Five Ways to Make an AI Virtual Assistant Work for You?

An AI virtual assistant can do more than process data. It can play a crucial role in redesigning the business

There is proliferating popularity for virtual assistants in enabling a smart and efficient work environment. Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana are the best examples of how people find virtual assistants are aiding in streamlining their everyday activity. On the work front, Virtual assistant tools are in place to help with mundane tasks. As technologies advance, their sphere of influence also widens. According to a report by Gartner, both consumers and businesses will be spending $3.5 billion by end of 2021 on Virtual Personal Assistants. Therefore, the user has to be smart enough to have an optimized experience and derive maximum results from Virtual assistants. Here are a few tips to follow when employing AI virtual assistants. 

Choose the Right Fit

Different virtual assistants come with different features. Not all your business functions would need their services nor all their features can fulfill your specific requirements. It is a case of choosing the right permutation and combination to leverage its full potential. In order to arrive at the right decision, you should educate yourself to know the latest upgrades and features. Instead of thinking about conventional ways of using virtual assistant features, you can find ways in which the existing features can be applied to other problem areas in business. 

Look For Business Opportunities

AI assistants are simply not a technical replacement for human beings. They can significantly influence the ways of doing business. Virtual assistants are primarily considered as voice assistants or data processors though they have immense potential to steer businesses in a new direction. For example, an AI-enabled VA can re-engage the retired leads bringing in more sales to the company. To have a bigger business impact, you should go for customizable VAs. 

VAs are More than Mere Chatbots

Instead of just feeding instructions into VAs and forgetting thereafter, adapt to NLP and ML-trained voice assistants. With their human-like intelligence, AI-enabled chatbots can scale up business tasks immensely. These bots can combine big data, personalization, and machine learning to generate meaningful insights. For example, in the banking sector, bots can be used to detect fraudulent transactions using location data mismatches. 

Address the Common Challenges

One major drawback of VA is the lack of personalized engagement and accuracy when it comes to interacting with human beings. Conversational AI training can address this issue to a great extent to make your VAs sound more human. The next challenge is VAs do not address behavioral targeting. Feed your VAs with behavioral targeting rules such as metrics which will help virtual assistants understand the client's intent. 

Build Security Features

Though virtual, these tools are your second self and will have access to every account you have. Questions like if your system has a foolproof mechanism for intelligent VAs to log in to your accounts and how the VA is providing your data to other team players should be addressed. 

Ultimately, in the end, what matters is to keep your customers engaged and not frustrate them with unnecessary intervention by a few random self-serving features of the VAs. Overcoming these implicit challenges in implementing intelligent VA technologies plays a crucial role in a brand's success.