virtual agents

COVID-19 and its associated containment measures are accelerating digital transformation and automation in financial services. Customer service has been under enormous pressure, and financial services firms such as Nationwide Building Society in the UK and the Royal Bank of Canada have launched chatbots to deal with the unusually high volume of requests. However, digital teams […]

Forrester's latest research finds future of banking will be invisible, connected, insights-driven, and purposeful. Analysts Jacob Morgan and Alyson Clarke break it all down.

(With Julie Ask) Last week, Samsung hosted its annual Developer Conference in San Jose, California. Developers sampled the company’s latest offerings for mobile app and web development, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence. Forrester clients may not be familiar with Samsung’s intelligent agent Bixby, but it’s primed to put other better-known agents such as […]

Chatbots rely on natural language processing (NLP) to understand you. Before they can process a language, they must learn it. Read more.

The advertising headwinds have been gathering. The $7.4B lost to bad ads. The chronic underperformance. Major firms pulling millions from media budgets. Consumers actively avoiding ads. And yet the interruptions continue. There are bright spots: great storytelling from some brands, better channel orchestration, and the pragmatic application of programmatic. Advertising fueled the remarkable rise of […]

So this makes it official: the rite of passage for every new analyst. My first research report, How Self-Service Research Changes B2B Marketing, has just been published. I covered the premise of this report in my first blog post — but I’ll summarize it here again: multiple Forrester surveys have shown that B2B buyers strongly […]

What do Aetna, the US Army, L’Oreal, and the London 2012 Olympic Games have in common? Each of these diverse organizations has deployed a virtual agent. Virtual agents are software services that provide automated assistance by simulating a two-way conversation with customers. And they have come a long way from Clippy the dancing paper clip. […]

Not all companies that offer a virtual agent elect to have an avatar. However, many companies choose to make cartoon, 2D or 3D renderings of a human to personalize the experience, support the brand, and reinforce the conversational nature of the interaction.  But what should an avatar look like? Here are some considerations for eBusiness professionals […]

One of the questions I'm frequently asked by clients is if virtual agents are a good idea. Many of us have had frustrating interactive agent experiences over the years (recall Clippy, Microsoft’s animated paperclip that launched a thousand parodies). Times have changed, and I think virtual agents are worth taking a look at. Today’s virtual agents can […]

I was speaking with clients today about their views on telephone customer service. One believed that his customers liked calling the call center to solve problems with a “human touch.” His colleague countered that telephone customer service is simply too expensive to be giving away that “human touch.” I think they are both correct. And […]