Growth is desired by all businesses but in order to grow and upscale a business, a lot of resources are needed. Apart from the right business strategy, you need a lot of people to execute tasks.
Highlights:
- What is an Automated Virtual Assistant?
- How can AI powered Virtual Assistants help Scale your Business Up
- Automating Business Workflow
- Better Customer Relationship Management
- Concerns and Challenges with AI Virtual Assistants
- Proper Design of Use Cases and Initial Training
- Privacy and Security
Well, maybe not anymore now because technology of artificial intelligence has raised to the point that they have the power to automate a lot of business tasks with a higher degree of accuracy and efficiency. With digital transformation accelerated by pandemic, many people are shifting to including virtual assistants at least in some areas of business.
Here in this article, let us discuss all essential things regarding these AI powered Enterprise Virtual Assistants — What they are, how they help and some challenges they present.
What is an Automated Virtual Assistant?
An artificial intelligence virtual assistant is a software that can effectively occupy a position of virtual assistant and carry out much of all expected tasks, like managing interactions, scheduling tasks and much more.
You may have already experienced personal assistants in your mobile, pc and in other ways too. Think of Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant. All these assistants are already powerful in understanding the intent of their users and satisfying their request. So, no wonder people would think of using AI powered virtual assistants for their business needs.
Practise of hiring virtual personal assistants has been there for a long time. Business owners used to hire a person, many of them sometimes to be their virtual assistants and carry out many of their important tasks.
Digital virtual assistants use various technologies of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning including NLP (Natural Language Processing) NLU (Natural Language Understanding) for performing their tasks. A great thing with machine learning models is that the more data they receive, the more accurate they grow.
Not only through text, they also support interaction through voice which is a great advantage.
With a small yet crucial initial training, they can harness their already trained machine learning models to quickly start becoming your virtual personal assistant.
Also, these assistants would be available for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week throughout year!
How can AI powered Virtual Assistants help Scale your Business Up
Artificially intelligent virtual assistants are designed so that they can understand your intent accurately not only through your immediate message but also across various data channels and perform automation over vast environments for executing required tasks.
Automating Business Workflow
Your business workflow might include a lot of repetitive tasks or certain tasks that can be easily done by a software. A report by McKinsey in 2017 states that 60% of all occupations contain at least 30% activities that are automatable! Many years into the future, as automation is steadily being used in industry, we can see that much of all activities that can be automated have been automated now and this trend will only increase in future.
By saying “automatable” tasks, they do not necessarily mean only customer service or general scheduling. While they are important, many other tasks like Marketing, Human Resources management & recruitment can also be automated!
Virtual AI assistant you use can integrate itself with a wide range of solutions you already use for performing these tasks.
Better Customer Relationship Management
An intelligent virtual assistant not only helps in turning leads to customers, but also provides a lot of help in maintaining customer relationships in resolving their problems and queries.
Instead of dedicated employees working round the clock to attend all requests, virtual assistants can be deployed to automate and manage many customer problems. When correctly integrated, they also have the power to solve a range of queries including giving insights and tracking product delivery. They can also notify your customers when appropriate.
Concerns and Challenges with AI Virtual Assistants
Just as with many solutions, using a virtual assistant bot in your business has a lot of advantages and also presents challenges too. These are some prominent challenges with using AI powered virtual assistants:
Proper Design of Use Cases and Initial Training
All of the virtual assistant platforms are pretrailed well and come with a lot of features. However, it is only in your hands to design it perfectly with use cases. While there are platforms that may do that too for you, it is ultimately you who knows what your personal assistant must do.
That is, you just design robust use cases that perfectly justify business uses and make use of all features of Virtual assistant. This might take some time, but provides very valuable returns.
Privacy and Security
As technology occupies every aspect of your life, privacy becomes a huge concern. All of your activities might be recorded by the company and fed into their big data pool. While some are okay with it, many are not. It is upto you to decide which level of privacy you want.
Also popular platforms often become targets for hackers and as such even though a company vows to protect your privacy, it might be susceptible to malicious attacks.
Even though a company protects your data very tightly, there are still chances an attack could happen in the arguably weakest link — humans. Social engineering attacks are being more sophisticated and the price of not being aware would be high.
Final Words
Businesses, especially smaller ones, have been long using virtual personal assistants to decrease load on them and outsource much of their work.
These people would be trained in many skills and work mainly on an hourly basis. Artificial intelligence powered enterprise virtual assistants are being more and more popular because they work perfectly well as personal assistants all while providing benefits of being digital — maximum uptime and minimum costs.
As much as they have advantages, they have their challenges and concerns. It is upto you to make perfect use of technology all while being safe.
By taking much of the administrative and repetitive tasks out of you, virtual agent software would ultimately take a lot of burden out of you. With this, you get a lot of time to focus on improving your business which ultimately, Increases sales and makes you profits!
