AI ADVICE FOR BUSINESSES
Should your next hire be an AI-powered virtual assistant? Maybe.
Just to be clear at the outset, I’m NOT telling you to replace people with bots. Instead, I’m saying to approach the launch of a bot in the way you would outline the responsibilities of a new hire.
This hiring analogy will help you understand what a virtual assistant is. Let’s call it a VA for short. Keep reading, and you may very well walk away with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on whether you need a VA. Either answer is OK.
Here’s when to NOT hire a virtual assistant
I’m not sarcastic when I say this — if you have no interest in improving customer service, support operations, and internal corporate communications, don’t hire a VA.
For many companies, customer support and sales volume are too low to justify a VA. Or perhaps the communication channels you have are working just fine. If that’s the case, no need for a VA quite yet.
Don’t let FOMO be the driver
Resist the fear of missing out! Jumping on the bandwagon for no reason rarely turns out well. If you launch a bot for no concrete reason, your bot will have no concrete reason to exist. It’s these pointless bots that sometimes give chatbots a bad name, and why many people think they are nonsense.
Find out if you NEED a virtual assistant
We help customers attack this question on our first sales call. I’ve created a sample call below. I hope it helps you figure out if you need a VA.
Keep in mind, I’m not trying to convince you that you need a VA. On the contrary, you need to convince me. Take a look:
Client: We found you guys and love what we see. Can you give us a demo?
Botcopy: Glad you found us! We’d love to welcome you to the Botcopy family, but first, why do you need a bot?
Client: We have a call center that gets a lot of traffic. We spend a lot of money on that traffic: high volume, low priority, repetitive task stuff. We also have an FAQ page and want a bot to help with password resets.
Botcopy: Wow, these are great use-cases! But, let’s take a step back. Imagine you’re hiring a human for this position — a virtual help desk live agent. What specific tasks would they perform during month one, how would you keep tabs on their progress and performance, and how would you measure ROI on the hire after, say, three months?
Client: Hmm, those do seem like the right questions. I guess they would start by doing (x, y, and z).
Botcopy: OK, cool. And if they don’t know how to answer a question or perform a task, what’s the protocol? Do they report to someone else?
Client: It depends. But generally speaking, they should get the customer’s contact info, report to the manager, get answers and follow up within a day or two.
Botcopy: Got it. So the new hire would need to learn how to answer a growing list of questions, perform tasks, know what to do if they can’t answer, and learn more over time.
Client: Haha, yeah, and they’d have to be able to do this 24 hours a day, for an unlimited amount of callers or web chatters at the same time! That’s why we need a bot!
Botcopy: You might need a bot, but just like for any new hire, you want their value to the company to exceed your investment.
Client: For sure.
Botcopy: What would an employee like that be worth to your company?
Client: A considerable amount. At the moment, our call center costs, on average, are $.70 a min. We get around 6,000 calls a day. Last year we spent over $3 million on our call center calls. So if you’re telling me an employee can significantly reduce that, we would be all ears.
Botcopy: Interesting. Based on that, I’m guessing your calls average two minutes per call. You’ll still need a team to help develop your chatbot, but once you deploy it, your cost per engagement will average $.3 and reduce as your agent becomes more intelligent. Note that these are “per engagement,” not per minute. Theoretically, one “engagement” could last forever if your end-user is feeling extra chatty. My quick math says that you’ll be shaving 80% of your overhead in no time.
Client: That’s what we were hoping!
Botcopy: We’re glad you found us. You have a compelling use case for a chatbot and we’re here to help! I’m sharing my screen now. Can you see it?
Client: Yes.
Botcopy: Great. In this example, you’ll see where companies start to the far left. 100% of the contact points are via human for calls, emails, and live chat. As we progress to the right, the bot learns to handle more of the engagements coming in. The previous or current live transcripts are your bot’s “textbooks.” The more messages received, the more intelligent your bot can become.
Botcopy: Let’s take a deeper look. Stage 1 is the inbound customer contact; Stage 2 is the chatbot. If a user asks a question the bot knows how to answer, the bot handles it. If a user asks a question the bot can’t answer (yet), the chat escalates to a human representative who can assist. These deflections to a human rep are stored in your Google Cloud project and will inform your chatbot’s future training. It’s a fantastic cycle that, over time, leads to more intelligent support.
Client: This all makes sense. The path to reducing our overhead is straightforward. Let me take this to our team. They’ll be excited to hear about this!
Here’s what that conversation revealed
This client had a call center expense that our solution can outperform. While a chatbot is not always the answer, in this instance, the imaginary new help desk “hire” with the power to communicate to inbound callers makes financial sense. The expense of having a team train the “new hire” is justified by the cost savings the company will experience over time. It’s grade school math. Let’s take a look.
Current daily call center operational experiences:
$.70*14,000 = $9,800
Projected call center operational costs with Botcopy:
$.30 * 6,000 = $1,800
*81.63% cost savings
Hiring a VA is sort of like hiring a person
I find this analogy useful because, to put it bluntly, the person (or VA) you hire has to come at an expense that is lower than the associated revenue they generate.
When hiring a person, this cost/benefit analysis takes place before you even publish the job listing. You know what you want that hire to do, how to bring them up to speed, and how to measure performance.
Likewise, for “hiring” a VA, it’s best to consider all that same stuff: goals/KPIs, training methods, and performance monitoring.
So, should your next hire be an AI-powered VA?
If you already know the answer is YES, let’s get on a call.
In addition to providing the software you need, Botcopy offers services that bring clarity and smoothness to the process.
Botcopy’s software brings the most advanced conversational AI to your website or app in one click. Build your agent’s back-end with top AI (e.g., Google Cloud Dialogflow) and run Botcopy as a whip-smart front-end custom UI that puts YOU in control. Our $19 Lite Plan or $65 Gold Plan can potentially save your company millions. Get in touch.
