Advantages of AI-Powered Intelligent Virtual Assistants over Basic Chatbots

The use of bots has become part of our daily lives and with the benefits they provide in reducing operating costs, organizations have been looking for ways to implement them effectively. Many businesses have tried to harness the power of chatbots to achieve this level of efficiency, but despite their efforts, still fail to generate the desired return on investment.

Following the disappointing results of simplistic chatbot technology, companies need better ways to engage customers and respond to inquiries. As consumers become more discerning with their digital interactions, a new and more sophisticated AI is emerging as the market leader: conversational AI.

By leveraging rapidly evolving conversational AI technology, businesses are moving away from simplistic chatbots to provide their customers and employees with superior levels of convenience. To get a deeper insight into why this change is happening, it is important to understand the differences between these two technologies and how they work in a modern world.

Why Basic Chatbots Struggle to Deliver Enterprise-Level Results

When users interact with basic chatbots, they often feel frustrated and like their time is being wasted. This is usually caused by a lack of proper chatbot training, testing and analysis leading to incorrect responses and user dissatisfaction.

Most chatbots we come across can only answer common questions and simple queries in a step-by-step decision tree style process. These chatbots cannot be made intelligent with strong natural language processing (NLP) training and lack the ability to enable human-like contextual conversations. Inadequate testing of the chatbots is also one of the reasons for their poor performance, as they are manually tested (not covering all test scenarios).

When it comes to enterprise-level functionality, chatbots have major limitations and are unable to understand multiple intents within a single query. It’s almost impossible for them to complete more than the first request and causes irritation when a chatbot switches topics while trying to complete a request. They are also unable to handle sentiments or respond to chats in real time. These issues cause users to become frustrated and dissatisfied with chatbots and avoid using them as their primary source of customer service. In fact, many contact centers struggle with this limitation as customers often choose to speak directly with a live agent over participating in an IVR bot call.

The advantages of intelligent virtual assistants over chatbots

At first glance, IVAs and chatbots can look similar, but on closer inspection the differences are very noticeable. A chat bot is software capable of automating simple responses in pre-programmed question and answer format. They lack any intelligence. However, Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) are, by nature, intelligent. They are advanced computer programs that can understand, process, learn and respond to voice or text input naturally.

Intelligent virtual assistants are powered by AI technologies, such as conversational AI, that allow them to understand complex queries and offer intuitive responses. Conversational AI technology helps these IVAs be more conversational, intelligent, personalized and contextual. AI-powered IVAs use a combination of machine learning (ML), speech recognition, and natural language processing (NLP) technologies to contextualize voice and chat conversations to understand how best to respond to user input.

AI-powered conversational virtual assistants are able to offer superior assistance by offering a human-like conversation experience that is personalized to the user and can handle complex support queries with multiple inquiries. In addition to all the functionality of chatbots, intelligent virtual assistants can engage in small talk, understand multiple user intents with a single utterance, hold and resume conversations, respond intuitively to an unrecognized request, and track users to cross-sell or resume conversations. Overselling services.

The bottom line is that chatbots support strict, rule-based conversations that force users to follow a predetermined path while intelligent virtual assistants allow users to have a free-flowing conversation to resolve queries.

How organizations benefit from IVAs

Intelligent virtual assistants offer voice and chat-based solutions for customer service, IT support, marketing and digital commerce. By harnessing the power of conversational AI technology, organizations have the potential to drastically improve their customer experience while reducing operational costs and increasing employee productivity.

IVAs can help organizations with complex user requests and offer them more human-like conversations in real time. Conversational AI enables smart virtual assistants to perform in-depth analysis and interpret data much faster than human capabilities. So, they can handle the volume and veracity of data to learn for themselves and offer more contextual customer experiences.

IVAs can benefit companies in a variety of use cases, from automating repetitive, labor-intensive tasks to providing deeper business insights that create a more personalized customer journey. For example, an intelligent virtual assistant can be used by commercial banks to evaluate and negotiate commercial loan agreements. Even with lawyers and loan officers of the highest level of expertise, commercial loan agreements are still subject to human error as a result of their manual review. This not only affects businesses financially but also adds time-consuming tasks that cost banks extra money. IVAs allow financial institutions to process loan agreements and help negotiate accounts in significantly less time than it would take a human being to ensure that no mistakes are made.

Intelligent virtual assistants are next-generation applications that aim to provide a human-like experience to users and can be used to create voice and chat-based solutions for everything from customer service, IT support, marketing and digital commerce. By leveraging AI technology for conversations, businesses will not only improve customer experiences but also increase employee productivity while reducing costs.

Interested in learning more? Check out this white paper below for an in-depth look at IVAs and their capabilities to learn how different chatbots are intelligent virtual assistants and help you understand the benefits each technology can provide and know which use cases are right for your business.