What are Intelligent Virtual Assistants? Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) are essentially chatbots that use either pre-determined rules or natural language processing and predictive analytics to assist salespeople, customer success, customer service, and marketing departments. They can help reps or agents perform tasks like lead qualification, meetings scheduling, data entry, pipeline management, pre and post-event outreach, etc. These types of platforms are also often called AI sales ...
We’ve collected videos, features, and capabilities below. Take me there.
Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) are essentially chatbots that use either pre-determined rules or natural language processing and predictive analytics to assist salespeople, customer success, customer service, and marketing departments. They can help reps or agents perform tasks like lead qualification, meetings scheduling, data entry, pipeline management, pre and post-event outreach, etc. These types of platforms are also often called AI sales assistants, AI virtual assistants, or virtual assistant software.
These platforms are designed to help customer-facing departments be more productive by streamlining, automating, and/or optimizing different parts of the sales and marketing funnel. A primary goal of IVA software is to help increase a company’s revenue by increasing its capacity, without needing to hire more employees.
Some products in this category, including Conversica, x.ai, Saleswhale, Amplemarket, and Drift, interface with prospective customers directly, using AI-based chatbots to follow up on inbound leads, answer basic questions, and schedule meetings. These virtual sales assistants send emails or respond to live chat messages according to rules defined by the user's sales organization, similar to the job an inbound SDR/BDR might do. Some of these vendors offer intelligent virtual assistant software for other departments too, like marketing and customer success.
Products like Edward, Cien, Zoho Zia, Tact, and Troops, on the other hand, provide internal assistance to sales reps and managers. They're focused on productivity and optimal performance—things like reminders, automated data entry, pipeline insights, forecasting, etc. Typically they interact with salespeople through email, a chat interface, or push messages.
Most intelligent assistants will include the following capabilities:
Before deciding to purchase an intelligent virtual assistant platform, consider the following key factors:
Pricing for intelligent virtual assistant software can vary from product to product. Though most vendors charge on a monthly or annual subscription basis. Products can range from $10 per month per user/seat up to $100 per month per user/seat.
Many vendors don’t openly disclose pricing information on their website but will provide a quote upon request.
Intelligent virtual assistants, or IVAs, can be used for a wide range of activities across different departments. For example, sales development teams can use them to help collect information about leads, qualify leads, and automate booking meetings with new prospects.
These tools can also be used by marketing and customer support teams to help answer questions from customers and web visitors, share content or links to other resources, and provide teams with a unified inbox for responding to requests.
According to feedback from end-users on TrustRadius, the top-rated intelligent virtual assistants are:
You can find more information about the intelligent virtual assistant software page and a list of alternative products here.