What is an AI virtual assistant and how might it help your sales and customer service teams?

Supporting both your customers and the employees that work with them can be a tough task. You’ve got to balance everyone’s needs while providing the right kinds of help to sales and service teams alike. With an AI virtual assistant, this is much easier to do.

We’re going to explore these assistants, their workings, and how they might help your business, as well as walking you through what kinds of options are available.

Let’s start with a quick definition.

What is an AI virtual assistant?

To properly define the term “AI virtual assistant,” we need to consider each word separately.

If you’ve ever had a secretary who excelled at their job, you’ll likely know what tasks fall under an assistant’s remit. If not, think of them as someone who helps you get things done by managing workloads, streamlining workflows, and more.

As for a “virtual assistant,” these are created to support you without you needing to rely on a human employee. They’re essentially pieces of digital technology that are designed to perform all the functions of a secretary—without taking any breaks.

Virtual assistant AI technology, then, is a tool that does all of this for you using the power of artificial intelligence.

There are plenty of different types of AI virtual assistants out there, not just the consumer versions, like Alexa and Siri, that we’re all familiar with. We’ll cover these in more detail below.

How do AI virtual assistants work? Understanding conversational AI, natural language processing, and more

Virtual assistants tend to use conversational AI to “talk” to users, meaning it’s much like having a human helper on hand. But how do they do this?

A lot of it has to do with natural language processing (NLP) technology. Simply put, this works by picking out keywords in human speech (or text), contextualising them in order to “understand,” and responding appropriately.

For example, if you ask a conversational AI what the weather prediction for tomorrow is, it won’t just give you the temperature. Instead, it might say something like: “Tomorrow, the forecast predicts rain at about 2 PM, with overcast weather for the rest of the day”. This sounds more natural to us and feels more like having a chat with a coworker than talking to a bot.

Of course, learning to talk like a person isn’t easy. It takes human babies years to get it right. Luckily, an AI-powered virtual assistant can move a little faster than that, thanks to machine learning (ML) models.

These models allow it to learn from both large data sets and its own mistakes to improve its performance over time. So, in the example above, a user might go on to ask about the temperature. If this happens often enough, the ML model may prompt the AI to start picking up on this. It might then begin including temperature predictions by default moving forward.

The different types of AI virtual assistants

Not all AI assistants are created equal. That’s because they tend to be made with specific purposes in mind, which we’ll explore in greater detail below.

Consumer-focused AI virtual assistants

These are the examples you’ll probably be given if you ask the average layperson what an AI assistant is.

Alexa and Siri, as well as other similar kinds of artificial intelligence, can be found in most people’s at-home tech stacks and fall into the consumer-focused category.

Consumer-focused AI assistants are created to aid individuals going about their daily lives. The weather example above is a classic use case, helping the average consumer know how to dress and whether to bring an umbrella.

While they’re hugely useful in the home, consumer-focused AI assistants aren’t suited to businesses looking to optimise their internal processes.

AI virtual assistants for businesses

This far broader category is better suited to the needs of companies. It’s full of AI-powered solutions for customer support, sales, marketing, and much more.

Let’s consider some real-world examples.

Chatbots are a common type of AI customer service assistant. These can have text-based conversations with consumers, as well as answer simple questions.

This type of AI assistant is helpful to customer service agents as well as consumers since it can field many common questions and thus lighten their workload. This not only saves agents from having to answer the same queries multiple times a day but allows them to focus on more complex customer issues instead.

For anyone considering implementing this technology in their business, it’s also important to know about virtual agents. These specialist AI tools can act as secretaries and managerial support combined into one and are ideal for helping teams work to their full potential.

A virtual agent might, for example, pick up on keywords and then present agents with flashcards full of important information mid-conversation. This helps team members provide the right info to customers and keep helping them without interruption or having to go away and fact-check what they’re saying.

Virtual sales assistants can also do the job of chatbots if they’re configured correctly. This makes them a great tool for supporting both your team and customers.

It’s not all about customer-facing AI virtual assistants, either. As artificial intelligence technology has developed—and particularly generative AI—so too have the applications of the technology to assist with internal business processes.

There are now a wide range of different types of AI assistant for business use, and we’ll look at some examples a little later.

The potential benefits of AI virtual assistants for your business

Using a business-focused virtual AI assistant has the potential to improve your daily workflows dramatically.

We won’t ask you to just take our word for it, though. Instead, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most notable advantages of integrating one of these AI tools into your company.

(Note: This section specifically focuses on tools created for businesses rather than consumer-oriented options previously mentioned.)

Making knowledge more accessible

Business workflows are often time-sensitive. For example, if you’re speaking to an important prospect on the phone, you can’t afford to hang up on them mid-conversation and do some research to come up with the right responses to their questions.

