Month: August 2021

A virtual assistant takes care of tasks that are important in many areas of business. That could be both technical and also non-technical aspects. Many organizations have been recruiting virtual assistants for many years. However, with an advancement of technology particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence personal assistants have been effective and efficient enough to be brought into the business.

However, choosing the perfect virtual assistant that suits exactly your needs is still hard. There are a lot of options to choose from and a lot of considerations to make.

In this article, let us discuss all key checks before you choose and answer the questions like which is the best AI assistant? So that you can decide on which virtual assistant to use.

Your Needs vs its Capabilities

It is never an understatement to say that you need your needs identified before you can choose anything. It can be hard, but the payoffs it gives are worth it.

This is important because not all automated virtual assistants are the same and each has its capabilities and limitations.

So, first, try to identify all of your needs before you begin searching for a chatbot virtual assistant. This actually is part of an initial investment you do in automated virtual assistants. The other part is in the actual integration of it in your tasks through an initial setup and learning curve.

While a perfect answer is desirable, it may not be possible for you. Even a high-level understanding of your needs would be certainly helpful.

Also, while doing these, it is advisable to write your needs in priority order. This is because the final decision would depend on a lot of other factors and if all do not reach the optimum level, like budget not being sufficient, you may need to sacrifice certain low priority features for high priority ones.

After you get a rough idea regarding your needs, check the capabilities of a particular virtual assistant. You may not be able to completely understand how a particular assistant software works, in that case, ask for a demo and most likely an organization would provide a live demo for the software in which you can ask and clarify all doubts.

If the capabilities of virtual assistants match that of your needs, then you can get it right away!

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

Flexibility

While we stress identifying your requirements, it might not be possible and also, your requirements change depending on your situation and you may want different capabilities in the future.

The automated virtual assistant solution you take must not only satisfy your current needs but needs to be flexible enough so as to accommodate your future changes effectively and efficiently.

Ease of Use

Not only must the personal assistant satisfy all your needs, but it must also do so in a way that is easy for you to use. There are two ways to think about ease of use: initial learning curve and general user experience. A combination of them will let us understand the ease of use of an application. It is highly good if an initial learning curve is less and the general user experience is great. But, if the user experience is great but requires a high initial learning curve you can give it a shot considering your current context.

If neither learning curve nor user experience is on great terms, then the tool might not be worth it.

Integration

In this digital world, you would have your workspace smeared across multiple channels. In order to effectively work for you and your organization, your online personal assistant must be able to integrate into all important channels and gather or put data into these channels.

So, make sure that an AI virtual assistant you choose has a lot of integrations in all the channels you work in.

Price

Your organization might or might not have a huge budget to spare for obtaining automated virtual assistants. So, seeing the pricing of an online virtual assistant is important.

Quite usually, platforms would have several plans that are tailored to different needs and also, include a free tier or at least a trial plan for some time that lets you completely test it and see it in action.

Also, if you find that all of their plans are not suited for your particular need, most of the organizations would help you to create a customized plan that works best for you!

Security

Your personal assistant knows a lot about you and the security of data must be of paramount importance.

Try to understand how a particular platform secures your data. Typically, you need complete encryption of data and secure ways for accessing it.

Also, completely study their terms and conditions of usage, especially privacy policy so that you would have an idea as to what they would do with your data. Most likely, the software would use your data for improving their virtual assistant algorithm, and only use this data anonymously, that is, without including information that could identify you.

Customer Support

While using a virtual IT assistant, you could be running into certain problems that can easily and sometimes, only be solved by a representative of the organization. That is, you need effective and timely customer service.

So, make sure that an organization provides essential customer service operations like Live chat, ticketing system, and others. Studying reviews about products especially in the area of customer service would help to get an understanding of this aspect.

Once you get confirmation that customer support is great, you can be without any worries about future problems.

Final Words

As much as automated virtual assistants can help you, they can only do so if their capabilities are highly appropriate for your requirement. By considering and analyzing all-important checks like understanding your needs vs their capabilities, flexibility, integrations, and others, you can make an informed decision as to what artificial intelligence personal assistant to take.

