Research in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). This has birthed a trend where companies continue to push the boundaries on what’s possible with the dynamic duo. The companies’ interests may be strictly commercial, but they’re seeing opportunities in places the rest of us seem to be taking for granted. Enter Poland-based startup, Virbe, and their quest for a virtual beings revolution.
You’ve likely heard of virtual assistants or virtual personal assistants, but “virtual beings” is a term so new you’ll be right to consider pausing for a moment to ask Google. There’s no need to do that, though. This article introduces you to who virtual beings are and what they represent. You’ll also discover where Virbe stands in the entire equation.
What are Virtual Beings?
You’d be precisely right to say that virtual beings are a fast-rising army of substitutes for human influencers. However, it’s advisable to still tread carefully with that definition.
A virtual being is a digital character that is capable of building a two-way relationship. In other words, virtual beings mimic human attributes down to relationships.
To be clear, whatever is available now is still a long way off from completely mirroring a real human. Computer-generated Instagram influencers, chatbots, and AI-powered digital companions are just some of the serious attempts at creating virtual beings. Alexa and Siri are two easy examples of innovations that humans interact with to carry out interesting tasks.
The use of personal assistants keeps growing in the workplace. Besides, a growing number of businesses are increasingly seeing the value in embracing the virtual beings revolution.
Who is Virbe and What’s Their Goal?
If virtual beings desperately needed a voice to make a case for their existence (read “adoption”) in the world, Virbe is likely the one voice they’d think of.
Virbe’s mission is succinctly captured in its mission statement available on the company’s website. It wants to enable businesses to automate “mundane communication and sales activities.” Every business can relate with how sales can be a real pain in the neck. However, it’s inevitable to sell because revenues mostly derive from sales.
Helping your business achieve efficiency in communication and sales means Virbe allows your people to focus on critical aspects of customer needs.
This Poland export is quietly but certainly demolishing any boundaries between spaces and realities – both digital and physical – for all.
Creating a Virbe Virtual Being
Layering Dialogflow on Virbe is an intelligent contribution to the modern sales environment. Finally, companies can celebrate the arrival of a truly natural customer experience with virtual beings.
What is Dialogflow?
Google’s Dialogflow is a platform that understands natural language and empowers your business to design and integrate a conversational user interface into your web app, mobile app, bot, device, interactive response system, and so forth.
You can import your Dialogflow project into Virbe.
Dialogflow makes sense of customers’ text or audio inputs from various sources (such as a phone or voice recording). After analyzing them, it “calculates” a fitting response which may come in text or synthetic speech form.
Virbe’s solution is unique, to say the least. It’ll certainly be new to you to learn that there’s a virtual beings product that can participate in multi-turn conversations without skipping a beat. You can even add supplemental questions. This is a piece of revolutionary computing running on the engine of the same deep learning technologies that form the backbone of Google Assistant.
Iterators helped Virbe built on the existing platform, designed 100+ screens for web application and build SaaS back office and actively maintains cloud infrastructure.
Enhancing Your Customer Experience with Virtual Beings
A robust customer experience amplifies the success of your sales and marketing efforts. One crucial aspect of the process that most businesses tend to ignore is the conversational element. But, people enjoy and respond well to positive attention. That’s why your company needs to ensure that you address customer expectations in a customized way.
How does Dialogflow help conversations with customers?
One of the things Dialogflow does really well is to support rich messages that consist of images, links, suggestion buttons, and other rich message elements. You’ll understand this better if you had first-hand experience of the capabilities of e-commerce assistant, Stephen.
It’d be great to make development time smaller than it currently is – think, days to minutes. It’s possible to achieve this using Dialogflow’s visual builder and pre-built agents. These are easy to deploy across your call/contact center over web, mobile, and messaging services.
If you’re thinking if you’ll have any control over your virtual beings, Virbe’s creators have thought ahead. With end-to-end Continuous Improvement/Continuous Development (CI/CD) via versioning and continuous evaluation, your customer experience is guaranteed to never fall behind.
