Chat On The Web | Virtual Assistant services | Customer service software

If you're like a lot of business and website owners, you've probably been looking for new and better ways to get the most out of your copy and content. But all of that tweaking, editing, optimizing and drafting can take up a lot of time - especially if you're not an experienced writer. And even a writer who excels in the off-line world will struggle with the demands of writing for the Web. Unfortunately, that can mean that you'll have to devote a disproportionate chat on the web amount of time in order to accomplish your goals - at the expense of other urgent, high-priority tasks and obligations.

Many people make the mistake of thinking they'll never accomplish their dreams; that it'll never get done. They give up, throwing in the towel, closing the door on what could have been a very successful opportunity that won't knock again. So, what do you do if you're not a writer? You hire one! But, if you want to own all rights to the final work - whether it's Web content, an article, a book or a press release - then you can't hire just any writer. You need a professional that works virtual assistant within the constraints of what is known as a work-for-hire assignment.

Work-For-Hire: What It Means When you hire a freelance writer to create a work-for-hire project, there are a LOT of benefits: You can require that the writer signs an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) When the project is complete, you'll own 100% of the rights. You can sell it to a publisher, list it with an agent, put your name in the by-line and keep all of the credit. Apart from the money you'll pay the writer who completes the assignment, every penny the live chat written work earns belongs wholly to you! You save a lot of time and stress! You simply hire a writer with a style and reputation that you trust and go about your regular business.

Aside from the a few updates and revisions, you can sit back and relax. And, if you've done your homework, you can be confident that your assignment will be completed on or before the agreed upon deadline. But, it's only fair to admit, work-for-hire writing CAN have it's drawbacks... Work-for-hire writing fees are often a bit (sometimes quite a bit) higher than other freelance fees. That's because the writer wants to be (and should be) compensated for missing out on the royalties and reprint payments that projects only requiring 1st North American Rights normally yield.

I'll tell you one way to avoid this pitfall in a few moments. Unless you're VERY explicit in your project details, there's a chance that the completed prose may be significantly different that you'd hoped or planned. You can avoid this obstacle by thoroughly detailing EXACTLY what it is you're looking for - even down to the seemingly minor things. Unless your writer offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee (in writing), there's a risk that you may wind up stuck with an incredibly flawed manuscript, and all of the money you've already released. If you don't want to find yourself caught up in this mess, consider looking for your ideal writer on a secure, mediated, third-party freelance network like Guru.com.

This site, and other similar ones, offer third-party invoicing and escrow services that protect you from writers that promise the moon and leave you with a big, ugly crater. On A Budget? Barter! I promised you a solution earlier and now I'm going to give it to you. If you're in need of a first-rate writer, but you're working on a shoestring budget, there are ways that you can still creatively "purchase" writing services at steeply discounted prices. The way to do it is to look for writers willing and able to work as a work-for-hire writer in a barter exchange situation.

How does it work? Well, I can't account for everyone out there, but when I perform barter exchange projects, I'm willing to drop my cash fees by up to 75%. The remaining balance, which is usually 50-75%, is "paid for" with services or items of value to me and/or my business. Popular barter items include things like: • Advertising • Graphics design • Solo mailings • Travel and flight accommodations • Joint ventures • Your business's products • A share of the royalties, etc. When writers and their potential clients are willing to try creative measures like these, everybody wins.

And there are several writers (even big-shot writers) who are more than happy to make the trade. So, before you give up hope, take a closer look at work-for-hire arrangements. Abstract Over the past few years, emergence of social media, mobile smart phones, big data, analytics and cloud has been fundamentally changing our lives and the way we work and interact. These forces have increased customer's expectations, pushing the enterprises to reconsider their virtual assistant services end-to-end customer experience strategy. Customer engagement solutions should focus on providing an enhanced direct experience and help enterprises increase revenue, expand margins, improve customer satisfaction and retention, and offer the much-needed differentiators in this competitive world.

