Gartner Identifies Five Challenges to Growth and Adoption for Virtual Customers

Customer Service and Support Leaders Must Understand Implications of Virtual Customers on the Enterprise

STAMFORD, Conn., Jun. 12, 2019 – 

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT)-connected devices and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled virtual personal assistants (VPAs) gives rise to a new way to serve customers and a new, virtual customer to serve. However, five challenges to growth and adoption must be overcome before this emerging trend becomes reality, according to Gartner, Inc.

"We are still several years away from creating autonomous virtual customers that can function with minimal human intervention," said Tiffany Fountain, vice president and team manager at Gartner. "However, existing capabilities suggest virtual customers will become a greater presence in purchase and service activities. Before this becomes reality, customer service and support leaders must understand how these virtual customers behave and what implications they may have for the enterprise."

Before intelligent virtual customers are developed and deployed at scale, the following five challenges to growth and adoption will need to be addressed by customer service and support leaders:

There are two key domains of knowledge that must be mastered for a virtual customer to be truly autonomous and a realistic substitute for a human customer: the depth of a customer's preferences and the breadth of factors that may influence a customer's actions. Without each, the virtual customer is unable to navigate required trade-offs. Another challenge is machine-to-machine communication. These system compatibility issues will slow the pace of deployment and acceptance with virtual customers.