Pick the right use case and reap the benefits of having an automated virtual assistant in your business
Choosing the right way to use a virtual assistant in your business may be one of the most important parts of the entire building process. The objective that you give to your virtual assistant will determine what features will be built, and how you will continue to develop the virtual assistant in the future.
Here are 7 great uses for virtual assistants in your business that can significantly improve your operational efficiency and differentiation:
Customer support
The most obvious use of a virtual assistant, it can help you to answer questions from customers quickly and cost-efficiently. Especially on platforms like Facebook Messenger, where many of your customers are on, this can be a real boon for operational and support staff, while increasing the perception of service for customers.
Commerce
Your virtual assistant can also help customers to discover new products and collections easily, often as they are released. With a virtual assistant that has inventory and payments capabilities integrated, you can also let customers order and reorder items easily, especially if you run a business that relies on recurring, low-involvement product sales.
Personal tracking
You may also consider creating a daily use case so that customers have a reason to return and engage with your business every day. If your industry is in finance, you could make an expense tracker; if you work in health, you can develop a fitness-tracking virtual assistant. Creativity can go a long way here in making it fun for users to come back.
Social & fun
Similarly, you could consider creating fun virtual assistants that tell stories, play games, or send jokes to users on demand. This could increase the brand preference for your business, as customers come to associate you with the happy feeling they get from interacting with your virtual assistant.
News
If your primary purpose is to provide information or news, then a virtual assistant can help your users stay informed through subscriptions. If you run a business that heavily relies on interesting content, and getting it out to customers, then a virtual assistant can automate the process of disseminating the content so it lands directly in your customers’ messaging inbox.
Productivity
Internally, productivity virtual assistants can make it easier and more expedient for your team to do their jobs. Getting digests of everything that happened instead of sifting through everything, or integrating sources of internal dashboard data to the internal messaging app (among other examples) can help to increase the satisfaction with the work environment and improve transparency in the company.
Employee engagement
Another internal virtual assistant use case can be to engage team members by offering praise or logging contributions by individuals, giving encouragement or pithy sayings, to motivate the team to work harder towards specific goals. Virtual assistants can be a great way to build culture and imbue the organization with a sense of connectedness, having an intelligent virtual “chat pet” that helps to keep everyone together.
There are of course myriads more ways to use a virtual assistant in your business, but these are some of the major categories of use cases that could benefit your business. If you’d like to brainstorm with us, we’d love to get in touch!
