Why You Need A Virtual Sales Agent For Your Company

Pros and Cons of Virtual Sales Agents
By Kevin S Collins

Every year more and more customers are turning to the Internet for online buying and getting customer support for products and services they have purchased from a website or a brick and mortar store. In order for businesses to stay ahead of their competition and reassure repeat customers they need to provide speedy and precise answers to patrons who are shopping on their website. If a shopper doesn't find answers to their inquiries they most likely will move on to your competitor. Staffing a live agent help-desk requires a lot of resources including office space, equipment, technology, employees and managers. Live operators require a lot of work and revenue just to get off started. The laborious task of interviewing, hiring, training, managing, scheduling and terminating your agents can be overwhelming especially for business owners. Most owners, directors and managers would get more out of their time if they were focused on growing their business.

However, there is an effective, easy-to-implement, quick, no risk resolution by adding virtual sales agents to your site. Virtual Sales Agents [VSA] use artificial intelligence and/or keyword based responses to quickly and effectively answer questions your customers may have in a chat environment. They can also be used to help boost your online conversions and increase your financial gains. One resourceful example of this is using a virtual sales agent to compel abandoned visitors back to your website and create "found" revenue. This technology is also one of the most successful retargeting / remarketing solutions available.

Virtual sales agents are the perfect fit offering low-cost, substantially scalable solutions that deliver your message and provide instant onsite help and guidance. Forrester Research recently did a study of North American patrons and found that 57% of them are likely to abandon an online purchase if they cannot find speedy answers to their inquiries. They also report that only 28% of US online consumers prefer to contact companies by phone or email rather than using a website ticket system to acquire answers.

Using VSA technology can boost conversions up to 25% and drop customer service costs by 25%. The virtual sales chat overcomes conventional road blocks to merchants looking for an increase in conversions. Most VSA solutions offer no setup costs or monthly fees and no additional man-hours are needed as your recovery campaigns are fully managed and optimized at no additional cost.

Below please find some of the pros and cons of utilizing virtual sales agents:

PROs:

• VSA works 24/7/365 never taking time off, a coffee break or vacation

• You control the messaging 100% - always precise and constant. No need worrying about what your live agents are saying

• No delay in answering questions. Often a live operator will be occupied with multiple customers.

• Significantly decrease customer support costs of live agents.

• Scalable - you have practically unlimited simultaneous chat sessions

• VSAs achieve greater insight into customer related demand, trends, and opportunities providing priceless feedback that is available in online reports 24/7.

• VSAs can maintain more consistent brand presentations and improved efforts to find, acquire and retain customers.

Well planned and implemented virtual sales agents can be used to handle preliminary contacts, deflect customers to the most cost efficient resource, support more full-bodied business intelligence and analytics efforts, and to improve both service value and overall shopper satisfaction.

CONs:

• preliminary setup - drafting and refining your agent scripts can take several hours.

• Virtual agents requires foreign code on your website, usually only a couple of lines of JavaScript.

• In extended conversations with customers, a user may understand they are not engaging a live operator.

• A virtual sales agent may not have answers for every question asked. However, most systems learn from unrecognized questions and over time improve the customer experience.

As you can see there is little downside to using virtual sales agents. Most of the work implementing a VSA is done up-front with a 'set-it and forget-it' approach. Although you'll still need to supervise a VSA campaign and optimize on a regular basis, the time required after implementation is negligible. If you have an inquiry regarding virtual sales agents or would like to see what is involved with testing please contact me.

We are one of the industry leaders and have a patent on our VSA recovery technology and will be more than happy to help you out. There are also other valuable uses of a virtual sales agent including the capability to cross-sell other products and services based on the users question. A virtual agent can also astutely provide an up-sell instrument and increase your average selling price.

Team Sales Agent utilizes patented Virtual Sales Agent technology

http://www.TeamSalesAgent.com

The Delfin Project, Inc.
7301 W Palmetto Park Rd
Boca Raton, FL 33433
561.361.7887 x1

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