How to Choose a Chatbot or Virtual Assistant Platform

AI allows companies to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage and going forward will play an even larger role in enhancing an organisations work productivity. When it comes to the many applications of AI technologies, virtual assistants are leading the way and making the biggest impact. Already popular in the B2C space, chatbots and virtual assistants are revolutionising B2B organisations as well. With a growing number of providers that claim to offer similar abilities, how do you make the choice on a platform that really add value to your business?  

Factors to consider when choosing a Chatbot or Virtual Assistant platform

Natural Language Processing and Speech Support

A platform that uses AI and NLP from multiple providers deliver the best results when it comes to accurately understanding user intent and responding with relevant content.  As well as understanding text, virtual assistants that can also support speech conversations ensure that phone calls into the business or voice driven applications can be dealt with to the same high standard as text-based messaging.  Very few  platforms offer the speech ability, which is essential for many industries that still receive a lot of voice calls and for customers where texting and digital channels are too complicated.

Multiple Channel Support

Look for platforms that can deploy your virtual assistant to your web chat, mobile apps, SMS, voice, email or other channel of choice. The user interface should allow customisation for each channel.  The platform should also have the ability to interact with corporate tools like Slack and Teams, and integrate to email, calendars or other process applications.

Accessing your data

Although responding to customer questions can be a valuable service, it is only when it can replicate a live advisor that it becomes truly useful. An advisor would validate the caller, look up information within a number of business applications, update records and truly resolve the customers query. A powerful Virtual Assistant will replicate the advisor through chat or speech  and if assistance is needed transfer the session to an agent.

Integration Framework and Application Connectors

A good platform will offer an advanced integration/middleware framework and connectors that greatly simplify integrations to external applications such as CRM, Service Desk, Databases, UC and messaging systems, Contact Centres and RPA tools.  Look for a low-code portal that means your in-house IT team can manage integrations with little or no external assistance.

Visual Designer

Platforms with a no-code visual designer make it easy for business users to build simple and complex workflows for customer interaction through an intuitive web interface. No technical knowledge should be required to create flows that include text, buttons, images and videos. It should be simple to add transfers to agents into your flows, request feedback from customers and present surveys. There should also be an easy way for the workflow designer to access customer data and provide rich responses that are hooked into the business applications.

Business Intelligence

As well as providing a great virtual assistant the platform must offer monitoring tools, analytics and reports that allow you to easily review and improve the service. This should all be displayed in easy-to-use dashboards that allow you to monitor and manage automated services and live services in one place or offer the option to export all data to a Business Intelligence tool.

If you want talk through your options for a virtual assistant platform please contact us or call us on 0333 6000 360.