Virtual Executive Assistant (VEA)
Employees who use VPAs do so in order to maintain a flow of official data to company systems. In fact, IDC analyst David Schubmehl reports that by 2019, 75% of workers who use enterprise applications for daily tasks will involve intelligent Virtual Assistants to augment their skills and expertise.
Virtual Customer Assistant (VCA)
The Virtual Assistants used to support end customers are called Virtual Customer Agents (VCA). A VCA is a software robot deployed in the enterprise cloud and constitutes a fully independent, virtual employee: it has its own employee ID, name, email ID, phone number, instant messenger, and behaves exactly like a human employee. Customers can communicate with the VCA through email, chat (IM) or voice call. VCAs use either a voicebot or a chatbot to communicate with the customer. A Voicebot is a speech recognition system and chatbots are NLP-enabled systems that use instant messenger chat as the main channel of communication. IPSoft reports that they have implemented their virtual agent Amelia in the Nordic bank SEB for IT service desk support and leverages their knowledge base by successfully supporting select IT operations and answering questions such as “How do I order remote access?”
The following table shows a comparison of VPA, VEA and VCA
|
SNO |
Particulars |
VPA |
VEA |
VCA |
| 1 | Location of Installation | Personal Device of the Individual | Official Device of the Employee | Enterprise Cloud |
| 2 | Communications | Uses the personal email ID, chat, mobile | Uses the official email, phone, and chat of the employee | VCA has a email ID, phone extension number, mobile number, IM like a real employee |
| 3 | Local Resource | Personal Device | Company ERP and other knowledge base | Company ERP and other knowledge base |
| 4 | Public resource | Internet | Internet | Internet |
| 5 | Technologies | Speech Recognition | Speech Recognition | Chat bot (NLP)
Voice bot (Speech Recognition) Human Empathy Machine Learning |