What’s a Virtual Agent? Use Cases, Value Add & Design Components

Virtual agents are a digital interface for people to interact with information. Virtual agents appear, most commonly, through a chat-based user interface (UI). They are digital replications of a guide at a museum, a librarian, or a help desk agent, for example, and often add personality to the company brand.

In terms of usefulness, virtual agents are less capable than an actual person, but more capable than a simple website. A single well-programmed virtual agent offers:

• Zero delay for users (No more waiting for the next available representative)
• Quick on-demand access to information (without reading through lots of web pages)

In this article, we’ll take a look at virtual agents, including:

• Use cases
• Benefits & value add
• Design best practices
• The role of AI

Common use cases for virtual agents

Virtual agents can be used to play host to any number of conversations from tour guide to doctor visits. The most common use cases, though, are in a company’s customer service or IT support/help desk departments.

For customer service, virtual agents can:

• Answer company questions
• Provide links to customer inquiries
• Get information from a customer about a purchase issue

For IT, virtual agents can:

• Help guide people through an issue they are having
• Create a ticket for what is going wrong and send it to the right IT team to tackle the issue
• Prioritize issues to help IT know which is most important to tackle first

In both use cases, customers and the business benefit. Virtual agents give customers quicker access to information because they don’t have to wait for an available representative. The company also doesn’t have to hire and maintain a large call center to take people’s requests.

Virtual agents add value

Virtual agents don’t just speed up requests and point to the right information. The best designed virtual agents can add value in their own right, particularly when it comes to:

• Data-driven decisions
• Acceptance of non-linear information

The great thing about virtual agents? Their ability to allow a company to make data-driven decisions with regard to the conversation it hosts. Companies have collected data in the past through human reporting and audio recording, but the information has been limited in quantity and due to human error.

Virtual agents, while possibly primitive at first, have the ability to give data without human error—and they can provide lots more data.

Domino’s was a company quick to adopt virtual agents and AI, where virtual agents provided an excellent way to use AI. Ordering a pizza checks the box on a few key principles that state if a virtual agent is good to use:

• Clear customer intent
• A fixed number of parameters to fill the order
• The order in which information is taken does not matter

First, people reach out to Domino’s most often to order a pizza. That is the customer’s intent.

Pizzas also have only a small set of parameters that need to be known by Domino’s—the information to collect. They need to know:

• What kind of pizza
• What toppings
• What size of pizza
• Delivery options

And, finally, it doesn’t matter in which order this information is given by the customer—it will all need to be known at some point.

Sure, an online form makes it possibly to gather all this information, but it requires that data in the same linear form, all at once. On the other hand, a virtual agent can accept the information in a non-linear way.

From a user experience (UX) perspective, it is great when an agent can accept non-linear information. The idea is that thoughts arrive to people at different times.

• For one person, the kind of pizza might be the most pressing thing on their mind when they are ordering and will be the first thing they wish to say.
• For another, the delivery time might be the most pressing thing and the first thing they wish to say.

While neither are necessarily the most important to processing the pizza order, a virtual agent that can accept non-linear information allows people to exist where they are at in time without insisting the person adopts the same linear sequence the form pushes forth.