One of the most powerful things you can do to give your business a foothold in the digital space in 2020 is to introduce a Virtual Assistant, or ‘Chatbot’.
Eliza, the very first ‘chatbot’, was developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1966. But chatbots are no longer the preserve of experiments and geniuses in scientific institutes. Chatbots are now the bread and butter of banks, fashion stores, agricultural industries, and taxation departments, to name just a few. The breadth of applications in 2020 is as staggering as it is extensive.

Virtual Assistants totally revamp your company’s customer support experience while increasing sales yield from business’s marketing campaigns. On top of all that, chatbots help increase productivity and efficiency from an internal perspective.

You might wonder whether virtual assistants can automate all of your company’s tasks and processes, but it depends on how the bot is specifically programmed to help. A helpful way to think about tasks is simple vs. complex or machine-capable vs. human-capable. Virtual assistants can be trained to automate and handle repetitive tasks which are simple but high in volume.

Chatbots can complete low-level tasks on their own with a lightning-fast turnaround, which allows more time for complex tasks which require human judgment. By dividing work in this way, companies can save on overheads and keep customers satisfied, thus improving both efficiency and productivity. 

We all know that manual customer service can be costly. In fact, IBM has estimated that businesses will spend more than $1 trillion on 265 billion customer service calls every year. But chatbots can help companies drive up efficiency through improved, low-cost customer service. Virtual assistants can respond to frequent and repetitive queries from customers, which reduces the load on human agents and gives them time to concentrate all their efforts on more complex issues. This greatly reduces customer service costs and streamlines processes in an ordered, predictable way, so your people can focus on doing what they do best.

You might not have heard of this particular application, but its value should not be underestimated: Virtual Assistants can run effective training programs. That’s right – instead of investing valuable resources into person-to-person training sessions, your chatbot can be trained to perform detailed analysis of trainees, which we all know can be a time-consuming manual process. This allows trainers to identify areas of improvement from a top-down view. Chatbots can also help companies to onboard new employees if they are trained to provide the necessary training and guidelines to incoming staff. This helps save time and effort that would have been expended on manual on-boarding processes.

So, whether it’s the automation of low-level tasks, generating or preserving leads, responding to frequently asked questions, or training staff, chatbots are the gift to businesses that keep on giving, driving up your company’s productivity and efficiency like never before. Every business should consider investing in this team member with a difference.