses questions based on predetermined options. The customer can choose from the options until they get answers to their query. The chatbot will not make any inferences from previous interactions with customers. These chatbots use an interaction tree (if this, then that), like an IVR. |
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AI Chatbot |
AI chatbots use generative AI and conversational AI to have free-flowing conversations and interpret intent, language, and sentiment. These chatbots require programming and robust data to help it realize the context of interactions. They are still restricted to the text channel. |
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Textbot |
“Textbot” is another term for simple or AI chatbots. It describes bots that operate solely through text inputs. Common textbots are programmed to follow scripted prompts to automate actions for the user. The most common example is a “live” support chat that helps automate first response for support requests. |
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IVR |
Briefly mentioned above, IVR software is an automated phone system technology that interacts with callers and gathers information based on how the caller navigates a call menu. It does not use AI. Callers navigate menu options (a phone tree) through spoken responses or by pressing numbers on their phone. IVR software routes the caller to specific departments or specialists. |
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Voicebot |
“Voicebots” is another term for IVR or a similar, simple software that can be accessed in the voice channel. The bot may call a person, or a person may call the bot and navigate a phone tree. The proliferation of simple voicebots caused a lot of frustration for users and led to the rise of the term “robocall.” |
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IVA |
An intelligent virtual agent is an AI-enabled communication tool that generates personalized responses to users. It can communicate via speech and text channels, though it’s most popularly known as a tool in the voice channel. IVAs process natural language requests using NLU and NLP to understand situational context, allowing them to handle a more complex range of questions and interactions. IVAs also more closely resemble human speech and can understand queries with spelling and grammatical errors, slang, or other potentially confusing language, much like an agent. |
IVA Benefits for Your Contact Center and Customers
IVAs are a powerful resource for contact centers to improve customer experience. Contact centers act as the front door for businesses because they support large numbers of customers who need answers to similar types of questions or solutions to problems.
IVAs manage demand in ways almost indistinguishable from an interaction with a human agent, which creates significant benefits for both your contact center and your customers.
Benefits for Contact Centers
- More Task Automation: Automated IVAs answer basic inquiries to reduce wait times for customers and free up human agents to manage more complex service needs. An IVA can ask the customer what they need help with when they call the contact center. Then, the IVA can use NLP to respond to open-ended prompts. With NLP, the IVA can recognize keywords and phrases to move the customer along on their journey.
- Better Data Management: The IVA can also track and report data about the customer during the conversation. For example, suppose a call needs to be transferred to a human agent. In that case, the IVA can share contextual information from the interaction, which improves service and the customer’s experience by not having to repeat themselves.
- Lower Average Call Cost: Not all call minutes cost the same. A minute handled by a person is far more expensive than a minute handled by a machine. Since IVAs are able to complete tasks that traditionally required agents, on-call minutes become much cheaper. IVAs not only lower average call cost, it also allows agents to focus on the most complex issues, which is more satisfying.
- Improved Retention: All these factors create a better experience for customers as well. Experience is at least as important as price or product for modern customers, so positive experiences increase retention and net promoter scores.
Benefits for Customers
- Personalized Customer Experience: Today’s customers demand customized services. Customers don’t want to navigate lengthy phone trees or interact with a bot that delivers limited support. IVAs can gather data, predict customer needs, learn about customer behavior, make simple transactions, understand requests and perform complex tasks, all while offering a humanlike experience for customers to reach a resolution quickly.
- Opportunity for Self-Service: Self-service has grown in popularity, as digitally savvy customers prefer to resolve issues themselves before seeking assistance from support representatives. For example, 73% of customers prefer to solve problems themselves instead of requesting the support of an agent. IVAs manage common challenges customers face without a live agent, which allows for self-service. Granting customers the ability to serve themselves strengthens the customer journey and minimizes costs.
- 24/7 Availability: More than half of today’s customers expect 24/7 customer service to be available to them. Customers can get support whenever they need it because IVAs are not confined to the 9-5 workday.
- Higher Satisfaction: By answering every call immediately and providing contextual service, IVAs reduce customer wait time and increase first-touch resolution, two of the most important KPIs in customer service. When these factors improve, customers feel more content.
Use Cases of Intelligent Virtual Agents
There are multiple ways in which contact centers can use IVAs to improve customer experience. From basic processes from previous technologies, such as call routing, all the way to solving complex issues, users may have without needing human interaction. Here are some of the most common use cases of IVAs across industries:
- Data Collection: As we briefly discussed, with IVA technologies, you can allow users to use a self-service option that captures all required information for any particular request. This can include everything from updating your address to filing an insurance claim.
