Navigating Digital Marketplace with an Augmented Workforce

The digital market is noisy; it’s not easy to be heard or stay visible. When you’re there, you’re competing against everyone with a similar product. To be noticed by the digital buyer, you must be creative, shiny, attractive and well-known. And, when you’re found, you must make every effort to convince prospective customers to choose you.

Looks like a physical marketplace — but the buyers’ behavior is completely different there. Customers are even not always physically present. There may be an “Algorithmic Buyer” to represent them and/or act on behalf of them.

In the digital marketplace, customers appear when they want to and spend only a couple of minutes or seconds at your marketplace. Then they disappear without a trace. They’re often faceless, unknown and search through your stock without giving any hint of who they are, where they come from, what they want and show any preference about how they want you to interact with them.

The Physical Vs. Digital Buyer

Imagine that you have a very well-located physical shop in the middle of Main Street; you have five professional salespeople working for you and your stock is full of a variety of excellent products. As a store owner, you’re proud of this close-to-ideal situation in the physical marketplace, right? But this is nothing like the digital world.

Digital buyers are fundamentally different. They behave differently. And they have very different expectations. They want to buy something whenever they want—no matter your store hours. Sometimes you’ll have two or three customers visit your shop; the next minute, you have 200 customers visiting—and all of them want to buy different things at the same time. Others are just browsing or comparison shopping, but not ready to buy. And a few customers want to buy something urgently, but all your resources are busy.

The digital buyer expects that you:

• Are always open and always listen (and you focus only on them)
• Have unlimited stock
• Have unlimited resources available all the time
• Can give them immediate support whenever they need it
• Are accessible through any device, and any channel, at any time
• Know who they are and can predict what they want—without asking
• Expect a fully personalized shopping experience, without having to show you a photo ID

This is a challenge (and sometimes downright impossible) if you try to meet these demands with existing tools meant for physical buyers. But to meet these demands—at any time without a lot of effort—you must be as digital as they are.

The Rise of the Digitally Augmented Workforce

One way to meet the demands of the digital buyer is to establish a seamless and fully automated cooperation between your physical and digital resources so that at least part of your workforce is always on duty. Unattended bots can always listen, recognize and capture the event whenever someone enters your digital marketplace. They can analyze customer behaviors, along with their entire buying journeys, and figure out what they should offer. They also can determine how and when to maximize the chance of selling based on predicted outcomes.

Bots offer several advantages for dealing with a digital buyer. They can detect when a human touch is needed; adapt behaviors and switch to attended mode, when needed, so they assist a human with proactive advice to lead the conversation more effectively; and they can take over the interaction at a certain point when it makes sense.

A digitally augmented “no-collar“ workforce can also handle millions of individual interactions and all associated requests in a hyper-personalized, cost-effective way. In addition, intelligent automation can double conversion rates by capturing every sales opportunity and assigning the best-fit human or bot for customers at the perfect time.

And, your CEO might be most interested to know that you can gain over 40% lead conversion at less than 60% the cost per lead. If all of this interest you, then it’s time to see how your customers can benefit from our digital sales support solutions.

Read this brief to learn how to use chatbots and voicebots in your contact center to better serve the digital buyer.