Virtual assistants are changing the way we get information and how we engage with businesses, which are increasingly relying on them to perform mundane and tedious tasks quickly and efficiently. And as more and more technology that improves the power of virtual assistants is developed, opportunities for new use cases across industries continue to emerge.
However, there needs to be a perfect blend of human and virtual when it comes to service delivery, says Ginelle Makhado, senior digital manager at the MTN Group, who will be presenting a case study on ’Virtual assistants vs the human touch: blending human and virtual assistant support for enhanced service delivery’, at the ITWeb CX Summit 2019, to be held on 15 October, at The Forum in Bryanston.
“Businesses need to augment their customer facing staff with the intelligence and predictive capability that an assistant can provide. Most bots are driven from business efficiency perspective and not a customer need, therefore you can’t service all customers with the same approach,” she explains.
Speaking of where businesses are going wrong when it comes to implementing virtual assistants, Makhado says having a limited amount of the correct data – which is essentially conversations between agents and customers – is a factor.
In addition, businesses tend to focus on one dimension only, which is the reduction in costs from automation.
Finally, she stresses the importance of advising customers that they are going to be speaking to a virtual assistant and providing the necessary transparency.
Makhado will discuss the challenges and complexities faced in an African context with bots, as well as the conflicting needs of a personal touch versus a business value proposition.
She will also share some insights from the MTN Group’s approach, and how to identify good use-cases for a virtual assistant within an organisation.
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