- Medical Scheduling: With IVAs, users can book a doctor's appointment by providing all required information. This happens through a combination of data management done automatically by the IVA technology to verify identity and a clear understanding of the intent and specialist requirements.
- Banking Support: People may use an IVA to manage their banking preferences, transfer money, and update sensitive information, among many other features. With an intelligent virtual agent, you can accomplish most of these things in minutes, skipping hold times, increasing customer satisfaction, and allowing agents to focus on the more complex requests that actually require human intervention.
- Billing Support: Multiple industries have implemented IVAs to improve their billing support. Instead of having agents handle hundreds of calls with unhappy customers trying to solve their issues, you can automate solutions and let your agents focus on upselling, cross-selling, or handling more sensitive cases.
- Insurance Claims: With an IVA system, users may file insurance claims independently. While this may not seem like a massive upgrade, it helps contact centers reduce the workload on their teams and users' anxiety during calls. It is vital to have the option to talk to a human agent, but only if required or if the user feels more comfortable.
Factors to Consider Before Implementing an IVA
Implementing IVA is almost always the best thing contact centers can do to improve their operations and profits. But before doing so, a few things need to be done to ensure the success of this technology.
- Objectives and Goals Should be Clear: A contact center has multiple layers, systems, and teams with objectives and goals that may not always overlap. Before implementing IVA, teams and leaders should agree upon the top objectives and goals and start from there. Only with this clarity can the infrastructure, both in terms of technology and operations, be built to maximize IVA.
- Understanding the Customer Needs: Contact centers are successful because they train their employees to understand what customers want and help them find the best solution for their needs. Keeping that in mind with IVA technologies is vital because the customers must always remain at the center of the call center's value proposition. You may use automation to serve multiple segments, or you may have particular services or queries that must bypass IVAs entirely, given the complexity of the call.
- Cost Estimation and Budget: Successfully implementing IVA can be expensive. Therefore, estimating the upfront cost and the savings it represents in the future is important to ensure successful IVA implementation. Without a disciplined approach to the financials behind the IVA switch, it becomes difficult for teams to make the most of the technology, leading to shortcuts that can hurt your CX and add stress to your workforce.
- Integration Capabilities: While multiple IVA vendors are in the market, not all of them integrate seamlessly with your tech stack. Ensuring that the provider you decide to partner with has the capacity, experience, and expertise to successfully integrate with your current systems is vital for implementation and successful IVA operations.
- IVA Provider Should be Reliable: Multiple providers in the market offer IVAs. However, just because they can offer the technology does not mean they are the most reliable provider you can find. In the tech boom around AI, organizations need to consider reliability a top priority. Organizations must avoid working with technology providers that change priorities or cease to exist, given their lack of experience and complex market dynamics.
What Does the Future Hold for Intelligent Virtual Agents?
The future of intelligent virtual agents is bright, with deeper integration into our daily lives and habits. IVAs are expected to become more capable of determining and understanding context and anticipating needs based on previous user behavior. Chances are they will evolve into assistants, not just entities responding to our queries but having a more active role in our experience.
Natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning advancements will also improve IVAs understanding of nuances in speech and intent, helping them move from a robotic to a more natural experience. IVAs may extend beyond voice to technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) interfaces. For example, an IVA may integrate with your smartphone your smartwatch or even help you with real-time feedback in your workout routines.
Technological advancements and ethical considerations regarding privacy, data security, and the use of AI and ML shape the future of IVAs. Companies in this space must balance being a convenient companion and safeguarding user data to maintain trust.
Ultimately, as with all technologies, the promise is for IVAs to become more accessible, helpful, intuitive, and less separated from our day-to-day activities.
Get in touch to implement Mosaicx IVA
Mosaicx, an AI-powered customer service platform, lets you create intelligent virtual agents that efficiently and accurately solve customer inquiries by automatically moving a customer to the “next best action” to resolve their query. We continue to innovate Mosaicx to stay on the cutting edge of modern AI, ML, and predictive intent technologies. As such, our customers receive the latest IVA capabilities. Our solution is flexible, easy to use, cost-effective and secure.
Businesses that want to evolve their communications and improve customer experience can benefit significantly from IVAs. As they do, they will keep pace with modern workplace landscapes, stay competitive, increase brand loyalty, and shore up revenue.