IVA is expected to grow at an annual growth rate of 70% in 2022

Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) are slowly replacing humans. This trend is highly being adopted in the US and APAC region. IVA is starting to bloom in India as well with its part as an automated version of customer service representatives.

What is Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA)?

An Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that emulates human interaction to perform particular tasks, especially customer service. Virtual assistance is seeing high embrace in the tech sector due to its deep neural network, machine learning and other AI advanced technologies. The system functions on three key elements- capacity for learning, reasoning and understanding.

IVA has a conversational ability similar to human interaction, using speech and thus responds to the specific intent of the customer. When a person visits a website and a chatbox pops up in the side asking for how it could help you is a chatbot that is powered by AI to address simple routine queries. Chatbots are already designed with answers whereas IVA responds to the basic customer queries by understanding the language and speech. Adopting an integrated and collaborative approach to using IVA helps strike a balance between automating highly repetitive and routine tasks using AI chatbots and managing more complex and sensitive customer issues via human agents.

Some companies that use IVA for customer service approach: 

• KhUshi, an app created by IIT Madras incubated Uniphore, an IVR company for PNB Metlife. KhUshi being India's first customer service app powered by AI and conversation recognition capabilities provides its insurance customers with instant human-like interaction assistance.

• Uniphore provides an automation platform where digital agents take over transactional conversations from humans, coach agents during calls and accurately predict language, emotions and intent.

A report suggests that the global IVA market size was valued at US $ 2,166 million in 2019 and it is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of over 33% during the forecast period of 2020-2025. The global key players of the IVA market are Apple, Microsoft Corporation, Alphabet, Nuance Communications, Samsung Electronics, Amazon, Baidu, International Business Machines (IBM) corporation, Inbenta Technologies, etc.

However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the fall of business and economy, 2020 is not a very enthusiastic year for the growth of IVA. The year has plummeted the demand. But a strong annual growth of 70% is expected through 2022.

Companies in today's developing sectors are at a spotlight to improve the efficiency and quality of customer experience by looking beyond the basic IVAs and their dependence on poorly equipped human agents. That doesn't make AI a perfect source for function incorporate. It is the mixture of the human brain and AI technologies like the virtual agent that brings a remarkable outcome by providing real-time solutions to customers.

Impacts of using IVA in organizations

• Reduce customers call hold time

Customers are more into service than the actual provision of facilities by any companies. All they want is rapid response whenever they approach the service agent. Messaging apps are there to help 24×7. But still, what they look for is different.

Henceforth, customers are not ready to wait for a longer time when their interaction is put on hold. Agents can become maxed out responding to a flux of inbound requests, requiring incoming customer calls or chats to be placed in a queue. When the queue grows, the waiting time too grows to make customers abandon the service. This purely indicates frustration, poor experience and potential lost business. Canada Revenue Agency revealed that wait times increased from an average of 2 minutes to 15 minutes in the past four years.

To cope with the rising troubles in customer service IVA could be deployed. IVA does not make any assurance that it could deal with all the problems and sort customers queries. But it might give its best in reducing the desk jobs of employees.

• Fix accuracy and consistency issues

Even after a customer gets through to an agent after tackling all the redirections and holds time, it is unlikely that they get an accurate answer for their questions. A prediction shows that 40% of answers given by employees to customers were either wrong or incomplete. This impact the general workflow of customer service.

It is difficult for agents to train and support to consistent and accurate responses. But AI can do it easily. AI bots support the agents throughout a customer engagement regardless of their communication channel, understanding the customer's intent and providing the correct responses within the chat.

Use of both virtual agents and chatbots bring a chance of routine work and response to the company. Virtual agents attend the requests and automate underlying workflows while chatbots reply to more complex issues. This collaboration fixes a lot of chaotic issues in the working environment.

• Help agents focus on productivity

As constantly mentioned by tech giants, AI and its inventions are not replacing humans. They are providing people with a better space to work by taking up physical labor. This could lead to humans utilizing their time on more revenue making sectors.

The same goes for IVA and customer service agents. When IVA and chatbots are filling the gap of an agent, he/she can function on a more crucial job and develop the company. The agent's performance will also improve when they are less pressured due to surplus job.

In the line of adopting IVA quickly, banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) seem to be standing first followed by healthcare, pharma, hospitality, travel and retail sectors. If IVA is successfully deployed at all the spaces, it will result in a high profit of working hours and labour of employees. IVA could become a technology breakthrough of the decade if the adoption continues.