WHAT ARE DIGITAL ASSISTANTS
When you hear the word digital assistant, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Is it a robot working alongside a human? A voice controlled hologram? Many people used to imagine some fantastic form of artificial intelligence like out of a sci-fi movie. These days most people are more likely to think of Amazon’s Alexa, Siri, or Google’s Assistant.
Digital assistants range in their capability and applications, but they are basically all designed to help people accomplish routine tasks quickly and easily. Some of them like the ones mentioned above can be controlled with voice commands, others like chatbots, are more commonly used via some form of messaging.
HOW DO DIGITAL ASSISTANTS WORK
Now that we understand what a digital assistant is let’s talk about how they actually work. The more things a digital assistant can integrate with the more useful it becomes. Some digital assistants only recognize voice commands, like the ones that live on your phone. Those digital assistants can access different parts of the phone’s operating system to accomplish tasks.
If you tell your phone to set a reminder Siri is able to do that for you. Siri can access apps by connecting through API’s and other methods and then pull data and instructions from those systems and translate it into a format that is easy to understand for the end user.
In a business setting a digital assistant would integrate with databases, CRM’s, marketing tools, and other business systems. Some digital assistants are limited in what they can connect with however, advanced digital systems like the ones made at atlasRTX can integrate with virtually any business system that you use.
Digital assistants can be accessed through a variety of different channels. Alexa, Siri, and Cortana all operate through voice commands. Digital assistants that take the form of a chatbot can operate via platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, on your website, even SMS text messaging.
HOW TO USE DIGITAL ASSISTANTS IN A BUSINESS SETTING
With the widespread adoption of digital assistants in the consumer market, it is only a matter of time before these digital assistants infiltrate the corporate world as well. There are many different ways that you could use a digital assistant in your day-to-day job. Different departments and job functions could benefit from automating mundane tasks to focus on things that they’re actually really passionate about and really good at. Here are some of the ways you can use a digital assistant in your job.
DIGITAL ASSISTANTS FOR SALES
Sales teams are always focused on people. Repetitive tasks can sometimes get in the way of meaningful personal interaction with prospects, which means incoming revenue suffers.
When sales teams are operating as they should be, and there is a full pipeline, the number of tasks to stay on top of grows. More people to connect with, more people to follow up with, more deals to close.
Digital assistants could be used to not only set reminders to follow up with important prospects but it could also do the follow-up for your sales reps, which is a great way for sales to close deals faster. Advanced tools like atlasRTX can automate sales follow-up using powerful AI chatbots. T
The chatbots are programmed and designed to sound and think like your best sales agents at any time, which means you can scale your team and eliminate the tasks that salespeople too often forget about, but are crucial to success.
Statistics show that it takes 5 to 8 follow-ups with a prospect before a deal is closed. The problem is that salespeople often give up after two or three attempts. A digital assistant could come in and fill in the gap, and make sure no leads get left behind.
DIGITAL ASSISTANTS FOR MARKETING
Marketing teams could use digital assistants to qualify leads before they hand them over to the sales department. There is an eternal struggle between sales and marketing. Marketing thinks they are always handing sales really good leads, and salespeople are always complaining about not having enough quality leads. This is another Gap that a digital assistant could help fill in.
When a lead comes in, it is important that you follow up with them within 5 minutes of the lead contact information being gathered. A digital assistant could immediately send a text message to the lead and ask qualifying questions such as: “what’s your budget look like?” , “what are you looking for?”, “what company are you with?”, “what is your job title?” and so on. Only after a digital assistant has qualified these leads, would marketing hand them over to the sales team.
DIGITAL ASSISTANTS FOR HUMAN RESOURCES (HR)
HR departments could use digital assistant in recruiting. A digital assistant could be used to answer common questions about a job role or about the company. Digital assistants could answer questions that are commonly asked about a specific job role or the company itself. It could also ask questions to the job candidate to see if they are qualified for the position. After a candidate has been qualified they would be handed to a hiring manager. This is a better path than relying on machine algorithms to pick up keywords in a resume. Many qualified candidates write their resumes for people to read, not for machines and are missed because of these algorithms. An intelligent digital assistant or chatbot that’s programmed and designed to interact the way a hiring manager would, is a much more natural way to qualify candidates.
DIGITAL ASSISTANTS FOR EXECUTIVES
Advanced digital assistants like the ones made by AtlasRTX could integrate with business systems and databases to pull dashboard reports at any time. An executive could then ask the chatbot on their phone or on a smart speaker and find out how their business is doing.
They could ask questions like “what’s our revenue for this quarter?” or “how much budget does the marketing team have left?” These simple high-level questions would be no problem for an intelligent digital assistant to answer. Giving an executive this ease of access to vital information would allow them to make business decisions faster.
DIGITAL ASSISTANTS FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE
Perhaps the most obvious way that digital assistants could enter the corporate world is through customer service. Customer service is an expensive but important role in any business. You want to keep your customers happy at all times. Digital assistants could engage customers that are either upset or need some help and answer questions for them, only escalating to humans for certain questions or under specified scenarios. Advanced digital assistants from atlasRTX are able to understand emotion and context in messages and elevate urgent questions to a human member of the team.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL ASSISTANTS?
Digital assistants come with many benefits, however, the extent to which you use them will determine how much you benefit from one. There are some use cases that have an obvious ROI like customer service where if you can free up 10% of a customer service rep time that translates immediately into a dollar amount.
The same thing goes with the sales use case where if your sales team is only following up an average of two to three times with all of the leads that come in, and you know your conversion rate of lead to close deal, then all you have to do is increase the number of times you follow up with that lead and you can calculate a direct ROI.
Other benefits include improved productivity of employees. When employees are free to focus on things that they are passionate about their morale goes up which often translates to increased productivity. When employees are happy and productive they tend to be more creative as well.
Advanced digital assistants like the ones made by AtlasRTX can communicate in over one hundred languages. These digital assistants can detect what language is being spoken to them, and instantly translate it into any other language. For example, if a customer is speaking in Spanish to a customer service rep who only knows English, the rep could use a digital assistant translate. A customer could speak in Spanish, the rep could speak in English, and the digital assistant would translate the languages so that both people understand each other.
POSSIBLE DRAWBACKS OF DIGITAL ASSISTANTS
Some common questions and concerns that people have about digital assistants include:
- Are Digital Assistants Expensive?
- Digital assistants can get expensive depending on how complex or advanced you want it to be. However, you should always calculate ROI when making a business investment and this one is no different. The ROI that you can expect from a digital assistant will be high.
- Are Digital Assistants Secure?
- This is one that depends on which digital assistant you are going to implement. If you choose a cheap inexpensive solution then you can expect more question marks around security. If you are willing to invest in an advanced one like the digital assistants at atlasRTX, then security is always taken as a top priority. For the most part, though, digital assistants are quite secure.
- Are Digital Assistants Complicated To Set Up?
- Digital assistants do not take a long time to set up depending on how complex or advanced you want it to be and what functionality you wanted it to have. It can take as little as one hour or up to a month to get set up.
- Will People Actually Use Digital Assistants?
- It is up to management to clearly convey the benefits to your team. Once the team understands how much better it makes them at their job it will be natural for them to adopt consistent usage of a digital assistant.
Digital assistants have been widely adopted by consumers to use in their everyday tasks. It is time that businesses embrace this trend and bring digital assistants into the office. If you are interested in getting a digital assistant setup today click the button to schedule a free consultation with one of our experts to discuss how digital the needs that your business has for a digital assistant.
