Intelligent Virtual Assistants: Improving, But Still Not AI

It was just the latest move in the growing self-service customer experience space. "Consumers can begin a conversation through self-service, and complete the transaction with a live chat agent who has context of the previous conversation," said Scott Horn, chief marketing officer of [24]7. "The ability to use channels interchangeably, pick up where they left off, and never have to start over, results in a superior customer experience." These investments range from omnichannel support to data tagging to intent prediction, said Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting and author of the recent, "2017 Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) Product and Marketing Report" (fee charged). The list of technologies in which these companies are investing money is a long one she said, a list which also includes better content generation, task management and auto content generation among others.