Fortunately, having an AI-powered assistant at your disposal makes all the knowledge you and your team need instantly accessible.

A sales AI might, for example, pull up real-time analytics based on previous purchases. This helps you make educated, fact-based decisions about each step in the sales process while optimally supporting customers using these insights.

Training new agents efficiently

Whether it’s because you’re growing as a company or because your team wants to bring fresh talent on board, new customer service agents will likely be a regular fixture in your workplace. These employees need proper training to perform at an optimum level, which means you’ll have to dedicate significant time and resources to this task.

With an AI virtual assistant, though, you can reduce that time.

These tools can help automate parts of the learning process while supporting new agents as they take their first calls from customers. A virtual AI assistant might, for example, guide new hires through their training modules. It may also bring up cards featuring key information during difficult calls.

Closing more sales

When a customer is thinking about making a purchase, the last thing you want to do is keep them waiting.

Thanks to AI virtual assistants, you don’t have to.

Instead, you can ensure a bot is always available to answer questions and help with basic queries. Chatbots and similar options are highly useful here.

These types of AI can give customers specific details about products or services. They can highlight ongoing deals, recommend demos, or share links to informative sources like how-to videos.

Plus, your virtual assistant can do this at all hours of the day and night, including over weekends and holidays. This means you can close sales even when no one is in the office.

Improving customer service

Despite being a newer trend, AI in customer service can be invaluable—in large part because of its capacity to boost the quality of service you can offer.

As mentioned above, AI tools are always available. This means they can support customers at all times, so they’re never left feeling like they can’t reach your company when needed.

A virtual assistant AI can also help advise agents unsure how to approach a given situation. This way, they can choose the approach that’s most likely to lead to success, creating better customer relationships.

Gathering and processing more data

Having access to more information about the status of your business helps you improve its internal operations. This is another area where AI virtual assistants excel.

AI can automatically gather data for you. You can use this feature to collect more information on customers and agents alike, so you can direct your efforts toward improving the things that need work.

Virtual AI assistants are also great at showing how your data measures up to your KPIs and predictions. This allows you to create more realistic forecasts going forward, as well as adjust your expectations.

Boosting productivity

A virtual AI assistant can help in this regard in two ways.

Firstly, it lets you automate repetitive tasks across a wide range of business areas. It can also perform research and data gathering for you (or at a minimum, help with these).

Virtual assistants create more time in your team's days by removing these tasks and the onus to perform them from employees’ schedules. They also boost morale by taking care of the more boring and monotonous side of their work.

AI can also help with administrative tasks like scheduling. This makes employees more organised and empowers them to use their working days more productively.

7 AI virtual assistant options for your business

Now, let’s walk you through some of the best AI virtual assistant options on the market. Each of these is designed to help your business run more effectively.

While each of these AI tools for business is useful in its own right, they’re not all the same, nor do they perform identical functions. That’s why we’ve split them into several categories to reflect best what you’ll get from each of them:

A holistic AI-powered collaboration platform

First and foremost, we’d be remiss not to mention the one type of solution that gives you everything you could want from a business AI. We’re talking about a complete and all-inclusive collaboration platform that works with the support of specialist artificial intelligence developed in-house.

1. Dialpad

Enter Dialpad. The best way to ensure your AI virtual assistant can support you in all aspects of your work is if it’s integrated directly into your digital workspace.

That’s why Dialpad comes with a built-in AI.

With it, you get much more than just a virtual workspace or AI assistant. Instead, it acts as a holistic communications solution that integrates all your essential apps into a single, unified platform.

Let’s look at some of the features you get access to as a result.

Firstly, Dialpad offers real-time AI transcription for calls and voicemails. This lets you keep a written, searchable, and highly accurate record of anything that was said by your employees or customers when the feature is turned on.

In addition, instead of asking you to choose between supporting customers or agents, Dialpad’s AI lets you do both. This means providing conversational chatbot-like support to customers while at the same time pulling up helpful information and guidance for agents.

Dialpad also provides an AI-powered meeting notes feature. This summarises the most important parts of a meeting in real-time, so you can look back on what’s been said over voice or video call.

Dialpad, too, comes with a native contact centre platform. This can empower your agents to communicate with one another using the same tool that lets them communicate seamlessly with customers.

In short, Dialpad is a complete solution that addresses the need for a virtual AI by giving you everything you could possibly require from a business tech tool—all in one interface.

Depending on the size of your business, you can get access to all of Dialpad’s most essential features for as little as £12 per user per month. If you’re looking for an enterprise solution, you can get in touch for a custom quote that suits your needs and covers all the functionalities you’d like to include.

AI writing or content creation assistants

The power of generative AI can also help you create high-quality content in very little time. This is because it allows you to enter a request and then uses AI to create an article, blog post, marketing slogan, or other text-based content based on this.

