Market research news

Creative Virtual, a leader in self-service customer experience management solutions for global enterprises, announced recently that its V-Person and V-Portal products were positively reviewed by the Patricia Seybold Group as go-to solutions for enterprises looking to improve customer satisfaction and secure brand loyalty.

Specifically, the report cites Creative Virtual’s recently launched V-Portal knowledge management system as its most significant strength and differentiator in the industry.

Despite the advance of Twitter and Facebook, email is still the “killer” electronic communications medium particularly at work, where it long ago replaced the telephone as the preferred way for communicating between colleagues. But not all of the billions of emails handled each day by office workers are strictly work-related. According to a recent study, about 15% of the emails sent by corporate users contain information about a person or persons not among the recipients. In other words, they contain gossip.

Facial detection software is on the verge of being implemented for business use: it can already detect average age, male or female, and even attention level. This software can be very valuable to marketeers and businesses in general. On the other hand, it is quite intrusive software and people might be worried about their privacy as it’s hard to keep your anonymity.

One of existing face recognition software is NotiFace II, a face recognition surveillance system developed by Face-Tek Technology. It integrates face recognition with security monitoring products, as presented on the video.

A survey to find out what functionality users want to see when they interact with a virtual agent - or chatbot - has been launched by chatbot specialists Daden Limited (Daden). Increasing in popularity, chatbots (a computer programme which maintains a conversation with a person using natural language) are seen as a cost-effective support to customer service desks and live chat. Available 24/7, chatbots respond to queries and frequently asked questions enhancing customer experiences and directing visitors to relevant web pages. To consider future development of the industry as a whole, Daden have devised a short online survey to understand what functionality people would like to see in chatbots.

By 2015, 50 percent of online customer self-service search activities will be via a virtual assistant for at least 1,500 large enterprises.

More than 1,500 organizations worldwide are in various stages of production with virtual assistants (VAs). The results range from profound cost savings (5 percent reduction in service costs) and increased customer loyalty to simply the entertainment of having a robotic presence on a website. But the number of organizations adding this capability is growing by 20 percent per year, especially in travel, consumer goods, telecommunications and banking. A challenge is that computer-generated characters have limited ability to maintain an interesting dialogue with users; they need a well-structured and extensive knowledge management engine to become efficient, self-service productivity tools. VAs will lead to further downsizing of customer service centers.

VirtuOz, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online marketing, sales, and support, today announced that it processed a record 166 million conversations in 2011 on behalf of its customers.  This growth was fueled, in part, by expansion of VirtuOz’ client base across multiple verticals including high tech, telecommunications, retail, and consumer packaged goods.  In addition, the company noted the expansion of IVA usage from customer service, to sales and marketing via a growing number of touch points, including mobile phones and social media, such as Facebook.

Online Virtual Assistants are becoming more widespread and consumer appetite for them is growing, as highlighted by an independent survey of 1,500 consumers across Europe.

Results showed that 81% of people said they would be more likely to engage with an online Virtual Assistant if it improved their online experience, 72% welcomed them becoming part of every website and a similar number said they would spend longer on a website that had one.

Virtual assistants can take on multiple roles on a website, such as answering customer questions, performing various helpful tasks and connecting to enterprise systems when needed. Their intelligence allows them to remember facts, learn from their conversations and maintain a two-way dialogue with visitors but what other characteristics should they have?

VirtuOz, the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online customer service, today announced that virtual assistants were a key criterion for determining for CRM Web Customer Service. In addition, the report ranks “new and additional customer access channels” as the number one business case driver for WCS deployments.

Independent analyst firm CCM Benchmark predicts that virtual agent implementations will be an industry standard in 3 to 5 years, a critical component in customer services and even the main point of contact in 2014.

The firm surveyed 57 global ecommerce leaders in Q1 2011 on their plans for deploying virtual agents as part of their customer service strategy. This group predicts a 100% increase in virtual agents in 2011, with that number skyrocketing to 400% by 2014. Virtual agents are services such as an automated, intelligent, virtual human on a website, assisting consumers during purchases or for customer service in natural language, therefore also often referred as virtual assistants.

In addition to the growth predictions, the majority of respondents cited use of the virtual agent for “right channeling” purposes as the most promising emerging application. Integration of the AI avatars with live chat (66%) and use of the virtual assistant as the point of first contact for all online customer interactions (56%) gained the most interest.
This study meets findings from VirtuOz 2011 user conference, at which 75% of respondents agreed that virtual agents will be used as the first point of contact for online sales and service by 2014.

Additional value drivers highlighted in the study include:

• 67% note eDeflection from higher cost customer service channels as a key benefit of VAs.
• 51% believe that VAs will increase their “customer requests” handling capacity.
• 36% believe virtual agents will provide insight into user trends to determine and optimize new service issues as they arise.
• 33% believe that VAs will address search limitations.

“Ecommerce vendors serve on-line savvy consumers who are demanding more sophisticated self-service tools that offer a richer and more satisfying customer experience,” said Steve Adams, CEO and president of VirtuOz, a US/European provider of virtual agents for online customer service.

Chatbots.org also noted a steep rise of interest in the application of virtual assistants in customer services. The website lists all implementations of virtual humans across the world in three main categories: customer services, e-learning and gaming. The application in the customer service area is growing fast; in 2010, 95% of registered implementations were related to customer service and e-commerce.

What is the perfect term for those seemingly intelligent ‘things’, which are popping up everywhere, and which feel more ‘natural’ as time goes by?

Well, we have found 161 synonyms (161!!! No typo!!).

As the leading business and research community in humanlike conversational artificial intelligence, we hope to increase understanding of this field, to provoke discussion and to initiate discussion on standardization of this huge list of different terms, some of them with slightly different implications but mostly genuine synonyms.

We are introducing the most popular, excellent candidate terms to be adopted by the industry and those synonyms which are really eye catching or controversial, and we will just list the remaining synonyms.