Key Checks Before You Choose Your Virtual Assistant

Published in

Chatbots Life

5 min readAug 23, 2021

A virtual assistant takes care of tasks that are important in many areas of business. That could be both technical and also non-technical aspects. Many organizations have been recruiting virtual assistants for many years. However, with an advancement of technology particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence personal assistants have been effective and efficient enough to be brought into the business.

However, choosing the perfect virtual assistant that suits exactly your needs is still hard. There are a lot of options to choose from and a lot of considerations to make.

In this article, let us discuss all key checks before you choose and answer the questions like which is the best AI assistant? So that you can decide on which virtual assistant to use.

Your Needs vs its Capabilities

It is never an understatement to say that you need your needs identified before you can choose anything. It can be hard, but the payoffs it gives are worth it.

This is important because not all automated virtual assistants are the same and each has its capabilities and limitations.

So, first, try to identify all of your needs before you begin searching for a chatbot virtual assistant. This actually is part of an initial investment you do in automated virtual assistants. The other part is in the actual integration of it in your tasks through an initial setup and learning curve.

While a perfect answer is desirable, it may not be possible for you. Even a high-level understanding of your needs would be certainly helpful.

Also, while doing these, it is advisable to write your needs in priority order. This is because the final decision would depend on a lot of other factors and if all do not reach the optimum level, like budget not being sufficient, you may need to sacrifice certain low priority features for high priority ones.

After you get a rough idea regarding your needs, check the capabilities of a particular virtual assistant. You may not be able to completely understand how a particular assistant software works, in that case, ask for a demo and most likely an organization would provide a live demo for the software in which you can ask and clarify all doubts.

If the capabilities of virtual assistants match that of your needs, then you can get it right away!

Flexibility

While we stress identifying your requirements, it might not be possible and also, your requirements change depending on your situation and you may want different capabilities in the future.

The automated virtual assistant solution you take must not only satisfy your current needs but needs to be flexible enough so as to accommodate your future changes effectively and efficiently.

Ease of Use

Not only must the personal assistant satisfy all your needs, but it must also do so in a way that is easy for you to use. There are two ways to think about ease of use: initial learning curve and general user experience. A combination of them will let us understand the ease of use of an application. It is highly good if an initial learning curve is less and the general user experience is great. But, if the user experience is great but requires a high initial learning curve you can give it a shot considering your current context.

If neither learning curve nor user experience is on great terms, then the tool might not be worth it.

Integration

In this digital world, you would have your workspace smeared across multiple channels. In order to effectively work for you and your organization, your online personal assistant must be able to integrate into all important channels and gather or put data into these channels.

So, make sure that an AI virtual assistant you choose has a lot of integrations in all the channels you work in.

Price

Your organization might or might not have a huge budget to spare for obtaining automated virtual assistants. So, seeing the pricing of an online virtual assistant is important.

Quite usually, platforms would have several plans that are tailored to different needs and also, include a free tier or at least a trial plan for some time that lets you completely test it and see it in action.

Also, if you find that all of their plans are not suited for your particular need, most of the organizations would help you to create a customized plan that works best for you!

Security

Your personal assistant knows a lot about you and the security of data must be of paramount importance.

Try to understand how a particular platform secures your data. Typically, you need complete encryption of data and secure ways for accessing it.

Also, completely study their terms and conditions of usage, especially privacy policy so that you would have an idea as to what they would do with your data. Most likely, the software would use your data for improving their virtual assistant algorithm, and only use this data anonymously, that is, without including information that could identify you.

Customer Support

While using a virtual IT assistant, you could be running into certain problems that can easily and sometimes, only be solved by a representative of the organization. That is, you need effective and timely customer service.

So, make sure that an organization provides essential customer service operations like Live chat, ticketing system, and others. Studying reviews about products especially in the area of customer service would help to get an understanding of this aspect.

Once you get confirmation that customer support is great, you can be without any worries about future problems.

Final Words

As much as automated virtual assistants can help you, they can only do so if their capabilities are highly appropriate for your requirement. By considering and analyzing all-important checks like understanding your needs vs their capabilities, flexibility, integrations, and others, you can make an informed decision as to what artificial intelligence personal assistant to take.

So, follow them and improve your productivity exponentially!