Also, flow-based modules that ensure scaling up to 20 independent and 40,000 intents per agent are honestly hard to beat.
This is tech, yet it’s not hard. All you need to create a Dialogflow chatbot without any experience. The Google documentation is the road map you’ll follow to spice up your customer experience with a Dialogflow chatbot which you can readily turn into Virbe.
Challenges You Can Overcome with Virtual Beings
It’s now the natural thing for businesses to add an e-commerce component to their operations. This development presents its unique challenges, however. That’s where virtual beings can help. Let’s review some challenges that you can put to bed with virtual beings.
1. Improving customer’s journey
The buyer journey is one place companies miss simply because they have to be deliberate about it and not hope on Mother Luck alone. Online customers have an innate need for satisfaction and this is only possible when you know precisely what they desire.
It becomes more challenging when you’re not sure about what questions the typical buyer will ask searching for products in an online store. Sometimes, they stray far away from their original intent and it’s your duty to help them worm their way back to where they should be.
Introducing virtual beings into the sales process can help to rejuvenate the sales experience for your customers. Virtual beings can play the role of online ambassador and sales acquisition expert to the hilt.
Virtual beings are a perfect fit for the role because they’re always available on your website to answer buyer questions, whether minute or big. Using a conversational AI backbone, virtual beings use machine learning to keep up with your customers in the quest for effective engagement and a personalized experience.
Virtual beings never get tired or dispassionate about helping your customers find adequate support and a successful shopping experience.
2. Fixing attention deficit
Dynamic visual communication is something humans are more inclined to. Mechanical scrolling is boring or even irritating. Businesses need to be aware that a new type of customer has appeared on the market horizon.
These customers are the ones influenced by remote work and isolation. They’re more stoic while shopping and their attention span is on a steady decline. Of course, that’s a recipe for higher bounce rates.
Virtual beings help to reinvent – digitally – the human dynamism that rekindles customers’ passion for your brand.
3. Answering important customer questions and doing it right
When people have serious questions, they prefer to ask other people. Instead of a FAQs page of your website that few people are likely to click on to read, chatbots can answer those questions in a chat window.
The customer will care less that it’s not a human talking with them. What matters is that the answers are coming in real time and only in response to their specific questions.
Human customer service representatives are great, but the option is equally expensive. Besides, they’re likely to have sick days, low moments, and life generally comes in the way. But, virtual beings? They’re more elastic in interacting with users and are available at all times.
Virtual beings are great if you’re still a small brand with a lean budget.
4. Online upselling and cross-selling challenges
It’s always a tricky affair to effectively upsell and cross-sell. All of a company’s efforts at making sales must be supportive of each other. Product recommendations need to be in sync with sponsored ads, special offers, and influencer campaigns, for instance.
Using virtual beings, companies can trust them to quickly grab and hold customers’ attention, analyze choices, and still interact with the clients in real-time. They understand the best times to present an offer and can even reload pages to adjust displayed goods accordingly.
Virbe virtual beings know the art of advising customers to choose the right products that match the buyer’s preferences. They do their best to convey emotions and facial expressions that invite customers to buy and buy again.
5. Maintaining consistency across multiple channels
E-commerce brands need to be visible and consistent on multiple channels at the same time. That’s an essential need in the modern marketplace. Virtual beings help to support the entire experience all the way with unique voices and human personality.
Virtual beings can engage your customers via any medium and communicate with them through customized messages.
Conclusion
The modern business era has brought many important innovations. Having virtual beings in your business is an excellent first step in managing how customers relate with your brand. The extent to which you apply them is limited only by your own imagination. Virbe can help you find clarity on how virtual beings can benefit your business overall. Dialogflow is a good place to begin if you’re starting to consider a virtual personal assistant, or AI virtual assistants.