In part one of this series, I talked about a trend that I am seeing and hearing about broadly across all sizes of companies and all industry types, Multi Channel Customer Service. As a component of that group, I wanted to call out a technology that I am seeing start to pick up steam and I think will take over from Live Chat as the next hot technology for customer service in 2013 and 2014. That technology is Virtual Assistants.
A brief history for those that are new to the concept. Back about 10 or 12 years ago, a few select companies started playing around with the idea of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence to create these characters that could assist people in using new technology. One of the first applications of this type of technology that we have all seen at one time or another was from Microsoft and the ubiquitous CLIPPY that also was incredibly annoying to most of us. This was the first crude version of what was going to come with the concept of Virtual Assistants and their application to the customer service space.
Building on that initial idea and concept, a few innovative companies started bringing to market the idea of CLIPPY, but in a Enterprise ready state and form. Of course these companies had their struggles with the technology and the application of it in the first early adopters customers, as any technology company does early on. But over the last 5 years or so, the concept of the Virtual Assistant has really started to pick up steam. There were companies like VirtuOz, NextIT, Creative Virtual and Intelliresponse here in the US that were signing deals with companies like PayPal, eBay, US Army, Continental Airlines, AT&T and many others. Although these big names were jumping into the market, the reality was that it was a very new market still and many companies did not have the risk tolerance to jump into the market head first.
Fast forward to 2011/2012 and the introduction of Siri into the lexicon of Americans and others around the world from our friends at Apple. As they introduced this new concept on a grand scale to the world, people have come to understand that although still limited in their abilities, Siri and Virtual Assistants in general are becoming more useful and applicable to our daily lives. Again, in the Enterprise space, vendors like VirtuOz and NextIT have been selling and deploying Virtual Assistants to websites for 10 years. But, when Apple released Siri, the market really started to build and move up and to the right.
So, we have now landed in 2013 and there are Virtual Assistant projects getting budget and resources in just about every large company now in the US. Many are looking at the mobile applications they have deployed and trying to understand how they can use a Mobile Virtual Assistant to help provide service in that channel more effectively than they do today. Others are looking at the application of a Virtual Assistant in their primary web channels and still others are looking at how they can use a Virtual Assistant in their social channels.
As I said earlier on in this post, I think that 2013 and 2014 are going to be the years that Virtual Assistants take off out of the early adopter companies and rush into the fast follower companies, just as Live Chat has done over the past two years. But as always, we need to keep our expectations in check about what a Virtual Assistant can and should do for a company. The technology is powerful, no doubt. But, the application of technology in the wrong area is always a recipe for disaster, no matter what the technology is. So, make sure that before you deploy any Virtual Assistant in any channel that you first understand the experience of the user and ensure that the deployment is a good match for your customer base demographic, the action they are trying to complete and the device they are trying to complete it on.
Are you planning a Virtual Assistant project this coming year? If not, I would suggest that you have your innovation teams for both web and mobile start looking at how it can serve your prospects and customers.
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