Technology selection | Persona design | Avatar creation | Integration | Implementation | Optimisation
SOLUTION
A digital human is an avatar capable of showing facial expressions and body language, focused on emotion and empathy. Running on top of conversational systems like chatbots, digital humans can respond in an appropriate non-verbal way that is aligned with the topic and sentiment of the conversation.
This makes Digital Humans a very powerful tool that open up an additional layer of emotional connection with your customers. This emotional connection allows you to influence the most important part of communication that cannot be achieved with words alone. The feeling and trust that are created will enhance the effectiveness of a dialog and enables you to leave an unprecedented impression of your brand, leading to higher sales and loyalty.
This customer experience goes far beyond what text-based systems can do and deeply touches on empathy and providing an authentic experience. People will feel less lonely when interacting with a digital human, or better understood, or are more easily persuaded, depending on their situation.
There is a high level of freedom to decide how your Digital Human will look. Things like gender, ethnicity, hair and eyes can often be modified while using an existing model, or you can build your digital human from scratch. Digital Humans are leveraging an underlaying conversational platform for Natural Language Understanding, Speech to Text and Text to Speech. This can be your existing solution like Google Dialogflow, AWS, Nuance Mix, Microsoft, or any preferred combination.
An example of how a photorealistic Digital Human can look, sound and behave is shown in this explainer video.
BENEFITS
Using a digital Human in your communication with customers has a few clear benefits that apply to every situation.
By adding emotions and gestures, Digital Humans leave an impression instead of sharing an expression.
Only 7% of our communication is made up of the words we say, The other 93% consists of our tone of voice and body language. Digital Humans solely focus on this 93%, making them far more effective compared to text or voice only communication, because they can make a true connection and emotionally touch your customers.
From: ‘Silent Messages’ by Albert Mehrabian
Digital Humans change communication with you customers from effective into affective.
When describing Digital Humans you will often hear words like empathy, animation, emotion, engaging, react to environment, soul of a brand, personality etc. I’ll bet you have never heard these words in relation to the existing systems like virtual assistants, voicebots and smart speakers. Imagine all this is within control when using a Digital Human.
Let your customers speak to some-one instead of some-thing.
By adding a Digital Human to your chatbot conversations, you offer your customers the chance to talk to some-one instead of to some-thing. It goes without saying that people treat someone different than they treat something. This means you can expect higher engagement rates, new audiences that are attracted to this ‘some-one’, increased trust in the answers the Digital Human provides and overall improved customer satisfaction.
Increased NPS will turn detractors into promotors of your brand.
This figure shows the percentage consumers (white) who are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. This proves that an outstanding experience drives customer loyalty and NPS. Digital Humans strongly contribute to a positive experience as they offer conversations that are far more engaging and appealing.
From: ‘Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right ’ by PwC
CHANNELS
The most obvious use cases for Digital Humans will be on websites and in mobile apps,
but also in other situations you will be able to successfully deploy a Digital Human for a whole different customer experience.
USE CASES
Digital Humans can add value in many different situations and use cases. The examples we describe here, are the cases where we currently see a lot of deployments and interest.
Customer Service
Make chatbot and voicebot interactions with your customers hyper personal by using a Digital Human as an additional modality in your conversational strategy. Conversations about high impact customer journeys like handling complaints or important life events like buying a new house can be far more engaging and empathic if a Digital Human drives those conversations versus filling out an online complaint form or a text-only chatbot that wants to know all kind of financial details for your mortgage. Give your brand a soul and let your customers feel they are important and valued.
Healthcare
Digital Humans are the perfect add-on in e-Health solutions. From advice and Q&A about your medication, to helping with post-surgery exercises, sharing information about surgeries or other treatments, proving pro-active reminders for daily routines or just being a buddy. With a Digital Human assisting in the repetitive communication with patients, they will feel more comfortable, more heard, less judged and better helped while the actual doctor can focus on his main tasks. The number of patients will increase, but the number of doctors will not. Digital Humans are ready to fill that gap.
Virtual Host
Whether in a retail store, hotel lobby, branch of a bank, an airport or train station, a Digital Human can be a perfect host to welcome your customers. They can help them out with their first an urgent questions and then hand-over to a human in case that is still required. Talking, touching or typing and even using your customer’s gestures and presence can be triggers for a Digital Host to start a conversation.
Brand Ambassador
Give your brand a face on LinkedIn, Instagram or any other channel where you want to reach you customers. Using a virtual Brand Ambassador or Virtual Influencer provides you with endless possibilities for storytelling, prevents your company from the bad publicity of real influencers and builds a consistent approach to the market as your virtual influencer is also the Digital Human on your website, at your head quarter’s reception etc.
IMPLEMENTATION
No two projects are the same, but this timeline will give you an overview of what to expect when implementing a Digital Human.
Goals
Define what you want to achieve by implementing a digital human and when this is considered successful. The goal always determines the journey, so take your time for this first step.
Scope
In this phase you choose the use cases you want to start with, including language(s), channels (website, mobile, kiosk, etc.) and input methodes (voice, text, touch)
Design
The fun part! During a persona workshop you can design your Digital Human’s appearance and personality. Male or female, skin, eyes, hair, clothes, voice, tone of voice and many more details are configurable.
Conversations
Connect the Digital Human to your conversational platform of choice and start writing the conversations and animations controls so the Digital Human will smile, frown, wink or laugh.
Integrate
It is time to deploy the Digital Human. This can usually be done by only adding a few lines of code. Your Digital Humane is now accessible for your audience!
Improve
Improve your Digital Human’s behaviour and animations. Based on analytics data your Digital Human will become better over time to make sure it still aligns with your goals as defined in step 1.
Animation Studio
STUDIO
Virtually Human has developed an animation studio allowing our customers to easily add animations to the content they have set up in their conversational system and to experiment with different Digital Humans. Based on intuitive buttons and easy to use sliders, they can generate the SSML code required to control the animations of the Digital Human from the conversational AI platform.
The animation studio also acts as a sandbox where you can test your conversations, including tuning the prosody of your text to speech prompts in any language. Please fill out the form at the bottom of this website to request access. You will find the animation studio at:
