User experience is not a priority for CIOs and most of them don’t know how to estimate the return on investment (ROI) of each new technology put forward. But the customer profile has changed and nowadays people are always online and demand more information from companies. As a result so CIOs should analyze how to improve the customer service.

The new user has different characteristics, for example he spends a lot of time on social media, which is the most powerful medium to share his comments and air concerns. Also, before purchasing a service, the typical user looks for opinions and views of other people that have tried the same product.

How to estimate the ROI

Even if the ROI is not easily estimated due to the number of hard-to-measure features involved (e.g. payoff from social reputation and impressions), we want to show a simple method for to determining the ROI of a Virtual Agent.

First of all, it is important to know how much the company invests in the Call Center service. Then, we have to estimate the percentage of people the virtual agent should answer. According to what AgentBot clients told us, between 60 and 80 percent of customers had been answered by this automatic form of customer service, without a human intervention, in the last year.

Comparing employees salaries with the small and fixed rate that companies pay for each automatic conversation with AgentBot, it is possible to save between 35 to 80 percent of the customer service budget. More over, some additional benefits are: no waiting time, complete and precise responses, and reduced headcount and office space needs.

Also important to highlight is that Agent Bot is a SaaS (Software as a Service) Solution, meaning that companies do not have to make a large investment in physical hardware and infrastructure. Instead, companies can implement Virtual Agents and analyze their performance through distributed software that is supported by the provider on a constant basis.

Conclusion

CIOs should think critically about using products and services that are able to satisfy clients needs and expectations and improve the user experience. More specifically, they should be considering those capabilities that build stronger customer relationships by adding more points of contact with the user to stimulate interaction and perhaps generate a dialogue with the Brand. More interactions with the brand can translate into many benefits such as increased loyalty, sales, and a higher NPS. Virtual Agents are way to achieve this: they are a cost-effective, easy-to-implement, high-ROI solution to increasing customer service, satisfaction, and interaction.