by Jim Sinur
Do you think of a digital assistant as someone who manages your calendar appointments and completes travel and expense forms? This is often the first impression of a digital assistant’s capabilities, but the reality is that this technology will do so much more than most could have ever anticipated.
Aragon predicts that by the year end 2019, Digital Assistants will talk with and complete many electronic tasks for their human counterparts. How are they going to impact your business?
1. Better Customer Experience:
Digital assistants will be able to understand what your customer wants in context and provide needed answers quickly. In order to do that, there will have to be a very natural conversation that leverages how the digital assistant interprets your customer’s emotional state at a specific moment to give appropriate answers for the situation. This capability will need to be seamless.
2. Picking the Right Process and Completing It:
At first, a digital assistant will be able to call up rule-based and structured processes and complete them on behalf of the customer, following the policies set up by specific industries, value chains, and specific organizations. As the technology becomes more sophisticated, digital assistants will be able to add cognitive capabilities to complete fuzzy and emergent processes.
By year end 2020, businesses will leverage Predictive and Cognitive Applications to deliver critical knowledge to employees and customers.
3. Creating Unexpected Value:
Imagine if your customer wants to complete several connected processes that span the typical functional specialties that businesses historically have had. Digital assistants could easily handle this complex kind of service without exposing the artificial boundaries with an organization. Digital assistants could also employ machine learning to suggest tweaks to the policies rules and constraints that organizations set up.
Net; Net:
More sophisticated digital assistants will emerge over the next two to three years as the demands for great customer service at a lower cost hits full stride. These digital assistants and lower level assistants, called chat bots, will become software or robotic agents for the good of many. This is a crucial trend to watch as organizations transform to digital.