The Future of Virtual Assistants in the Workplace: What to Expect in the Coming Years

The working environment is rapidly changing.

We are gradually moving away from the traditional physical office setup to a more interactive and connected experience. Various digital channels like smart speakers, web chat, messaging, SMS, and email are facilitating the digitization of our work environments.

As everything becomes increasingly automated and digitized, businesses are turning to solutions, like virtual assistants, to increase efficiency and productivity. How is this growing technology being adopted by businesses? What potential opportunities can companies expect from virtual assistants?

In this blog post, we'll explore all the exciting possibilities that come with virtual assistants – from improved customer relationships to enhanced data analysis.

Let’s dive in to gain a better understanding.

The Growing Popularity of Virtual Assistants

A virtual assistant, also called an AI assistant or digital assistant, is an artificial intelligence software that understands natural language to perform tasks or services for an individual or an organization. In recent years, the use of virtual assistants has become increasingly popular. As digital technology continues to advance, virtual assistants have grown into indispensable tools for many businesses and households.

With products like the Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod, and Google Home, many consumers have experience with innovative virtual assistants that ease their daily tasks, such as setting reminders, planning, fast responses, etc. 

Not just limited to households, virtual assistants have been well adopted in the workplace for streamlining processes and improving efficiency. Some virtual assistants commonly used in the workplace include Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa for Business, and Apple Siri. They are used for scheduling appointments, setting reminders, answering questions, ordering supplies, making phone calls, and managing employee calendars.

A recent example of the integration of virtual personal assistant (VPA) speakers in the enterprise space is Amazon’s partnership with Marriott. The hotel operator uses Alexa-powered Echo VAs to assist with checkout procedures and management of rooms’ amenities.

Gartner predicts that, by 2023, 25% of employee interactions with applications will be via voice (Source: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-01-09-gartner-predicts-25-percent-of-digital-workers-will-u).

Another virtual assistant, IBM Watson Assistant, can be customized to fit specific business needs, such as automating HR processes and providing insights into business data.

The Role of Virtual Assistants in Business Operations for Customer Service and Data Analysis

Customer Service Enhancement

Virtual assistants are incredibly useful tools for providing customer service in a variety of contexts.

VAs are extremely valuable in providing website support. They answer frequently asked questions, help customers explore the site, and even complete simple transactions like booking appointments or making reservations. All of this functionality helps businesses improve efficiency and provide a better quality customer experience.

For marketing and sales purposes, virtual assistants are being used to provide customer service via social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. By giving support to customers 24×7 and fast responses via these platforms, businesses increase their customer engagement and loyalty.

Virtual assistants are also used to provide automated phone support. For example, when customers call the company's support line, a virtual assistant greets them and helps them navigate the various options available to direct them to the appropriate department or representative.

Related Read: How Chatbots are Changing the Future of Customer Service

Data Analysis with Virtual Assistants

Virtual assistants also have the potential to revolutionize the way businesses analyze and use data. Through automation, virtual assistants can help companies to make better decisions by providing real-time insights.

Some of the ways that VAs can be beneficial are:

• Data visualization and reporting: Virtual assistants can generate charts and graphs, provide real-time data visualizations, and create automated reports. For example, a virtual assistant could be programmed through machine learning algorithms to create reports on sales data for a particular period. They can further provide recommendations based on the data to help decision-making.
• Data cleaning and preprocessing: One of the most time-consuming tasks in data analysis is cleaning and preprocessing huge volumes of data. Virtual assistants can be customized to automate this process, identifying and removing outliers, correcting errors, and filling in missing data.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP):Virtual assistants use NLP algorithms to analyze large amounts of unstructured data such as customer feedback or social media posts. They can also be used to perform sentiment analysis to understand how customers feel about a particular product or service.
• Predictive analytics: Virtual assistants can be used to build and deploy predictive models to help businesses make informed decisions. For example, a virtual assistant could be programmed to predict customer churn, identify potential leads, or forecasting.
• Data exploration: Virtual assistants can explore and analyze large datasets. They can identify data patterns and relationships to help businesses make better decisions through these insights.

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What Can We Expect from Virtual Assistants in the Future?

The future of virtual assistants looks progressive. Artificial intelligence and automation are evolving more than ever before. Combining these technologies can give amazing results such as:

Streamlining routine tasks:

With the help of AI, virtual assistants can automate repetitive and time-consuming operations such as scheduling appointments, answering emails, and completing paperwork. It allows the employees to be efficient and productive in other complicated tasks, allowing businesses to strategically use their available resources.

Enabling remote collaboration:

‍A rise in the remote work trend has increased the use of virtual assistants. For example, virtual assistants are used for scheduling and creating meeting agendas and coordinating project tasks via email.

Advanced Analytics:

‍Virtual assistants will become more advanced in terms of analytics, providing businesses with insights into customer behavior, preferences, and sentiment. It will help companies better strategize plans.

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Integration with other technologies:

1. IoT: IoT sensors can be used to monitor inventory levels, and VAs can be used to automate the ordering process. It helps businesses avoid stockouts and reduce waste by ensuring that they have the right amount of inventory on hand every time.

2. Other Business Systems: Virtual assistants can be integrated with other business systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software and marketing automation platforms. It enables businesses to use virtual assistants to streamline their operations and improve efficiency.

3. Voice Assistants: Virtual assistants are primarily integrated with voice assistants, such as Amazon Alexa. Businesses are offering their services through voice-enabled devices to expand their reach and increase convenience for customers.

Enhanced Multilingual Support:

Virtual assistants will become more proficient in multiple languages with the help of NLP. It will allow businesses  to interact with customers from around the world.

Increased Personalization:

‍AI-based virtual assistants will understand individual customers. Their preferences, purchase history, and communication style will help gain more sales leads and improve customer experience.

Security Concerns with Virtual Assistants

While virtual assistants offer numerous benefits, they also raise important security questions for organizations, such as data breaches, identity theft, etc. Virtual assistants require access to sensitive data to perform their tasks. This data can include personal information such as names, addresses, and financial information. If this information is not secured, it could be compromised, leading to identity theft, fraud, or other cyberattacks. Virtual assistants rely on cloud-based services and APIs to function. These services should be authenticated and secured because they can be vulnerable to data breaches. A data breach could expose sensitive data, including corporate secrets, financial data, or customer information.

The virtual assistant is in-demand and the potential it holds is immense, but one should be careful when adopting them in business. When it comes to security issues, trust needs to be prioritized so that users feel comfortable working with these tools in the future.

If you want to include a virtual assistant as a part of your organization’s strategic roadmap, then contact us at https://sparsolutions.com/contact-us

Our experts will help you implement and optimize the VA to fit your business processes and ensure it operates in a secure and trusted environment so you can leverage more business opportunities.