So, follow them and improve your productivity exponentially!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Key Checks Before You Choose Your Virtual Assistant was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chatbot technology has become an inextricable part of good customer service nowadays, but it can do so much more for your brand and your customers. In fact, there are many reasons why you would want to integrate a chatbot into your website, and also have a social media bot to communicate with your followers. For one, a chatbot allows you to take a lot of the pressure off your human staff and allow them to focus on the complex problems while the bot handles menial tasks, simple queries, and some repetitive issues that your customers might regularly come across.

That said, now that conversational AI is becoming more and more available to companies around the world, it’s also important to note that chatbot technology is starting to boost business processes across the board. One of these is definitely content marketing, and you can use your chatbot to take your content strategy forward, and you can use some sound content practices to improve and optimize your chatbot.

Let’s put all of this into perspective and talk about intelligent content management using chatbot technology in 2021 and beyond.

Provide a more personalized experience

Nowadays, one of the most important pillars of long-term success online is personalization. Your goal should be to personalize every experience on all customer touchpoints as much as possible in order to acquire and retain loyal customers organically. After all, people want to read stories and consume content that is highly relevant to them and their needs — content that will address their pain points and deliver a solution to their unique problems.

There are some pretty amazing content marketing examples you can use as inspiration and effectuate yourself with the use of chatbots. This is where chatbot technology can prove invaluable, in fact, as it can allow you to personalize and customize every customer interaction on every touchpoint. Your chatbot has the ability to deliver only the content that matters to the individual based on their online behavior, past interactions with the chatbot, and other factors, effectively guiding them to the content that solves their problems.

This makes for a highly effective and highly personalized content distribution strategy for your brand.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

Improve engagement with visual content

Content nowadays goes beyond long-form articles or short-but-to-the-point blog posts, even though written content will always be king and has the most impact on your SEO. If you want to stand out in the competitive online market, though, and drive as much engagement as possible across different channels, you need to invest in other content types as well. For the most part, this means investing in visual content, specifically videos.

Now, you could develop your video strategy manually and sift through all the customer and audience data yourself, but you could also use your chatbot to tell you what type of visual content your audience wants to see. Keep in mind that every customer is at a different stage in their journey, and so it’s important to give them the visual content that will address their needs.

What’s more, now that the latest visual content marketing statistics show that original graphics and videos are the key elements of meeting your marketing goals, it’s more important than ever before to invest in creating quality visuals for your audience. That said, it’s not just about the quality, it’s also about proper dissemination, and you can use your chatbot and the data it has on your customers to deliver the right visuals, to the right person, and the right time.

Help sales reps achieve success

Modern sales agents can often wear many hats in an organization, and aside from handling the sales process itself, they are often tasked with organizing and contextualizing customer data, keeping track of where every lead is in the sales funnel, as well as some administrative tasks. While your sales experts might be perfectly capable of handling all of those responsibilities, they would be much more productive and effective in their work if you included an AI-driven solution into their process.

There are many ways in which sales AI can help reps grow revenue, and when it comes to chatbot technology, it can take a lot of the pressure off your human staff. You can have an internal chatbot handle their menial administrative tasks and help them organize all data, or you can have a sales chatbot on the customer-facing end to guide leads towards the best product or service for their needs.

If the customer is at that stage in their journey when they are ready to buy, the chatbot can easily close the deal, but it can also assist in any stage of the customer journey. Some people are not ready to buy and are merely looking for quality information, while others are comparing their options — both groups can get relevant content and solutions from your AI-driven chatbot.

Provide stellar customer service

It should go without saying that using a chatbot is one of the top ways to provide swift customer service to your customers, and do it in a way that ensures brand consistency across all touchpoints. Now that more and more businesses are creating omni-channel experiences and engagement strategies, it’s more important than ever before to present a consistent brand image wherever your customers decide to engage with your company.

While you might not have the human resources in-house to manage these channels, you can leverage your website chatbot to provide stellar customer service to every visitor. You can also use various social media bots to handle customer queries and issues on different channels, and guide them to a positive outcome.

