“Automated Virtual Agents†– available in a wide variety of forms and called artificial humansOpens a new window by some developers – are coming soon to your company.
But how will these intelligent bots interact with your customers, sales agents and executives?
How will they fit in with your sales-focused customer relationship management platform?
And how will they likely affect your company’s overall prospects?
Automated Virtual Assistants and their cousins, so-called Intelligent Assistants, count among the growing universe of botsOpens a new window that will be deployed to supplement your CRM platform and other work.
Early-generation examples include Google Now, Amazon Echo, Cortana, Siri, BlackBerry Assistant, and a host of others. Tech companies are spending billions of dollars annually on virtual assistants – an estimated $2 billion globally in 2019 alone, up from $600 million in 2016.
Emphasizing automation
It’s all part of the trend by which enterprises develop machine-learning solutions within CRM technology with steadily more emphasis on automation whenever and wherever it can be effective.
The sales pitch from technologists is that inserting robots in the workplace can free humans to perform high-value tasks where their involvement is more of a requisite. The bots – which do not create personnel problems, demand high salaries and bonuses or insist on benefits – can look after the rest.
Early-stage work with bots in CRM platforms focused on addressing frequent customer questions and routing other queries to humans. Since then, more sophisticated interfaces have been deployed, and some bots are now filling out forms and addressing more sophisticated technical problems with products or services.
This situation has allowed managers to use several different bots to deal with common tasks, saving the business thousands of man-hours and dollars which can be channeled elsewhere. Despite the high costs of development, with some bigger firms helping out with development from scratch, bots are saving businesses a lot of money.
There’s also the additional level of efficiency the bots can bring, acting as an interface between the customer and the CRM and staying “on the job†24 hours a day, 365 days of the year.
Customer trends are also driving the uptake of the virtual assistants. Some customers prefer to interact with companies via bots or online and younger workers seem more comfortable with it.
Fragmented technology
The downside for CRMs is the fragmentation of the technology. There’s no market leader or uniform solution. A CRM consultant may still find it difficult to arrange a parade of the top bots used by the sector’s Fortune 500 companies.
Much of the technology has been tailored – or simply set up – to meet specific needs. Most companies using virtual assistants have also tended to place them in ‘silos’ – the bots don’t interact with each other although they may feed data back to a centralized CRM platform.
Choosing this level of automation is an important and increasingly necessary decision for a company. Much will be determined by what your existing technology stack looks like and which platforms you’re using at the core of your CRM operations.
From there it is worth consulting the team involved in your day-to-day call center operations and direct customer interaction because your customers will provide the best feedback for your automated workplace, its virtues and its flaws.
Key takeaways:
- Spending on bots has ramped up in the last five years as companies seek to exploit the considerable cost savings and other efficiencies which they represent.
- The technology, while it leverages many of the early wins of machine learning, is still fragmented, with hundreds of applications on the marketOpens a new window .
- Making the right decisions on importing bots to your CRM stack will be determined partly by your existing technology and ideally guided by the day-to-day operational needs of your call-center teams.