Virtual assistants, also known as intelligent virtual assistants or intelligent personal assistants are those that assist people with day-to-day activities such as email management, meeting scheduling, and so on. According to Gartner, by 2025, half of the knowledge workers will use a virtual assistant on a daily basis, up from 2% in 2019.
Is your company looking to increase customer engagement and personal productivity? To scale your customer service support 24 hours a day, a customer-facing chatbot can be the right fit while to increase productivity, businesses can use a virtual assistant.
Virtual Assistant will assist you in saving time, money, and stress. Thus both virtual assistants and Chatbots tend to differ by “requirements” in different companies. Let’s explore the major role played by Virtual Assistants in many industries.
Use-cases of Virtual Assistants in various industries
1. Retail
In the case of British retailer Marks & Spencer, a virtual assistant is good for business. Since it was added to the website, the company’s virtual assistant has helped to improve online sales worth an estimated $2.5 million. The virtual assistant assists customers in troubleshooting discount codes, the loyalty program, and nearly 70% of other customer issues without the need for human intervention.
Telecommunication
In 2017, Nokia launched a virtual assistant for telecom engineers. MIKA, or Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant, is the first digital assistant “trained” specifically for the telecom industry, with the goal of providing automated assistance that saves time and allows highly skilled workers to focus on critical tasks.
The MIKA provides quick recommendations for common networking issues and directs users to relevant knowledge base resources and diagnostic tools.
The application of MIKA could ‘give back’ more than one hour of productive time to engineers every day by providing them with access to information and recommendations via the interactive user interface, according to a Nokia analysis of working methods within a Network Operations Center. The company reported a significant improvement in first-contact resolution (FCR) rates for a variety of network-related issues during the first year of use.
Health-Care
GSK is a global pharmaceutical company that innovates pharmaceutical medicines, vaccines, and consumer healthcare products.
The company takes pride in its customer service and aims to provide channels of support 24 hours a day, seven days a week through its call centers. GSK started looking into virtual assistant technology that would allow these users to self-serve.
More customers are utilizing self-service in the pharmaceutical industry, and GSK uses several virtual assistant capabilities to deliver self-service options, providing customers and employees with a 24/7 support channel.
According to GSK Sources, the benefits due to virtual assistants are plenty and they reported that it is becoming easier to deploy as more teams adopt it. It helped them in completing projects completion five months ahead of schedule on average. GSK anticipates that the number of virtual assistants and use cases will continue to grow. The company is also looking into deploying Watson Assistant through voice channels like IVR and integrating with conference rooms to make booking easier.
Education
The Husky Helper virtual assistant created by the folks at Northeastern University is a great example of virtual assistants’ growing impact on higher education.
This assistant has a list of the 20 most frequently asked questions at the university call center over the last three years. Rather than being forced to wait on hold for an answer to a frequently asked question, students can use the Husky Helper to get the information they require.
This saves the university money on call center staffing. It also simplifies the process of requesting information, making it much easier for students.
Supply Chain
A company’s or organization’s success is heavily reliant on effective supply management processes.
A virtual assistant from Outsource2india, helps businesses to track all the supply management functions in the company. The virtual assistant would establish credit lines with your suppliers/vendors and monitor them, keeping credit information up to date-and accurate. The virtual assistant helped the firm to control costs, and allocate resources efficiently thus leading to take strategic business decisions.
Conclusion
We have seen an increase in virtual agent demand in the current environment, where the pandemic has accelerated digital business and “remote everything.” Hiring a virtual assistant is one of the smartest changes you can make for your company. They can undoubtedly contribute to the growth of your business if their potential are fully utilized.