The best part about this is that you can provide the kind of customer service that people want and need — prompt, exact, and personalized. An intelligent chatbot will not only engage with the customer and resolve their issue or answer their question, it will also boost the upselling potential of the interaction.

Your chatbot can suggest additional, complementary products and services that might interest the customer, or even offer package deals, discounts, and loyalty perks. You simply need to implement these features into the bot and watch as it transforms customer service into a powerful upselling tool.

Make internal processes or your app more efficient

Last but not least, consider adding an internal chatbot into your company’s proprietary software to boost productivity and efficiency in the workplace, or if you have an app that the customers are using, be sure to integrate a chatbot to make their lives easier. One of the most creative examples of how an in-app chatbot can help comes from Animaker and their personal assistant Max, which they have integrated seamlessly into the software to achieve a more user-friendly experience.

Customers can call on Max (an intelligent chatbot), to help them with video creation and finding the settings and features they need, which creates an amazing customer experience for all users. You can use the same method to create an intelligent chatbot for your apps, and help your teams to better work or help your app users get the content they need.

In either case, the chatbot will help provide the content, guidance, and help people need to achieve their goals.

Over to you

Content management becomes easier and more effective when you leverage the right tech, and chatbot technology should definitely be at the forefront of your strategy. With these tips in mind, go ahead and maximize the potential of your chatbots to deliver stellar customer service, provide the best content possible to all users, and even disseminate valuable information to your team members.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Intelligent Content Management Using Chatbot Technology: 5 Key Tips You Should Know was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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By Soffos Team

The premature adoption of inadequate technologies can often do more harm than good. One of the most apposite examples is the frequently misguided espousal of basic ChatBot solutions in an increasingly digital-first landscape.

ChatBots have been around for a long time, having grown from Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems from over 20 years ago. But with businesses progressively shifting online over the past few years (in particular the past 18 months), organizations everywhere have been on the hunt searching for solutions that can reduce the volume of costly, time-consuming digital interactions with customers. Yet traditional ChatBots have infamously underperformed in terms of user experience. More often than not, these Bots will continue to pass a query to an employee when the task at hand becomes too difficult — only serving to complicate the customer experience, rather than enhance it.

Thankfully, the next generation of Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI) solutions is here to change all that. CAI is already a strong and growing presence within the tech space, with Soffos being at the forefront of this movement. Indeed, researchandmarkets.com predicts that the global Conversational AI market will grow from USD$4.8billion in 2020 to around USD$13.9 billion by 2025, a statistic that signifies the enormous momentum that this technology has gained and the importance it holds.

Yet the almost boundless potential of CAI to reinvent the customer experience and reduce business costs continues to be overshadowed by lasting misconceptions. Despite being in a league of their own, Conversational AI tools are generally misconstrued to be in the same ball-park as decision-tree basic ChatBots. This has hindered their ascendence to the ‘premier league’ of customer experience, which is where they truly belong.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

With that in mind, below are some of the key differences between Conversational AI and the traditional ChatBot:

Why Conversational AI reigns supreme

While superficially the traditional ChatBot and CAI perform the same functions, their capabilities are worlds apart. The basic Bot simply cannot cope with anything beyond simple queries — for instance, inputting figures to generate insurance quotes. This is because most do not employ true AI or genuine computational linguistics. Instead, they are pre-programmed to use ‘decision trees,’ which can only automatically react to keywords, much as a dog reacts to set commands.

As a result, most contemporary ChatBots cannot easily adjust to unexpected customer responses, instead triggering an action from a staff member who must step in to assist. The result? Needless expense and frustrated customers.

This will all change with the growing usage of agents powered by true AI. For one, sophisticated algorithms mean that these platforms can understand more complicated and nuanced conversations, even if people use slang or acronyms. Along with utilizing memory modules, our AI’s powerful algorithms make educated associations between phrases and follow-up questions to determine the context of the conversation, all the while referencing previous interactions to offer more personalized support.

The greatest advantage of AI agents is that they truly free up employees to deal only with the most complex queries — leaving repetitive and common questions to be addressed effectively by machines. Meanwhile, users will enjoy more seamless and tailored assistance.

