For retailers, there are certain table-stakes expectations when it comes to Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs). An acceptable retail IVA should be able to look up orders, check shipping status, and provide information about store locations. A better, more advanced IVA may be able to process branded card payments and even manage returns without escalation.
A best-in-class IVA, however, can do so much more. Innovative features that leverage human-AI augmentation and Gen AI can tip “good” customer experiences into “stellar” territory and lead to benefits that drive deeper efficiencies and insights.
Here are 6 ways that Interactions IVAs — with our seamless blend of best-of-breed AI and human expertise , ridiculously accurate AI, innovative Gen AI features, and human touch — can delight retail customers and lead to business-wide improvements.
1. Next-Level Personalization
Most IVAs can integrate with common CRMs, appointment systems, and inventory systems for personalization. What sets Interactions apart is our hands-on help with integrations. Our consultative approach means we continually work to ensure our retail clients’ IVAs are working as successfully as possible, including helping to set up and maintain integrations, even if you use less-common or home-grown systems.
Additionally, our IVA offers omnichannel fluidity, with context persistence that enables the IVA to be aware of previous transactions, regardless of the channel or time when it occurred. The customer journey is optimized and personalized within whatever channel they choose, remembering customers and interactions across channels.
What this adds up to are IVA interactions where the customer is authenticated with easily accessible information and proactively asked if they need information on a recent order or shipment. Inventory or BOPIS transactions can be contextualized to stores near them. They can be asked if they need to address an upcoming appointment or pay a near-due bill. This level of personalization speeds up interactions, saves retail consumers precious time, and shows that your company cares about their convenience — and their business.
2. Upselling, Cross-selling, and Emptying Those Shopping Carts
With these same integrations and personalization, retailers can transform contact centers from cost sinks to revenue generators. An IVA can suggest the purchase of — and securely facilitate the payment for — items that are lingering in online shopping carts, products that have been purchased repeatedly in the past, subscriptions to oft-used items, or SKUs that are commonly cross-sold with a customer’s recent purchases.
3. Multilingual Support
Managing different IVAs across regions causes IT management challenges and inconsistent customer service quality. Interactions offers support in all major languages, and can work with your team to meet regional data residency and other regulatory requirements. This support gives you one less concern when expanding into new areas or when demographics shift in your customer base.
In addition, with our hybrid AI approach which includes Human-in-the-Loop technology, background digital agents can keep customers engaged with the IVA and move conversations forward even when the IVAhas difficulty understanding a customer due to background noise, a dialect or accent, or a phrase that’s worded unusually. Intent Agents (IA) code these phrases so that the IVA can understand them and can support virtually any language so that you can have greater freedom in staffing and to upskill agents.
4. Agent Assists
There will always be some calls or chats that reach a live agent, whether due to customer insistence or an atypically complex issue. It’s critical to provide a seamless transition between a self-service IVA and agent, or the customer may be reluctant to use self-service in the future. Interactions IVA eases these exchanges in several ways. First, the IVA saves agent time by authenticating the customer’s identity and gathering information prior to escalation. That data is then shared with the live agent so that they can immediately help with the issue rather than wasting time on repetitive questions.
Then, through innovative Gen AI features, live agents can access auto-generated responses to reduce their cognitive load and improve productivity, while increasing consistency in the information shared across agents.
5. Trustworthy Customer Record of Truth
Every IVA and live agent conversation can be automatically transcribed and summarized with AI, even including customer sentiment. (PII is redacted from records by default.) Having agents review and edit the summaries before they become customer records, rather than writing them from scratch, saves time, provides much-needed consistency, and introduces necessary Gen AI guardrails. Your company now has accurate, consistent, and actionable data that isn’t subject to a particular agent’s writing skills or memory.
These records can drive data exploration and insights (see more on that in the next item), and be shared with customers via automated emails or their account dashboard to help build trust and agreement.
6. Deep Dive Data Analytics
With AI able to transcribe and summarize every interaction at scale, it also becomes easier to derive insights from your customer service interactions. Interactions offers an easy-to-use and thoroughly comprehensive view into your IVA data. You can drill down to individual conversations, create custom dashboards, or dig into trends using a conversational interface that also provides suggested actions.
By tying interaction data to KPIs such as close ratios, resolutions, CSAT, Customer Effort, Average Handle Time (AHT), and revenue generation, you can quantify successful behaviors and cull those that are ineffective. With these insights, you can improve agent training materials, add new intents to your IVA to automate more interactions, improve self-service information, and pinpoint product and operational issues that are causing issues.
By investing in a best-in-class IVA like Interactions, you can see benefits that extend beyond the contact center, including deeper and more accurate customer insights, increased revenue, and overall operational improvements.
To learn more about how Interactions helps the world’s largest retailers deliver unparalleled service, visit our retail page or read this case study to learn how a major retailer removed 7.9 million agent minutes in one year.
