NETTING IT OUT

Creative Virtual V-Person is the virtual assisted-service offering from Creative Virtual, a privately held supplier that was founded in 2003 and is based in London, UK, with offices in the US, India, the Netherlands, and Australia.

Organizations purchase subscription licenses for cloud deployment or perpetual licenses for on-premise deployment of V-Person. To date, Creative Virtual claims that 41 customer organizations are using it.

V-Person earns a very good report card. The product earns Exceeds-Requirements grades in Answers, Analysis and Matching, and Analytic Functionality. It earns Meets-Requirements Grades in Customer Service Integration, Product Viability, and Company Viability.

Use V-Person to deploy virtual agents on web, mobile, social, and IVR channels to answer customers’ questions directly or through guided, question and answer dialogs. Answers can integrate any application data through Python scripting. V-Person can also deliver personalized answers by matching customer profiles with answer properties.

We recommend that large B2C and B2B organizations and government agencies in Dutch, English, German, and Spanish speaking geographies consider V-Person to add cross-channel virtual assisted-service to their customer service application portfolio. Its virtual agents can deliver answers to every customer question, lowering cost to serve and improving customer satisfaction.

Customer Service

Answer Customers’ Questions and Solve Customers’ Problems

Customer service products help organizations deliver answers to their customers’ questions and solutions to their problems through their case management, knowledge management, search, account management, and social network management capabilities, capabilities that support self-service, assisted-service, and social-service channels. These products help answer and solve customers’ questions and problems about products and services, about business policies, processes, and practices, or about the elements of their customer relationships such as accounts, bills, orders, and contracts.

Virtual Assisted-Service—Customer Services Delivered by Virtual Agents

Virtual assisted-service products and services use software to:

• Solicit and receive customers’ questions, typically within a box on a web page, similar to the box for a chat session. Within the box are a text box into which customers enter their questions and an image of a person, a virtual agent.
• Analyze customers’ questions to determine its meaning, its intent. Analyses are typically natural language processing (NLP) and linguistic analytics.
• Match a customer’s questions to the answer within a collection of predefined answers that best matches it. Matching also uses linguistic analytics. The collection of predefined answers is a knowledgebase.
• Deliver the best answers to customers within the box on the web page.

Virtual assisted-service is virtual because it uses software to determine and to deliver answers to customers’ questions. It’s assisted-service because, from the perspective of the customer, it solicits questions and delivers answers in the style that live agents/customer service reps deliver answers on assisted-service channels. However, from the perspective of the customer service provider, virtual assisted-service is self-service. Its agents are implemented in software. They are virtual agents, the faces/avatars of virtual assisted-service technology.

Customers escalate to virtual assisted-service from self-service activities when they have difficulty getting answers to their questions using traditional web facilities such as search, knowledgebases, and portals. Customers escalate to assisted-service from virtual assisted-service when virtual agents cannot answer their questions satisfactorily or when virtual agents suggest that live agents/reps should be contacted.

Virtual Assisted-Service Can Be a Low(er) Cost Customer Service Channel

Virtual assisted can be a low(er) cost customer service channel. It’s customer service software, not customer service staff. It can lower cost to serve by avoiding or deflecting assisted-service chat sessions and/or contact center calls. It can also prevent or delay abandonment and improve customer satisfaction, delivering answers to customers who might otherwise leave rather than call.

The Best Virtual Assisted-Service—Fast and Accurate

As it is for all customer service, the best virtual assisted-service is fast and accurate. Customers won’t wait very long. They access your sites on fast devices using fast connections on fast networks. Your processing of their questions should never be the bottleneck to their completing their activities in doing business with you.

Accuracy is the key. Customers want the right answer. They’d prefer not to read a list of FAQs to match their questions with yours. (That’s what they expect a virtual agent to do for them, anyway.) They don’t want to wade through pages of possible answers like they’re forced to do when they use Internet or site search.

Creative Virtual V-Person

V-Person is the virtual assisted-service offering from Creative Virtual. Using V-Person’s technology, businesses place virtual agents on web pages for laptops/desktops, mobile devices, and social networks. V-Person also deploys on IVR. Within web pages, software avatars represent virtual agents. They present text box that invites customers and/or users to “ask” questions by entering a text string. Virtual agents analyze and match customers’ questions against answers in its knowledge base to deliver a “suitable answer” in response in text and graphics or in speech. Suitable answers may include data from external applications.

V-Person’s virtual agents deploy...(more)

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