Now more than ever, businesses need Conversational AI

Permanently scattered workforces mean that enterprises today must find ways to ensure their employees are armed with the necessary knowledge of their company and products, wherever they are based and whatever their new working patterns. People must be able to locate the right information and get assistance without having to resort to lengthy, scheduled conversations with managers.

That’s where Soffos comes in. Our next-gen, AI-powered conversational agent will transform the workforce experience, ensuring that colleagues can quickly and efficiently find out what they need to know. Driven by leading natural language processing (NLP) technologies, our corporate KnowledgeBot delivers a contextual and flowing conversational experience that feels truly ‘human’.

Soffos’ algorithms use long-term memory from previous conversations to understand the true meaning of a users’ intent, as well as being able to understand written and spoken abbreviations, slang and dialects. To do this, the AI engine interrogates Knowledge Graphs, which are far more advanced than the simple keyword databases used by ChatBots.

Employees can speak or type their questions or commands into the Soffos platform, which then provides an answer from its knowledge silos or a solution that might come in the form of links to alternative resources. However, it also protects the human element of mentorship — if an individual could benefit from the expertise of a colleague from another department, Soffos can direct them to the most appropriate person to liaise with.

There can be little doubt that the future is digital — but Soffos isn’t intended to replace humans, who will always have an integral role to play in training, and in interpersonal communication more generally.

You can learn more about our revolutionary product here, and don’t forget to sign up for beta if you’d like to trial our corporate training solution within your business! The future of Learning & Development starts today — it’s called the Soffos experience.

Soffos.ai, a portfolio company at Fountech Ventures is a hyper-personalised AI-powered app designed for workplace training.

Fountech Ventures — A home for your deep tech AI startup

FOUNTECH VENTURES – AI Venture Builders | LinkedIn

Fountech Ventures (@Ventures_FT) / Twitter

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Chatbot Today, Conversational AI Agent Tomorrow was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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The COVID-19 pandemic changed everything around us. As we look back, we cannot imagine the magnitude of changes it has brought to the whole world! While it boosted the pace of the digital revolution, it also took the lives of many innocent people.

We applaud the tireless efforts of the healthcare department that has worked round the clock (literally) to ensure the health and safety of its citizens. We cannot compare ourselves with the work done by them, but we take immense pride in helping the nation fight another critical battle — a battle against rumors, myths, and misinformation.

To facilitate this efficient and timely information dissemination process, Haptik developed the MyGov Corona Helpdesk — the official Government of India chatbot to answer queries about the COVID-19 pandemic.

We received encouragement from senior public officials for this technology-driven awareness initiative, including the Honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi.

Creating a similar impact, a year later

The cloud of pessimism and negativity has passed now, and India has picked itself up from the shackles of the second wave of the pandemic. Vaccination drives across the country are in full swing, and business owners are breathing a sigh of relief!

The MyGov Corona Helpdesk was the talk of the weekend, and we couldn’t be more excited to witness how the whole of India reacted to it!

Trending Bot Articles:

How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

We worked with the MyGov and WhatsApp teams to enable people to download their vaccine certificates from the MyGov Corona Helpdesk on WhatsApp.

Here’s how it works 👇🏻

What prominent industrialists and government officials had to say about it 👇🏻

Apart from the business results we deliver for large-scale enterprises, these events genuinely reflect AI’s impact on society!

We’re proud to join hands with MyGov and WhatsApp who are doing groundbreaking work to facilitate the process of efficient and timely information dissemination around everything related to COVID-19.

In more than 90+ hours that we are live with this use-case, 697000+ users have downloaded their certificates successfully, which is almost 50% of the whole traffic on the bot during those hours. (The above data is between 06 Aug & 09 Aug 06:00 PM)

We’re also excited to announce that we’re working on Coming Soon: Booking your Vaccination Appointments on WhatsApp directly!

Click here to open WhatsApp and use the service directly: https://lnkd.in/eADEK9NC

Interested to explore more or want to try out a chatbot of your own?

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Haptik enables India to Download Vaccination Certificate was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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