Since hosting the first Intelligent Assistants Awards in the fall of 2014, the market for smart self-service solutions has rapidly expanded. Today’s customers don’t just accept interacting with virtual intelligent assistants (IAs); many prefer taking their questions to IAs rather than calling or chatting with a human agent.

Companies reap the dual benefits of providing customers with popular self-service options while optimizing their overall customer support infrastructure and expense management.

IA Awards Puts Focus on Intelligent Assistance Landscape
Opus Research will host the third IA awards at the upcoming Intelligent Assistants and Intelligent Authentication Conferences (IASquared) in San Francisco on September 12-13, 2016.

Awards Focus on Real-World IA Implementations and Proven Business Value
From their inception, the IAAs focused on real-world implementations that fit into what Opus Research has defined as the “Virtual Agents and Customer Assistants” category of the Intelligent Assistants Landscape.

To qualify for the award the submission must represent a real world implementation of a customer-facing IA solution that provides some type of customer self-service. The actual solution can be a voice-activated or text-based conversational IA that is implemented in any form, be it avatar, web- or mobile-based virtual agent, or messaging-based chatbot.

This year the panel of judges will look closely at the business value that the company has achieved as a result of their IA solution. Entrants are encouraged to write their submission to include details of the company’s goals and rationale for implementing an IA and data or facts that show how the IA helped the company achieve those goals.

If the IA did not meet goals in one area, but exceeded expectations in another area, this information would be valuable to include in the submission as well.

Apart from business value and impact, the awards evaluation panel may also examine one or more of the following criteria:

• Support of multi-channel of omnichannel support
• Consistent responses and experience across multiple devices and channels
• Personalized responses based on customer-provided information
• Attainment of “key performance indicators”
• Leverage of existing customer experience infrastructure
• Ability to learn and improve responses over time based on experience
• Future readiness, adding topics and moving from Q&A to advice and sales

IA Award Submissions Are Now Open!
If your company or organization has a working intelligent assistant capability, we invite and encourage you to submit an award application. If you’re still evaluating IA solutions or if your IA implementation hasn’t gone live yet, we invite you to attend the Intelligent Assistants and Intelligent Authentication Conferences in San Francisco this fall to learn from and share information with your peers.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Customer service, chatbots, Opus Research, Artificial Intelligence, intelligent Assistants