12 Use Cases for Virtual Assistants that are Helping Businesses Drive Customer Satisfaction Around the World

Chatbots are the future of customer service. They're fast, they're accurate, and they can help customers with frequent queries while saving time for your customer service team to handle more complex requests. Customers expect this kind of automation everywhere they go these days; with so much information readily available at our fingertips, why should people have to sit on hold for 30 minutes just to ask about something simple like shipping times? Chatbots are able to handle these types of questions without any wait time at all.

The technology is relatively new, but it's already proven itself as a way for businesses to interact with their customers in a more efficient way than ever before. And as more businesses adopt chatbots, we'll see more and more customers expecting them everywhere—including your business!

Below, we'll look at how businesses like Dominos, University of Auckland, and Telstra have used chatbots for their own business purposes. If you're thinking about using a chatbot to engage with your customers or improve your business processes, these examples will give you some inspiration and ideas.

1. Dominos

With so many ways to order food, creating an ordering system with the lowest friction gives businesses an edge over the competition. With Dominos' Facebook Messenger chatbot, customers can place an order in just a few seconds—and get updates on delivery progress as it happens.

The bot uses artificial intelligence to remember previous orders, which means you never have to type in your address, contact details, or even your order again!

2. HLC

When you’re in the business of making customer support a priority, you have to be able to answer your customers—and they’ll never stop asking questions.

HLC, a leading distributor of bicycle parts, was looking for a live chat solution that would help them better categorize customer support requests, provide online support for an extensive and highly technical product line, add more customer communication channels beyond phone and email, and solve technical issues and answer product/shipping questions in real-time.

Since implementing Acquire Live Chat, HLC has achieved a nearly 100-percent live chat response rate, onboarded new hires quickly, and gained greater operational visibility into business and product issues.

3. Glasses USA

The Glasses USA chatbot streamlines the process of ordering glasses online - a task that has historically been limited to in-store shopping experiences. It can help you determine what style of glasses would best fit your face, and it can also give you an estimate on how much your new frames will cost. The chatbot has recommended questions to get you started, and can help guide customers through returns, insurance claims, and more.

4. ACCES Employment

Over the past few years, ACCES has been developing a new virtual employment and resource assistant to help them address the growing demand for their services. After development was complete, ACCES named the agent VERA—an acronym for Virtual Employment and Resource Attendant.

VERA addresses multiple areas of service, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without human intervention. She can answer FAQs for jobseekers, employers and volunteers; refer users to specific ACCES programs and services; facilitate registration of users into workshops and events that match their interests; surface direct links to job-search resources such as resume templates, articles, videos and web content; automate email flows to jobseekers; support registered clients; populate Salesforce CRM with user profiles for staff to pursue as leads; increase capacity to assist jobseekers.

5. Telstra

To better serve its 28,000+ employees, Telstra sought a smarter way to manage internal queries and self-service functionality. The result is Darcy, a virtual assistant that helps Telstra employees with their HR queries, such as ‘How can I check my vacation hours?’.

Darcy can walk the user through a series of questions and answers, refining the initial query and moving closer toward a satisfactory answer. If Darcy can’t answer the query directly, it can pull up relevant content from a knowledge base. Failing that, if Darcy cannot resolve a query or if it is sensitive in nature, it will hand off to an appropriate human agent within HR.

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6. University of Auckland

Driven by a need to respond to spikes in activity around exams and enrolment, we built a bespoke AI chatbot for the University of Auckland using IBM Watson's powerful NLP platform. The result? Faster resolution times, and greater capacity for the Student Centre team to respond to more complex issues.

By integrating the University of Auckland chatbot with student systems, the university is able to offer immediate answers tailored to individual students, as well as providing enrolment information and assisting them with administrative tasks.

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7. The Dufresne Group

In the wake of COVID-19, The Dufresne Group —a premier Canadian home furnishing retailer— needed to adapt. No longer could they sell furniture the old way; they needed a new platform that would allow customers to connect with them wherever they were, all while still providing exceptional customer service when they needed it most.

They realized that the best way to solve this problem would be by using a live chat platform like Acquire (a company which provides live chat, cobrowsing, and chatbots). With this technology in place, customers can shop from the comfort of their home through video tours of furniture, or have basic questions covered by their 24 hour chatbot that can capture contact information even when the team is out of office.

8. DEWbot

As the world of streaming continues to grow, so does the need for brands to find new and innovative ways to engage with their audiences. For Mountain Dew, this meant creating a fully customised chatbot that could be integrated with their Twitch channel – the first-ever branded chatbot on the platform.

DEWbot is a chatbot that engages with the Twitch community in real time and collects data to provide insights previously unavailable from the platform.

The result? A 550% increase in in-stream conversation during the promotion; a 265% increase in Mtn Dew Twitch fans; 572% increase in channel engagement; 190K unique in-stream viewers; 11.6K hours of branded content watched; 1,270% increase in the Average Viewers Per Stream benchmark; 48 influencers called out with 86K estimated total views.

9. Southern Cross Health Insurance

Aimee is a Digital Human we built on top of UneeQ's digital human platform. Aimee is trained to recognise the most popular questions that are asked in the insurance industry and give an appropriate answer, reducing waiting time for customers calling into the call centre. She is also able to remember what she’s told each customer so that she can respond with more personalised information next time they contact her.

The outcome? In only 3 months, Aimee had 7000 conversations with customers and achieved 95% customer satisfaction!

9. Arvee

Contact centre traffic and volume soared during the early days of the pandemic at Camping World. There were more glaring gaps in agent management and response times than ever before.

The solution? Arvee: Camping World’s virtual assistant.

Following the implementation, customer engagement rates have trended upwards significantly, and the number of dropped conversations has decreased. Customers are experiencing shorter wait times and faster responses, with live agents’ ability to handle multiple simultaneous chats increasing their overall efficiency by 33%. As of March 2022, customer engagement increased by 40% and Camping World saw wait times drop down to 33 seconds.

10. Cleverbot

Cleverbot is a conversational AI that allows you to converse with your computer. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to mimic human conversation and learns from interactions with users.

You can talk to Cleverbot about anything you want! You can ask it questions about the weather, politics, or even what it thinks of your favourite TV show.

12. Virtual City Ambassador For Chicago

The COVID 19 pandemic greatly impacted the tourism industry, and Choose Chicago had to work double time to encourage visitors to come back to the city by marketing all of the amazing things it has going on right now.

What better way to encourage people to visit than by showing them what they can expect when they get here? That's why Choose Chicago turned their attention toward digital solutions like chatbots.

The Bean is an AI-chatbot that helps answer visitors’ questions, suggest new places and events, and serves as a virtual ambassador of Chicago. The Bean can understand when you ask it about Chicago neighborhoods, where to eat, attractions, breweries, events, celebrities, and much more. The Bean covers 63 topics, and has logged 139,000 users between August 2021 to September 2022.

Chatbots can be used to automate anything. Providing 24/7 support where it was previously impossible or too expensive is a big win for businesses, and while the technology is not yet perfect, the benefits are clear: companies now have a new, innovative way to interact with their customers, and chatbots promise to change customer service forever.

If you’re interested in learning more about conversational AI and how it can be used to improve your business, check out our Conversational AI White Paper. If you have an idea for a virtual assistant that you’d like to discuss with an expert, get in touch with our team here.