Use a Virtual Agent to Improve Service Desk Efficiency

LONDON, ENGLAND, March 29, 2012 (Press-News.org) The key to a business' productivity is in the way that it uses the human resources that are available to it. Focusing on core activities that employ people's skills has become much more important as many businesses have to justify the money that they spend on every aspect of their operation and so a cost effective, labour saving alternative to the customer's first point of contact with a business that actually works can make a real difference to the profitability of even the biggest companies. Using an intelligent virtual agent to deal with these initial contacts by clients can not only cut down on the costs of customer relations but can also be an efficient way to deal with the majority of customer queries.

Using an automated responder to handle incoming calls is not new and we are all familiar with the concept of talking to a computer in order to find our way to the services that we want but a virtual agent takes this sort of service to the next level. Unlike the automated response programs, a virtual agent can be programmed to handle complex questions and, because it is a computer and not a person, it can have the technical knowledge that is related to several departments of a business immediately available to it in order to handle even very specific questions. Virtual agents have been developed out of AI research as a form of chatbot technology and can be combined with a graphical element to give the caller the impression that they are talking to a real person on the screen.

The development of the virtual agent technology has progressed impressively in recent years and now it is possible for them to go a long way towards replicating a genuine human interaction. Intelligent virtual agents can now be programmed to respond in very human ways and can handle a broad range of situations, often in a better way than many humans would. Virtual agents are even programmed to respond to aggression by informing the caller that if they continue to be insulting the virtual agent will terminate the call, and one is even programmed so that if it is called stupid its' response will be that it is just a machine that the caller is abusing and then asks them who is stupid now?

The advantages of using this system for handling incoming queries is that it doesn't require anyone to supervise these calls as they come in and, as a large number of enquiries will be straightforward and simple to answer, many will be handled entirely by the software without the need for any personnel to be involved at all. Virtual agents can also handle several calls simultaneously so there will be shorter queuing times for callers without the need to have several operators physically answering them. Because virtual agents aren't real people they can also work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, meaning that calls are being answered effectively even when the business is closed.

Of course intelligent virtual agents have their limitations and there will be calls that require a real person to respond to them but by using a virtual agent to sort them out it greatly reduces the amount of time that staff spends answering questions that don't require their full knowledge of the service or product that is offered by a business.

Fusion is an IT Service Management specialist which uses their experienced and well trained staff to help IT organisations improve their service performance, efficiency and quality. Fusion help businesses transform their IT departments using IT Management software like BMC remedy itsm and are BMC partners.

Website: http://www.fusion.co.uk