This technology is becoming ever more popular with businesses as a means to save time. That’s why we’ll be discussing two of the most prominent AI content-creation tools out there next:

2. ChatGPT

Famous for being able to talk to customers like a human and generate most forms of text-based content, ChatGPT is a more recent product developed by OpenAI. It’s trained on a huge swathe of data taken from all corners of the internet.

You can use ChatGPT as a kind of virtual assistant as well.

Most notably, ChatGPT can help you generate text to suit your needs. While this will rarely read exactly as though written by a human, it can be prepared in seconds, saving you a lot of time.

ChatGPT uses a custom pricing model for enterprises and larger companies, so you’ll have to reach out to them to get a quote.¹

3. ProWritingAid

Focusing more on the editing side of things, ProWritingAid markets itself as a “grammar checker, style editor, proofreader, and writing coach” combined into one.

It’s useful for anyone seeking to improve their written content's overall level or quality. Rather than using AI to generate this in the first place, you can pass it through ProWritingAid after the fact.

ProWritingAid offers two pricing packages: Premium and Pro. These can be bought on a monthly, yearly, or lifetime basis. For the latter, Premium costs £199.50, while Pro costs £249.50.²

AI SEO assistants

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is all about making sure your content is the first thing people see when they search for relevant keywords in search engines (primarily Google).

Since SEO is ever-evolving, it can be difficult to keep up with new trends and tailor your content appropriately. That’s where AI assistants come in.

Here are two of the most useful ones:

4. Frase

While it does have an AI writing component, Frase is most well-known for its SEO-improving capabilities.

It works by analysing search engine criteria surrounding keywords and phrases you want to focus on. It then gives you a list of short and long-tail keywords to incorporate into your content to raise its SEO ranking.

You can also use Frase to generate a list of titles, headings, and keywords that your competitors are using. This allows you to outrank their content on search engine results pages tactically.

Pricing plans for Frase are split into Solo, Basic, and Team. The prices for these range from £12 per month to around £112.³

5. SurferSEO

This tool’s primary aim is to increase the amount of organic traffic your website sees. It does this by helping improve the SEO scores of individual pages and blog posts so they’re put in front of more people.

It’s a little like an AI-based article writing, and SEO-optimising tool rolled into one.

SurferSEO isn’t restricted to English either. If you’re looking to create content in multiple languages or optimise content for search engines in a language you don’t speak, it can be a helpful tool.

As for pricing, SurferSEO has multiple different plans available depending on the needs and means of your business.⁴ Their most comprehensive is the Enterprise model, priced on a case-by-case basis.

AI note-taking assistants

Lastly, let’s look at some AI assistants that focus primarily on helping you take notes. These play the part of a scribe or minutes-writer, except they’re powered by AI rather than human minds.

Before we jump in, it’s important to note that the functionalities offered by the tools below are also included in more all-encompassing solutions like Dialpad (alongside a host of additional features).

In other words, these are not the only AI note-taking tools out there, but if notes are all you’re looking for, they could serve your purpose.

6. Otter.ai

This AI-based tool aims to help you streamline your meeting workflows. It can write notes while also recording audio for any ongoing meetings. Additionally, Otter.ai comes with a summary generation feature built in, alongside functionality for highlighting action items.

Otter.ai has four different pricing tiers, ranging from Free to Enterprise.⁵ The latter is priced individually, meaning you’ll have to get in touch to learn how much you’d be paying.

7. Fireflies.ai

Another note-taking assistant, Fireflies says it can “transcribe, summarise, search, and analyse voice conversations”. Each of these features is powered by artificial intelligence.

Additionally, it offers some capacity for automating workflows.

The business plan Fireflies.ai offers costs around £15 per month per user if you choose the annual billing option.⁶ It’s slightly pricier if you pick monthly payments. Their Enterprise plan is customisable, so you’ll need to get a quote from them for an idea of how much this would cost.

An AI virtual assistant may be just what your business needs

AI virtual assistants help you get more done in less time with greater efficiency.

This is because they’re built to support you and your teams’ needs alongside those of your customers. They’re the ideal tool for streamlining internal processes and workflows without sacrificing a lot of time to do so.

Dialpad has everything you need in a virtual AI assistant and more. With it, you get access to a full unified communications solution and integrations to a number of tools that your team may already be using. This turns Dialpad into a complete all-in-one package that functions as the perfect virtual workspace.

The best part? It’s all powered by Dialpad’s proprietary AI, trained specifically on business conversations.

Sources:

1. https://openai.com/enterprise
2. https://prowritingaid.com/pricing
3. https://www.frase.io/pricing/
4. https://surferseo.com/pricing/
5. https://otter.ai/pricing
6. https://fireflies.ai/pricing