Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Virtual Assistants Could Generate $7.7B by 2025

January 02, 2018

Virtual digital assistants are poised to see rapid adoption in the enterprise, according to Tractica.

A new report from the company indicates more than 1 billion unique active users will employ VDAs annually by 2025. At that point, the firm says, VDAs will generate $7.7 billion in annual revenue.

As you probably already know, VDAs are automated software applications or platforms that enable people to speak or type in natural language. The VDAs then use artificial intelligence to make sense of and act on those human requests.

In its study “Market Guide for Virtual Customer Assistants,” published last month, Gartner says: “Using conversational artificial intelligence applications and platforms to optimize customer engagement is one of the biggest trends in customer experience.” 


Tractica says there were 145.2 million active VDA users worldwide in 2017. And

IBM in a recent blog said 85 percent of customer interactions by 2020 will be handled without a human agent.

Contact centers and customer service are among the use cases for virtual digital assistants or robotic process automation as VDAs are also sometimes called. RPA employs virtual agents/robots to handle routine tasks that have traditionally been carried out by call center agents.

James Wilson of contact center outsourcing outfit Call Center Pros says RPA can reduce process cycle times, bring error rates to close to zero, and lead to 40 to 70 percent savings in labor costs.

RPA software product isn’t limited to running automation at the direction of agents,” adds Wilson. “It also has the capability to trigger automated process from system events. This means a certain call outcome can cause automatic steps to check account profiles, validate required changes have been made and enter the validation into the customer’s records.”




Edited by Mandi Nowitz



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