Top 4 Features of an Effective Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA)

While Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) were once a luxury for more tech-savvy and resource-rich companies, they have quickly become a common customer expectation. Luckily, IVA adoption has become an option for companies of all sizes and industries thanks to the evolution and increasingly widespread availability of AI and Automation technologies.

With 62% of customers preferring the help of virtual counterparts over 15-minute wait times for a human agent response, the value of an IVA in customer service cannot be disputed. And the benefits reach further than just your customers! With 57% of executives citing that IVAs take little effort to adopt and achieve a notable ROI, and better yet, 64% of live agents supported by IVAs can spend their time solving more difficult and pressing cases, it is truly a win/win for all.

This shows that when deployed correctly, IVAs can provide fast and efficient service with the ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously while maintaining your brand image. But as with all other areas of CX if the service being provided is disjointed, confusing, and lacking personalization, you are at risk of losing customers.

Read on for our list of the top tips, tricks, and features to ensure you, your employees, and your customers are always getting the most out of your IVA.

1. ANALYTICS & KPIs

The most important feature for your IVAs continued success is the utilization of analytics and KPIs to ensure ongoing improvements to service. When you track key data such as Agent Handle Time, customer pain points, and customer intents you can fine tune your IVA to provide smarter and more personalized services.

For example, taking a deep dive into all the times that your IVA has had to hand off to a live agent due to insufficient knowledge will show you exactly what you can do to avoid this happening by enriching the IVA with the information to fill these knowledge gaps to ensure seamless service.

Furthermore, tracking your customer intent data can allow you to stay one step ahead of the CX game by predicting your customer’s needs for the issue at hand and even the next. In the Experience Economy where CX has become an ultimate priority, you can stand out from the crowd by taking the time to truly understand and learn from your customers to provide personalized experiences.

2. EASY HANDOFF TO LIVE AGENTS ‍

Despite the widespread acceptance of IVAs in customer service, 23% of consumers still prefer face-to-face interaction when the complexity of the inquiry rises to issues such as complaints or issues with payments.

Ensuring your customers have a direct line to live agents when requested is paramount to avoiding frustrations and customer churn. An IVA will never be able to replace the value of your live agents and ultimately should be viewed as a support tool.

When done correctly, your IVA can transfer priority inquiries to your agents and pass key information extracted from the interaction such as the customer’s name and current needs and pull data from prior interactions to provide agents with a comprehensive view of the customer and their history. This is just another way that IVAs can help your business provide more personalized and refined CX while benefiting your employees and bottom line.

3. EASY CUSTOMIZATION

‍Each business is different, and your business may change and evolve over time. Your IVA needs to fit your business and its unique needs perfectly to serve your customers and agents.

The pace at which technology and CX evolves makes ensuring your IVA is flexible and scalable an extremely valuable feature to have. You need to choose a technology that will allow for the addition of new channels when needed, integration with new technologies, and the ability to easily update the visual interface to match your brand as it evolves.

Ensuring you find the right technology for your business can be difficult, and potentially costly to rectify when done incorrectly. This leads us to our final key feature in an effective IVA…

4. COLLABORATION & IMPLEMENTATION WITH AN EXPERIENCED VENDOR ‍

You don’t need to do it alone. Choosing to work with an experienced vendor for your IVA implementation saves you resources and shaves valuable time from your project. With the right expertise and partnerships, your vendor can not only determine the right IVA solution for your current and future requirements but also personally develop and design it to perfectly represent your brand and support your customer base.

If you are looking for a team of people with extensive conversational design, development, and deployment experience to support you in your CX modernization goals, you are in the right place. We are proud to have rich partnerships with industry-leading technology providers that allow us to provide truly customized and personalized services.

We also offer 24x7x365 post-deployment support on all our solutions ensuring that you are always getting the most out of your technology. Our support guarantee means we are a partner that is in it for the long run, not just for a project.  

Now that you’re ready to provide unbeatable IVA experiences, Contact Us to get started.