As customers continue to increase their demand for a personalized customer experience, many brands are struggling to keep up, occasionally causing customer service to slip to suboptimal levels. In response, more and more companies are moving to virtual assistant programs; AI programs that can respond to customers and provide support, information, and other services that would otherwise be covered by organization representatives.
While these systems sound futuristic, they’re becoming ever more present in our everyday lives, even today. A new report out of Global Market Insights predicts that the global Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) will continue to grow at a rapid pace of nearly 35 percent through 2024, eventually reaching an estimated value of over $11 billion.
The report notes that the catalyst for this growth is the growing desire for a streamlined, seamless customer experience that enables brands to build loyalty as a result.
Organizations are already making use of the technology today; Dominos, ING Bank, and JetStar are all utilizing some form of IVA to engage customers and provide support over multiple channels.
Also, key to the growth of the market is the ability for an IVA to personalize the customer experience. Achieving 1:1 CX is the goal for companies across the globe, many of whom viewed it as unobtainable through the use of a virtual assistant. Thanks to advances in capability, these programs can now provide customized experiences based on customer information, preferences, and inquiries.
As IVAs like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana have proven, voice recognition software is here to stay and is only improving. This technology opens countless doors for IVAs as a whole, especially as natural language understanding continues to forge ahead. Because of this, speech recognition is expected to grow at an even higher rate (37 percent) over the forecasted span, driven specifically by demand in the medical and automotive verticals.
Chances are, almost every consumer has encountered an IVA at some point while shopping. If this Global Market Insights data is to be believed, these virtual assistants are only going to become more prominent in the future, decreasing operational costs and improving customer experience for brands that can remain in front of the trend.
