Virtual assistants can help your company in different ways
Virtual assistants, like editors, stage managers, and food safety inspectors, work best when the customer isn’t aware they’re there. They are here to streamline procedures and ensure that a business’s activities and the lives of its customers operate smoothly, much like human assistants (which still exist somewhere).
That does mean, though, that we can overlook just how much a virtual assistant can accomplish for us. In short, a chatbot excels at tasks that require little human intervention. Depending on the industry, the work, or the service, this might mean a lot of different things, but the overall guideline remains the same. There are hundreds of processes where virtual assistants may handle the majority of client interaction, freeing up your personnel to focus on other tasks while still being available to tackle more difficult issues.
With that in mind, consider the following nine ways virtual assistants can assist you:
Keeping Track of Products
Customers have come to expect eCommerce companies to keep track of where a product is between ordering, delivery, and (sometimes) returns. However, if you want to scale your commerce operations solely through human labour, you’ll need to hire hundreds of people merely to deal with the expected rush of consumer tracking questions.
By using a tracking bot, you can avoid having to hire a new fleet of customer support employees. These assistants can be programmed to provide clients with timely messages concerning order and delivery status, as well as confirmation of order submission, delivery times, and scheduling. They’re also compatible with refund bots, which helps speed up the return procedure.
Appointment scheduling
Scheduling appointments is another time-consuming chore that is at the heart of any industry. We live complicated, interwoven lives with a plethora of appointments with a variety of businesses—meetings with coworkers, doctor visits, hair salon visits, automobile repair, and so on. A single minor occurrence might have far-reaching consequences throughout your day. When you multiply it by thousands of appointments, a receptionist’s job becomes nearly impossible.
Unless your receptionist is a virtual assistant, that is. Appointment bots can efficiently schedule, manage, move, and cancel appointments, making the process for customers a breeze. This assistant, like Tracking Bot, manages all confirmations and reminders and can even be built with a customer rating system to help with testimonial marketing.
Application vetting
Noah McGuire, a business blogger at Britstudent and NextCoursework, says, “Applications used to be the misery of my existence.” During one holiday season, I worked at a gym’s reception desk, where I spent more than half of my time processing membership applications. I was bombarded with the same questions from hundreds of eager New Year’s Resolutionists every day, and I felt like a machine addressing them.
As a result, Noah enlisted the aid of a machine. “I created a rudimentary application bot that could answer basic membership inquiries and handle simple yes-or-no application acceptance scenarios.” It more than half my workload, which made me delighted, and it was available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which pleased the customer. “
Renewals are another use case for membership-based bots. It’s exhausting and time-consuming to follow up with subscribers to see whether they want to re-up for any service. Instead, have a bot keep track of membership expiration dates and send out reminder emails.
Payment Processing
Customers and sellers, without a doubt, desire expediency when it comes to money. Money in transit serves no one; it is revenue that cannot be converted into products, and it delays the delivery of things to customers.
Put payment handling in the hands of virtual assistants to eliminate delays and human mistakes. Payment bots can confirm transactions and offer information on where, when, and how to pay recurring fees, similar to the refund function of the membership bot discussed above, but in the other direction.
Keeping Accounts Organized
We’ve grown accustomed to knowing information about our bank accounts at the touch of a button, just as we have with money entering or leaving our possession. Whether it’s a bank balance, fee due dates, recent transactions, or any other information, speed and efficiency are paramount.
You’ve undoubtedly seen the value of virtual assistants in this area without even realising it. For years, banks and utility providers have relied on automated services to send all of this information to clients; if there was a person on the other end of your bank app, you’d have to wait hours, if not days, to get a response. Account bots are quite useful because they can work around the clock and can do most simple tasks without involving any human employees.
Dealing with complaints
Virtual assistants can do more than speed up and streamline tasks; they can also take on less appealing activities traditionally assigned to customer support representatives. Complaints are unavoidable in any business, and a successful company pays close attention to them and addresses them with respect, no matter how irrational they may be.
Stefano Obata, a writer for Academicbrits and Write My X, recommends having a virtual assistant to handle complaints can relieve stress on your employees while also ensuring that criticism is followed up on. A complaint bot can collect information from customers, produce records based on timetables, and even assist in the resolution of client issues, all without having to yell at a customer care professional. It ensures that issues are kept and monitored in a consistent manner, and it may often settle minor complaints by offering FAQs or support pages. Anything more complex can be directed at a staff member. “
Recruiting
Recruitment is another time-consuming chore that is rarely enjoyed by anyone. Every firm must do it at some point, but fewer and fewer people appear to want to do it. After all, there is an entire industry dedicated to recruiting agencies. There must be something wrong with this task if companies are so ready to unload it.
This is where the recruitment bot comes in. Especially during the initial scouting stage, recruitment can sometimes be reduced to a yes-or-no decision. A virtual assistant can be programmed with precise search parameters and given the responsibility of sorting through thousands, if not millions, of CVs to find those that satisfy the requirements. The beautiful thing about these bots is that they can be set and forgotten – they can constantly explore the web for possible candidates with very little input from employees.
Research Assistant
Similarly, projects requiring a significant amount of study are frequently delegated to third parties. Research is the foundation of so many daily decisions, but gathering significant volumes of valuable data can take a long time, even if the data is easily available (which it often isn’t).
A research bot can assist in the early phases of research by filtering out certain subjects or keywords from a large pool of data. These virtual assistants can be assigned to numerous jobs at the same time and have a voracious appetite for data much greater than that of any human counterpart, giving them a very efficient means of obtaining raw data to be processed.
Offer a Private Service
This is a challenging one because it is unlikely to be the emphasis of most visibly charitable businesses. But, because shady dealings and nefarious activities have always been a part of human life, it’s no wonder that they’re abundant on the internet.
Without the requirement for human interaction, a virtual assistant can deliver information and automate services, reducing the risk of implication. I should emphasise that I do not condone this type of behaviour, but it is an important aspect of virtual assistant technology that must be recognised and understood if it is to be properly managed.
The most important takeaways
When viewed in this light, the evident advantages of virtual assistants are speed, efficiency, and accessibility. A virtual assistant, when built with the right inputs and monitored properly, can do things at a velocity and scale that no human employee could ever think of. The advantages are so obvious that they’ve already found their way into a number of internet firms, and their influence is only expanding.
However, it’s critical not to lose sight of why virtual assistants are beneficial. It’s all well and good to state that they increase income or improve customer service response times, but focusing solely on these advantages risks losing sight of the human workers that these assistants are intended to replace.
Instead of thinking of virtual assistants as new employees, consider them tools to help your team operate more efficiently, devote more time to more challenging projects, and increase their overall well-being. As AI surpasses human intelligence and expertise, there will come a time when they are better than all of us at all jobs. Let’s make sure there’s still room at the table for humans.
