Definitions of ‘virtual agent’ within the chatbot industry seem to vary according to developer’s objectives. In interviews between CRM Magazine and three virtual agent companies, the following definitions of virtual agent were identified:
CRM Magazine also describes some interesting results so far with established virtual agents:
- Vodafone uses a virtual agent to facilitate 750,000 conversations a month regarding customer account questions and the company’s services.
- eBay is already facilitating 200,000 customer conversations a day with virtual agents in six different countries.
- Another company concluded that it was able to offload 30 percent of customer queries at a 96 percent resolution rate.
These results are quite remarkable and predict a great future for the virtual agents industry, even though there are still some challenges developers need to overcome to optimise the virtual agent experience, such as:
- No speech interface: All vendors currently lack the speech interface to create a truly seamless and natural experience. Conventional customer service will be complemented if not replaced by virtual agents, certainly when speech interfaces become more human-like.
- Maintenance of knowledge: Another component that needs to be constantly improved upon is the knowledge of the virtual agent to assist customers with an overload of questions
- Consistency across multiple channels: Another challenge for the virtual agent industry is keeping the agent consistent across multiple channels.
- Human intervention: Human beings still need to oversee all conversations and in the future, customers should not be able to tell the difference between a response from a virtual agent and a human being.