Virtual Assistant technology is a new area that could be integrated with the existing applications, helping users to converse in natural language with a lifelike online avatar that responds to their queries in text or voice. They offer a personalized experience that reduces the need of being in touch with support team; builds a brand image and increases customer satisfaction. It could be integrated with the existing applications as well extending them and adding value to the services they offer. Here we explore on how Virtual Assistants could be added to the Omni-channel communication solutions and talk about solutions developed for the insurance domain to help streamline and improvise their customer engagement opportunities.

Introduction Customer expects the appropriate response to their queries when they visit a support website or contact the helpdesk. They expect their queries answered, problems resolved so that the overall experience becomes a satisfying one. Not meeting their expectations would result in an unsatisfied customer and hence a loss to the enterprise brand. Other challenges in providing high quality service are the poor experience with support live chat outsourcing via web, phone or email, lack of product knowledge, long call waiting queues and linguistic misunderstandings etc. Enterprises can significantly increase their brand value and sales by providing customers with fast and correct responses through an effective customer engagement services.

Challenges in Customer Engagement Services Here are some of the key challenges faced by the enterprises in managing customer engagements: • Meeting the ever-increasing expectations of the tech savvy users having various channels for communication, including web, mobile, Facebook, Twitter etc. • Making a good first impression when a web application or a mobile app is accessed for the first time and thereby increasing the chances of a revisit. • Providing a personalized support at the time of a new account creation or product registration that may need involving an agent. • Providing a user-friendly self-service feature that might be faster than talking to a live agent as a preferred mechanism.

Overview A Virtual Assistant is a conversational lifelike, online avatar that can simulate a conversation to deliver voice or text-based engagement on any web application or mobile interface. They can converse in natural language with the avatar to respond to queries, understand questions, offer a detailed step-by-step activities for certain processes and provide cross-sell opportunities depending on interests, etc. It is very effective in scenarios where call rates are very high. They are capable of livechat understanding different languages and can communicate in the natural language.

Virtual Assistants can be very successfully implemented to optimize the number of support team size. A Virtual Assistant not only resolves the query of the customers, but can also be configured to give more information about the promotions and offers. For the example, if we have to fly from one place to another, it will not only inform about the flights, but also provides the details about the hotels where we can stay, promotions and offers, luggage limits, climate of the destination and any other destination specific details that are configured. In web applications, though there are online FAQs and user manuals to help the users, they are found inadequate when a user wants to look for some specific information.

It may take a long time for them to go through the FAQs and find the solution to their problems. At times this is time-consuming and prevents them from performing certain functions and they may call up customer support. Virtual Assistants allow creation of knowledge base and provide an interface hire a virtual assistant where the users can put their queries and get the relevant answers interactively. Additionally, Virtual Assistants can generate reports showing the frequently asked queries, their trends (of being asked), unanswered or new queries and level of customer satisfaction with the responses and so on.

This provides an opportunity to improving the question bank and the response. Mobile Virtual Assistants In addition to Virtual Assistants for the web applications, there are mobile based Virtual Assistants that provide a user-friendly interface for a smart phone. They are capable of understanding the user profile, questions and offer a powerful engagement which will be more effective. With advances in speech and voice recognition technologies, the mobile Virtual Assistant can turn the smart phone into voice enabled customer service person. They can recognize the person, understand what the customer is looking for and interact in a conversational way to facilitate a unique way of interaction.

Virtual Assistants are more than a voice enabled help file and have inbuilt intelligence that can help in providing a more personalized help and give the further inputs sensing the context of the help being asked. For example, when we need to book a ticket customer service software between two places, the help can also be personalized to ask other questions like type of food preferences, preferred seating arrangement. Users can be asked whether they would be interested in hotel booking at the destination, any vehicle requirements, taxis etc. to add cross-selling to the list. Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) With new technological advancements, the concept of "Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA)" is developing, which is providing new technology enablers such as.

