Today, virtual assisted-service offerings focus on the service. VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent is a good example. Its virtual agents are cross-channel virtual agents that deploy on web, mobile, and social channels and can answer questions that help customers complete activities across all phases of the lifecycles of their relationships with businesses. VirtuOz’ Virtual Agents best capability is the range of virtual agent interaction styles. Yes, these Intelligent Virtual Agents can deliver direct answers of text, links, and images to customers’ questions. But virtual agents can also “converse” with customers to guide them to web pages that contain more complex answers or to have a question and answer dialog that leads customers to answers based on how they answer the virtual agent’s question. And virtual agents can perform tasks with case management and CRM systems on customers’ behalves, acting as customer proxies.
By the way, speaking virtual agents are coming back. Think of Siri. Their best fit is on mobile devices for customer service apps that are narrow in scope. For example, “What’s the status of my order?”
We’ll be publishing more evaluations of virtual assisted-service products in the next several months. Next up is our review of Creative Virtual V-Person. Stay tuned.
~ Mitch
VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent
Powerful and Flexible Cross-Channel, Cross-Lifecycle Virtual Assisted-Service
By Mitch Kramer, Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, July 26, 2012
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NETTING IT OUT
VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) is the virtual assisted-service product from VirtuOz, Inc., a privately held, venture capital funded, 10-year-old supplier based in Emeryville, CA, and Paris, France.
Organizations purchase subscription licenses of the VirtuOz IVA for cloud deployment. To date, VirtuOz claims that approximately 25 customer organizations have licensed its virtual assisted-service product.
VirtuOz earns very good grades on our Virtual Assisted-Service Report Card for Virtual Assisted-service—exceeds-requirements grades in all virtual agent technologies (answers, question analysis and matching, and customer service integration) and meets-requirements grades for analytic functionality, product viability, and supplier viability.
VirtuOz IVA is an attractive and useful offering with powerful and flexible capabilities. Use it to deploy virtual agents on web, mobile, and social channels to answer customers’ questions with direct answers, through guided dialogs, or by performing tasks on customers’ behalves within case management and CRM systems.
We recommend VirtuOz for large B2B and B2C organizations in North America and Western Europe that want to add virtual assisted-service to their customer service portfolio to support web, mobile, and social channels for answering customers’ questions across the entire customer lifecycle.
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