At present, Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly protruding role in technological change. Industries in various segments are leveraging the technology to deliver customer service functions efficiently. Chatbots have been around for decades, helping the business to remain available for their customers.
At present, the idea of a virtual agent is helping to seamlessly interact with the customer while providing relevant information. Businesses of different sizes are using virtual agents to provide complete basic functions like booking an appointment or scheduling an important call with the experts. With the rapid development of advanced technologies, it is getting more difficult to keep up for many businesses. AI-based virtual agents are taking the pace in the industry with evolving capabilities.
Many tech vendors are utilizing the power of technology to connect potential customers using virtual agents or chatbots. Above this, there has been general confusion related to the difference between artificial intelligence enable chatbots, and virtual agents. Let’s understand the key differences between chatbots and virtual agents.
Chatbots and Virtual Agents: What’s the Difference?
A chatbot is programmed for chatting, conversation, or communication. Several free online chatbots can communicate with you without any hurdles. There is much business with their scripted chatbots that are deployed on the web or social media.
Chatbots typically run using scripts with a programming code that provides basic instructions. Talking about virtual agents, it is slightly more advanced than a chatbot. A virtual conversational agent can accomplish additional tasks including resolving common issues like password resets, performing automated tasks related to requests, or escalating the interaction to a live help desk agent.
Though chatbots and virtual agents sound a bit different their focus is to interact with the customer and deliver customer service. What makes the difference is the technologies essential for these applications. Majorly their services include how the translation into capabilities is done to benefit the customer. Moreover, it is also about advanced technologies that are used to deliver service.
Chatbot Vs Virtual Agents
Chatbots are developed to carry out a basic and limited conversation with the customer. The chatbot is not made to understand the customer. The conversation between the chatbot and the customer is held through hard-coding, phrases, keywords matching based on the background programming training.
On the other hand, the power of the virtual agent helps to understand human interaction with powerful natural language processing. They can fully understand the customer’s queries instead of understanding the keywords only. Chatbots are mot such powerful when it comes to human conversation. Advanced technology such as machine learning is helping to continuously improve the overall customer experience in a virtual agent.
Chatbots is not well-suited to represent a business with high volumes of customer-service chat traffic. When it comes to deal have human language conversation it is too complex for the chatbot. Mostly it is narrowed down to a predefined selection of questions and answers.
Virtual agents are not powered by the same rules-based programming. Empowered with conversational AI solution provider, the virtual agent is designed to both accurately mimic human conversations and understand the underlying context, and proceed with customers’ request.
The advanced customer service tools are built to achieve better communication with the customer based on the conversation. Chatbots are more superior to store the information as backed with the database whereas virtual assistants still struggling with storing important information. Another significant factor the char is missing maintaining the conversational flow with the customer. It is noticed that while interacting with chatbots if there is a break in the conversation in between, the chatbot will fail to match the context of the interaction.
Virtual assistants/agents utilize dynamic conversation to understand human intent, enriching communications with humans. This helps to bring a personal touch in the conversation. The business these days are more intent to utilize the virtual agent for the futuristic prospect.
Final thoughts
Business is integrating chatbot and virtual agents to communicate more effectively with their customers as well as a potential client. With the evolving developing technologies, virtual agents leverage advance technology NLP and ML to deliver exclusive customer service. With the time there is more inclination is the usage of the virtual agent as it more advanced version of itself. Virtual agents are more sophisticated with deep neural networks, machine learning, or natural language understanding. This helps them to better understand and interpret the needs and desires of the customer. Business is various segments are looking forward to utilizing virtual agents to stay ahead in the market.