Algorithms enabling natural language interactions • Artificial Intelligence induced by self-learning • Context-aware, proactive search of knowledge portals • Voice-assisted user interface for mobile devices with speech recognition/analytics • Voice biometrics The Intelligent Virtual Assistant can also be used to improve interactions on traditional online web portals, as well as on smart phones. Additionally, they offer a more personalized engagement of the person's identity while talking. They can also customize recommendations by leveraging the features and capabilities provided by smart devices and accessories (e.g., Geo location, accelerometer etc. and feed provided by smart watch and fitness wearable) extending the boundary of their services and making them context aware.

The future generations of Intelligent Virtual Assistant can leverage artificial intelligence using self-learning algorithms to provide more relevant solutions to customer queries. Virtual Assistant Tools in the Market According to Gartner, "Virtual Assistants" have transformational benefits. Global Intelligent live chat staffing Virtual Assistant (IVA) will grow at a CAGR of 39.3% over 2013-2018, and the total market shall be projected to climb to more than $2.1 billion by 2019. The market for IVAs shall be expected to grow with a few global intelligent virtual assistant tool vendors emerging like Next IT Corp., Creative Virtual Ltd., VirtuOz Inc., Anboto Group., Code Baby Corp., IntelliResponse Systems Inc., Nuance Communications Inc., SpeakToit Inc., Artificial Solutions UK Ltd., eGain Communications Corp. Etc.

Virtual Assistant Comparison Matrix Different customers have different requirements, hence it is important to make sure that we appraise to map the Virtual Assistant tool features as per the requirements so before starting the development we have done some comparison between various tools available in the market and chose the best tool as per their need to develop the proof of concept. Iactive intelligent, Creative Virtual Ltd, eGain Corp. and Nuance Communication are some of the key Virtual Assistant tools available in the market that covers most of the features like 3D Persona with Emotions, Mobile solutions, concept understanding, multiple questions, Analytics, Social Dialogue, Natural language processing capability, multiple language support, etc.

Apart from all these features Creative Virtual is good in reporting and analytics, Nuance (Nina) is good in Voice biometric (person and voice identification) and Iactive intelligent technology is good in features planning and decision-making. Customer Engagement Solutions using Virtual Assistant agents for hire To verify the viability and usability of Virtual Assistant products we developed two Proof of Concepts (POC) based on the use cases from the insurance domain: • Product Enrolment: A web-based Virtual Assistant solution that provides assisted form filling while enrolling for a new insurance product. • First Notice of Loss Application:

A mobile-based Virtual Assistant solution assisting users to log First Notification of Loss (FNOL) using voice for a vehicle in case of an accident Virtual Assistant for Assisted form Filling Solution In a product enrolment form, any user who wants to enroll for a policy will need to enter their personal details and express interest in the product. Typically the form could be complex asking for various details and customers may call up support asking how to fill it. This solution uses a Virtual Assistant to help the user filling the enrollment form by asking questions and considering the user responses as input vales.

Virtual Assistant for First Notice of Loss (FNOL) Solution When a person driving a car meets an accident, he will need to report the accident to the insurance company at the earliest. Since there are multiple pieces of information to be entered at times additional help would be required and hire an agent the person will try getting in touch with the support team. This smart-phone-based application uses a Virtual Assistant and provides a voice-assisted solution to capture the information. User will simply need to respond to questions spoken by the tool and respond to them in speaking.

The whole process can be completed as a natural conversation. Virtual Assistant Technology Benefits Implementing a Virtual Assistant solution for automating the business processes provides many benefits by increasing the efficiency and productivity. With this an enterprise can not only increase the overall customer satisfaction, but also cut the cost involved. Some of the key benefits are as follows: • Enhanced customer experience • Increased overall productivity • Optimized support team • Reduced cost • Better monitoring and control Summary Customer engagement is being no more seen as a nice to have thing anymore and businesses are having a strategic view towards it.

