Virtual assistant: Help you in a few clicks!

Marketing automation has an increasingly prominent place in marketers' online strategies. In fact, with the rise of chatbots, artificial intelligence and other automated contact capabilities, Gartner expects that by 2020, 85% of all relationship management will be done without talking to a human. We too see virtual assistants being used more and more. Take a look at the capabilities of Google Assistant, Alexa or Siri, but also websites of various companies are increasingly deploying virtual assistants. Will your customers and leads soon be assisted virtually as well?

What is a virtual assistant?

Virtual assistants can be thought of as a personal assistant, but digitally. Virtual assistants make your life and that of your customers easier. With Google Assistant or Siri, you already see this reflected in the form of turning the light on and off, turning the heater warmer, looking up recipes and so on. The possibilities are endless and now you, as a business, can take advantage of them too.

Chatbot and navigation in one

You can, for example, deploy a virtual assistant on your website to help customers more easily through their customer journey. For example, you can ask them what they are looking for and thus direct them to the right page with just a few clicks. If the visitor still doesn't get there in the end, you can also easily link a built-in chat or e.g. WhatsApp to this virtual assistant. Then a 'real' employee takes over the conversation.

Remove obstacles and increase conversions

Marketing automation is about removing obstacles for your website visitors. This makes it easier for them to perform the most important action, such as making an enquiry, making an online purchase or finding more information. With a virtual assistant, you can help them with this. Namely, you can send the visitor faster to that page where conversion is possible or make them leave their contact details to download a necessary PDF, for example. The contact details are then automatically added to a marketing automation software like MailChimp, HubSpot or your CRM package. This allows you to retarget this person or provide them with the right information in the form of a newsletter, for example.

Hooghoudt's virtual assistant

As you read, virtual assistants can ultimately help you get higher conversions. Want to know what this virtual assistant could look like? For Hooghoudt, we also built a virtual assistant to help their visitors navigate through the website. Hooghoudt tries to give this virtual assistant a personal touch by showing their host Laurens and by asking different questions. This way, virtual assistant Laurens can help you find information, the address and even cocktail inspiration in just a few clicks! Because Hooghoudt can fully manage this virtual assistant itself, content can easily be adjusted, added or removed and the assistant can be added to any page. This way, the virtual assistant continues to help where their customers need it and can be constantly updated.