[Steve L. Adams is president and CEO of virtual agent company VirtuOz.]

Businesses are increasingly turning to intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) —  computer-generated agents that can interact with customers online  – to lower customer service costs. CCM Benchmark predicts a 100 percent increase in IVA implementations in 2011, with that number skyrocketing to 400 percent by 2014.   

While social networks and self-service web sites already give customers new ways to talk to vendors and solve customer service issues, they often leave customers frustrated, isolated, and underwhelmed. IVAs, on the other hand, offer a highly responsive human-like interaction (see an AT&T IVA in action pictured below). They can handle easy-to-moderately complex inquiries, and –when trained appropriately — can handle highly technical questions in specialized areas, such as ecommerce, technical support and billing.

You can deploy IVAs on a web site or on a mobile app, and you can embed them into social media to hold conversations with customers, respond quickly and accurately to requests, guide customers to information or perform other tasks.

However, IVAs are not simply pixie dust that you sprinkle on a website to produce quality customer experiences at lower costs. Like most technologies, they require thoughtful deployment with a well-defined mission, a disciplined release process, and a focus on continuous improvement. Finally, they should be designed as a channel the consumer chooses naturally, not as a channel you force customers to choose. By avoiding common pitfalls, you can both please the consumer and save valuable resources. Here are 4 key best practices you’ll definitely want to follow:

1. Shampoo, rinse, and repeat. IVAs are brilliant in their ability to quickly handle customer inquiries. To be successful, however, an agent should have a well-defined mission — a specific set of inquiries that it can respond to quickly and intelligently.  Similar to customer service representatives, an IVA requires “training” and will get better with time. By limiting scope at the outset, training the agent, and learning how your customers want to engage with it, you will see great results faster. A high-performing IVA, like a high-performing employee, will take on more and more responsibility as it matures.

2. Promises to keep. Until recently, the market had a number of lightweight agents with limited capabilities — more “eye candy” than agents with mission critical skills, so consumers may be wary. Today’s agents are far more robust, but the best way to ensure success is to set customer expectations. The agent must make sure it can communicate clearly what it can and cannot do. IVAs should also add value, not simply parrot generic information already on a Web site. IVA content must be well-written, thoughtfully developed and optimized; and personalized responses will avoid evoking the nightmare of customer service reps reading from a script.

3. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Humans are still part of the equation. An IVA is best when deployed in concert with human-assisted channels.  Ultimately, consumers will make requests that the IVA is not trained to answer. In such instances, an IVA can detect when a consumer has exhausted its skills and pass along a transcript of the conversation to a human who seamlessly picks up the conversation, adds value and drives the engagement to resolution.

4. When a tree falls in the forest. A common pitfall of IVA deployments is focusing on agent responses with limited-to-no focus on listening to customers. Thousands of conversations with your IVA capture the “voice of the customer” in a way that is equaled only by social media. A good IVA deployment will include analytics that allow you to hear what your customer is interested in, understand consumer behavior, and filter out noise so that you can respond to cogent issues. In fact, appropriately implemented, a virtual agent can even respond to the most meaningful exchanges in your social media.

Well-deployed virtual agents can make a real difference to your bottom line. But it’s critical to remember the end goal: You want IVAs to help you get closer to your customers, not to distance yourself from them.