Virtual Assistant technology combined together with other emerging technologies is empowering them to revamp their customer engagement platforms. It has huge potentials in the areas where a lot of interactions happen as a routine with a large support team. Enterprises can reap tremendous business benefits through a well thought Virtual Assistant implementation. Another way of doing customer service is through the use of live chat support which is now gaining positive response aside from the famous inbound and outbound customer service management. This is a simple way of assisting clients worldwide because it requires the agents to be proficient in grammar, can type at least an average of 25 words per minute and most importantly, can respond quickly to the concerns of the customers.

Unlike with voice support, a customer service representative often encountered irate clients and sometime being discriminated on their race identification, among others. But regardless on how they help their customers, Filipinos customer service was proven and tested in telephoning communication. Clients from the United States easily pissed them if they failed to receive enough services they wanted. If this will continue, no wonder that the next move would end up in cancellation the program website chat they purchased. The introduction of chat support is a great wonder to the outsourcing because it gives the opportunity for the customers to deal one-on-one coaching with the agent using this technology.

In many contact centers today in the Philippines, live chat support are now offered because call center locators believe that customers are their lifeblood and no matter what happen addressing the customers' problem should be listed a top priority. Meanwhile, Melanie Mae P. Lagasca, a chat operator for Unique Interaction, disclosed that she is now accustomed using the live chat support services. Previously, Ms. Lagasca came from the inbound account but was transferred to chat account, as part of the company's way of giving quality help to the customers. "I encountered angry customers on live chat support but the thing is, I can fully address their concerns after looking on the customers' account. Chat support service is broad and in general this is fun," said the 24-year-old lass from Bulacan province.

Speaking in Filipino and English, she said: "Chat support improves my skills in typing and I become more conscious of my grammar and I also learned how to handle the HTML code. I learned new things everyday and I treasure this opportunity to work in call center which greatly help me in supporting my family." Agents assigned for a chat support were trained the workings of this services. First, they were brief about the background of the program. Once they know everything, then they started to explore some basic jargons related on this account. Since the account is complicated to learn at the beginning but later on the knowledge will continue to spark the chat operators. If the customers were satisfied with the service offered by a chat agent, usually they give good remarks to the agent's performance.

This is true, because the agents were also evaluate how they deal with the customers. If their remarks "NI" (needs improvement) this is something to give continuous coaching and reorientation to the agents to avoid getting this remark again and again. Everything can be sorted out properly through proper forum. Today, ecommerce sites improve their sales because of the live chat software as a standard way of customer service. Call center executives interpret that this technology is a powerful customer interaction and support solution that offers substantial advantages to clients.

Because online shoppers or Internet users rapidly increasing, chat tool gives positive outcome by helping the customers decide which is the best pick to choose. This tool can help strengthen up selling and generate loyalty by enabling live, person-to-person communication. A survey conducted by e Marketer in 2000 showed that retail revenues from online shopping worldwide will increase to 35.3 billion by 2002. However, according to Yankelovich Partners, there is a problem: Nearly two-thirds of Web users are unwilling to purchase products without human interaction.

Another research from Andersen consulting, revealed that 63% of consumers surveyed did not compete an online transaction because they could not find necessary informal. With less than adequate information, they frequently don't buy at all or end up buying the wrong product and ultimately, return it. Ecommerce companies especially outsourcing, lead the customers in a way that they will learn and earn the benefits from the products they bought. This is not only for the purpose of doing sales but giving accurate information not to mislead the customers are the responsible of the provider.

HOW TO USE CHAT SUPPORT Most of the ebusiness companies now have window section for live chat support. They provide few snippets information, along with a button, to their pages in which the customer may have the chance to browse it. If the customer will click on a button then it will alert the live chat server, hosted by the service that a visitor is popping up and wants to talk to the available chat support agent. In this highly regulated outsourcing industry, everything is compact and the information is stored ready to give a quick response to the visitors. And at the end, this visitor will enable to learn about the services and possibly turned out to be an up sell. No wonder that in the next following years, live chat support services will give the outsourcing a remarkable journey in the online marketing scheme. Roberto L. Bacasong, 27, works as Customer Interaction Associate in a biggest contact center in the Philippines.