NETTING IT OUT

IntelliResponse Virtual Agent (IntelliResponse VA) is the virtual assisted-service offering from IntelliResponse Systems, Inc., a privately held supplier founded in 2000 and based in Toronto, ON, Canada.

Organizations purchase subscription licenses for cloud deployment of IntelliResponse VA. To date, IntelliResponse claims that 155 customer organizations have licensed it and have deployed more than 450 virtual agents.

IntelliResponse VA earns excellent grades on the Customer Service Report Card for Virtual Assisted-Service—it Exceeds Requirements for Answers, for Question Analysis and Matching, Analytic Functionality, and Product Viability, and it Meets Requirements for customer service integration and company viability.

Use IntelliResponse VA to deploy virtual agents on web, contact center, social, and mobile channels. Customers can ask questions in any language and, on mobile devices, they can speak their questions. Virtual agents can deliver answers in any language and can answer in speech on mobile devices.

We recommend that B2C companies of any size consider IntelliResponse VA to add cross-channel virtual assisted-service to their customer service application portfolio. Its virtual agents are fast and easy to deploy and can deliver accurate and consistent answers to any customers’ questions, lowering cost to serve and improving customer satisfaction.

© 2013 Royal Bank of Canada

1. This illustration shows the IntelliResponse VA deployment for the RBC Advice Centre.

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

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 the meaning and the intent. Analyses are typically natural language processing (NLP) and linguistic analytics.
• Match a customer’s question 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 it solicits questions and delivers answers in the style that live agents/customer service reps deliver answers on assisted-service channels. Customers escalate to virtual assisted-service from self-service activities when they have difficulty getting answers to their questions. Virtual agents are the faces of virtual assisted-service technology.

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.) They don’t want to wade through pages of possible answers like they’re forced to do when they use Internet search.

INTELLIRESPONSE VIRTUAL AGENT

IntelliResponse Virtual Agent is the virtual assisted-service/virtual agent offering from IntelliResponse Systems, Inc. “IntelliResponse VA” deploys on web pages, agent desktops, social networks, and mobile devices. Its virtual agents invite customers to ask them questions in text or, on mobile devices, in speech. Then, using IntelliResponse VA’s patented analysis and matching technology, virtual agents find and deliver the “Single Right Answer” from their knowledgebases in text with images, links, and, optionally, data from external applications, or in speech.

IntelliResponse branded its virtual assisted-service offering as IntelliResponse Virtual Agent in 2012, but the offering’s foundation technologies and the product that leverages them were introduced in 2001. To date, IntelliResponse claims that 155 customer accounts have licensed IntelliResponse VA (and its predecessor offerings) for more than 450 product line, organization, application, and language deployments—by far the largest customer base in the virtual agent market segment.

IntelliResponse VA deploys in the cloud. IntelliResponse offers subscription licenses for its deployment. The firm also offers professional services to help ensure successful …

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