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In this episode, we talk about Conversational Surveys and Transformation of E-commerce Sales.
Let’s face it, surveys are everywhere these days. There are the official ones used for market research. Then there are simple ones that ask about your recent shopping experience or how well a particular customer support call went. Many of these questions haven’t changed in decades. Are these surveys really making a difference in the overall Customer Experience (CX) or just wasting everyone’s time?
Defining what exactly constitutes a survey is not easy.
Ask anyone and they will be able to tell you what a survey is or looks like. Dig a little deeper and you will soon realize that surveys are also hard to define. Surveys can be 1 question or 100. They can also be serious or silly. In this episode we elected to discuss only online e-commerce surveys. We challenge preconceived notions on what those surveys are. Also, how they can also be considered a conversation with your customers.
Studies show that simply asking customers their opinion can increase their profitability over the long term. Other studies have shown that surveys also increase people’s awareness of a company’s products and thereby encourage future purchases and interactions. In this episode we also dive deep into the psychological reasons that just asking customers questions about your products and services (surveys) can increase sales.
Many marketers know surveys are good for business if done correctly.
Some store owners or marketers even know that surveys can increase sales, but many don’t know why. Considering many of the questions in the average survey are conversational questions. For example, asking “Did you find everything you were looking for” or “please rate your shopping experience” helps to explain how they can improve your brand by doing nothing more than asking the question.
New trends in the Consumer Experience reveal that there is an emerging conversational banking trend on the rise. Consumers are getting more and more accustomed to talking to automated machines to obtain information. In this episode we predict that soon many survey questions will become more automated, voice driven and conversational in the coming years. These conversations or surveys will be part of a larger sales assistant trend. And one that should work wonderfully based on human psychology to get us to open up and buy more
There is a reason it is illegal for marketers to try to sell you something in the guise of conducting marketing research (called “sugging”) – the Federal Trade Commission Act empowers the agency to investigate sugging. However, in the near future asking customers questions to try to sell them something is exactly what conversational surveys and sales assistants will be doing once Virtual Assistance starts using Voice and AI to interact with customers. Studies show Consumers prefer messaging platforms that have a voice and text-based interfaces.” Eventually this preference should work its way over to AI driven Sales assistance software.
It will take time for a Robotic AI Sales Assistance to catch on.
The same tricks that work now by simply surveying your customers, will have a major impact once Machine Learning kicks into high gear. Soon a Robotic AI Sales Assistance will use their interactions with humans to survey us and sell us better than any human sales assistant. It is not that humans can’t survey and sell, it is more that robots can do so better.
An AI driven sales assistant can be trained to recognize and then use dialects and local language so we lower our resistance to them. They can adjust their speech, focus, and actions to fit the human that they are interacting with. As humans we often miss subtle cues in a conversation. But an AI driven sales assistant might be trained to look for them, learn from them. Probably more importantly AI Virtual Assistants are active 24×7 and are easily scalable during busy times.
Each new technology breakthrough gets us closer to the inevitable. Soon AI driven Virtual Sales Assistants will become part of our accepted Online Customer Experience. Once that happens they will learn the simple trick of asking survey-like questions to hold conversations and a new era in online sales will begin.
Interested in implementing a custom shopping or e-commerce experience? We’re excited to hear about it!
