Virtual agents provide a wide-variety of benefits to organizations using them:

• Support Cost Reduction and Improved CSR Focus: Because virtual agents are interrogative and focus on bringing customers issues to resolution, they naturally reduce the number of questions submitted to support and sales via email or phone. This results in lower support costs and allows personnel to focus on higher-value customer issues.
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• Reduction in “Silent Sufferers”: Silent sufferers are customers who come to a company’s website and are unable to find answers to their questions, but choose not to call for assistance. They silently “walk away” without getting answers to their questions or finding the right products or services. Virtual agents reduce the number of customers who leave a website unsatisfied, not only by offering a more engaging way to resolve their issues, but also by proactively guiding the customer through the solution process. The virtual agents constantly interact and monitor the user to keep them moving towards resolution of their issue. If the given situation is too difficult to resolve through automated interaction, the virtual agents can proactively offer the opportunity to talk to a live person and pass along the information the user already provided. In this way, even in very challenging situations, virtual agents reduce the chance customers “walk away” frustrated.
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• Personalized Shopping Experience: Virtual agents also help increase sales by providing a personalized, interactive way for customers to find the right products and services. Rather than forcing customers to hunt through a complex catalog of offerings and compare products, virtual agents can ask personalized and relevant questions to make customers confident that they are getting the right product or service that will meet their unique requirements.
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• Superior User Experience: Virtual agents offer many ways to improve and personalize a customer’s interactions with an organization, whether the user is looking for assistance in buying or getting support. The virtual agents can be as proactive and powerful as the organization would like. The net result is that your customers interact with your organization in a way that adapts to their specific needs and provides a superior user experience over more static and anonymous tools.
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• Improved Understanding of the Voice of the Customer: Because virtual agents proactively engage users in a rich dialog, the organizations sponsoring them directly learn a great deal about what customers are thinking. Whether understanding issues customers have with products or how doing business with the organization could be made easier or what trends are happening on the website, virtual agents are constantly gathering and consolidating customer feedback. This ultimately allows an organization to respond faster to customer needs while also giving them better insight on how to improve in the future.