How To supercharge operations efficiency with an enterprise virtual assistant

The average enterprise manages over 350 Terabytes of data—seven times as much as a small business. With so much data, modern enterprises should seek creative and smart ways to manage the wealth of information they collect on a daily basis, while being mindful about important factors like compliance. With the help of AI and Machine Learning, an enterprise virtual assistant can tap into enterprise data and help augment common human processes across many departments, including finance, HR, and leadership. Below is a step by step guide to optimizing your infrastructure for virtual assistants, and specific use cases.

Infrastructure First

In order to properly deploy a virtual assistant across your enterprise, you must provide it with secure access to your data. Making your data easily accessible for queries and analysis can be done by storing it within a data lake, which supports and organizes all types of data, structured and unstructured. Modern, unified big data management platforms are built with these features in mind, to manage all stages of your data—ingestion, manipulation (such as copy/move), classification/metadata, governance, and analysis.

When all of your enterprise’s data is managed and easily accessible, an AI-based virtual assistant can quickly run queries and automate tasks in real time—so you can make sure your organization’s data is working the hardest it can for you, every day.

Identify Opportunities

Chances are, you have untapped, inactive data available to you that can help you streamline and improve your operations. The first step is to identify precisely where those opportunities are, and what kind of solution will help you meet your goals in that regard. These goals will likely vary from company to company, so I encourage you to really take stock of where your employees have had trouble, or where they’ve alerted C-level executives to their own personal pain points.

For example, if you’re on a sales team that is struggling to drive new business, a sales assistant can notify a salesperson to call specific leads they haven’t followed up with recently. A finance-focused assistant can access collections of financial data in order to give updates on details like payment statuses of customer accounts, or accelerate customer on-boarding by processing credit data quickly and automatically. Need a little HR help? An assistant can schedule interviews and training sessions, and generate reports of employee performance data to assist with job evaluations. In the healthcare field, an enterprise virtual assistant can flag important details in a patient’s medical history to aid and accelerate diagnostics and treatment. The list of industries in which assistants prove useful is nearly endless—the key is to augment and simplify, rather than replace, human tasks across your enterprise.

Enterprise Virtual Assistant: Prioritization is Key

Often, integration of an enterprise virtual assistant can free up huge swaths of the workload across your teams by simply taking the initiative to handle the more mundane day-to-day tasks like generating reports and analyzing insights. Determine exactly which tasks require the human ingenuity of your employees, and which ones can be delegated to be at least partially managed by an assistant. This could be anything from technical support to fielding customer questions to handling data analytics and reporting. By prioritizing the tasks your human teams should handle, you can simply assign the smaller stuff to an assistant—creating value for your customers, and saving precious time and mental load for your employees.

All Eyes on Compliance

Chatbots and assistants can also help with some of the more crucial challenges your enterprise encounters as well–simplifying them and prompting you to take action when necessary. As compliance remains a major issue facing enterprises—65% of organizations are still not confident that their GDPR data will stay within the EU—it’s important to know where your company stands on data protection. Virtual assistants can generate detailed compliance reports upon request for the specific regulations your business must adhere to while storing and utilizing customer data, follow the instructions and scripts to ensure compliance when new data is collected, and help suggest ways to better guard the sensitive information in your possession, so you can better serve your customers.

Regardless of your enterprise company’s needs or the industry you serve, it is important that professionals who handle copious amounts of data are constantly reaffirming their commitment to customers to provide them with the highest quality results possible. That means understanding and applying up-to-the-minute technology and solutions for data management that help your employees, your customers, and your stakeholders feel confident, protected, and satisfied.