Are you struggling to hire sales staff? The current job market is unlike anything we’ve seen in the past two decades. The U.S. unemployment rate remains below four percent. That means power is squarely in the hands of jobseekers. According to a recent CNBC report, the 11.4 million job openings in April is almost twice the number of unemployed jobseekers. As a result, a record 4.4 million voluntarily quit their job for better opportunities over the past year.
In this environment, hiring the right people to fill open roles has become an increasingly difficult proposition. More companies are competing for an increasingly limited pool of workers. Those workers can pick and choose the best opportunities for them based on new and emerging perks, like remote work opportunities.
Unfortunately, this boon for workers has had potentially significant negative implications for both organizations and their customers. Increases in staff turnover have made it more difficult for companies to offer the expert help their customers expect. In fact, Forrester Research found that in 2022, brands have experienced a 19 percent decrease in customer experience quality.
Filling the Hiring Gap
Filling that gap requires expertise and institutional knowledge. But we’re in an environment where finding qualified applicants is becoming more challenging and where those employees turn over more quickly. As a result, the solution can be difficult to grasp.
That’s where digital assistants can enter the equation. Join us for an exploration of this new technology. You might be surprised to learn it has the potential to augment the sales and customer-facing staff you’re struggling to hire.
The Basics of Digital Assistants in Sales
At its core, the concept behind a digital assistant is simple. It creates an audience-facing ‘front door’ for the business, answering initial questions and making initial product pitches in ways that cold calls might not be able to. Text messages, social media, and web chat are emerging as important sales communications channels, and they can all effectively be staffed by this technology.
In short, digital assistants can integrate into text-based outreach channels to take the burden off human sales staff. Especially repeated and routine questions can be answered instantly, while more personalized and custom requests can reroute to the more limited human staff for individualized attention.
5 Key Benefits of Digital Assistants in Sales Positions
Put simply, an effective digital assistant (when implemented the right way) can go a long way toward solving the challenge of hiring and retaining employees in a job market as competitive as this one. They can handle much of the functions these job openings would otherwise take on, with a few comparative advantages that are important to keep in mind:
Digital Assistants Vs. Hiring Sales Staff
- Constant availability: 24 hours per day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year. In other words, your sales communications will no longer be limited by business hours. Instead, you can rest easy knowing that the setup allows for instant responses regardless of the day and hour.
- Multi-language capabilities: This is especially relevant for companies looking to expand their market or reach multilingual audiences. Digital assistants can switch seamlessly between languages to create a better experience for potential customers. They can converse in the prospect’s native or preferred language.
- A single source of truth: These “truths” are housed in the database from which the digital assistant draws its answers. Misunderstood or simple misinformation is common among new employees still in training. However, the digital assistant will always be as truthful and accurate as the database it relies on.
- Instant scalability: There’s often a slow ramp-up when you hire sales staff. Digital assistants are able to instantly handle unlimited customer conversations and engagements. They can also learn from each interaction. As a result, they get smarter and provide more relevant information to create a better experience over time.
- Immune from turnover: Digital assistants don’t leave for a better opportunity or stay at your company for only a few months at a time. Once implemented, they’re with you for the long haul. They help you improve the customer experience every time they record (and improve from) an interaction.
These benefits have made digital assistants an increasingly relevant option in the typical B2C or B2B sales environment. In fact, the vast majority of audiences have positive experiences with this technology. As a result, it’s not difficult to understand its continued growth across industries.
Connecting Digital Capabilities With the Human Element
When it comes to augmenting human sales staff, one benefit is particularly worthy of highlighting. Digital assistants are built to be empathetic when engaging consumers. They provide the human-like interactions that most audiences are both accustomed to and expect. That’s especially important considering the fact that research continues to show customers prefer a human (or human-like) sales experience.
This technology, as it turns out, is not designed to completely replace the human sales staff. Instead, it’s developed specifically to handle mundane and repetitive tasks that don’t need in-depth human interactions. And those interactions constitute the vast majority of conversations that happen between consumers and brands.
Sure, the machine learning capabilities of AI-enabled digital assistants can make those initial interactions more personal. But they also help the assistant recognize when to turn a conversation over to a human representative. This ensures the customer gets the answers they need for a positive experience.
That process doesn’t just improve the customer experience for those initial conversations. It also helps to free up the time of your human team. As a result, they can now focus on more valuable tasks with higher chances of converting customers. Focusing on these more strategic and in-depth experiences can create more positive sales experiences for both simple and complex sales funnels across industries.
Hire Sales Staff Vs. Deploy a Digital Assistant
The best digital assistants, like those developed by AtlasRTX, go even further. In addition to being powered by artificial intelligence, they’re backed by a dedicated human team to ensure that they always optimize and improve. As a result, a “human element” is always present on the path to CX success.
In other words, the benefits for a company to support its existing human team with a friendly, artificially-intelligent digital assistant range widely. Especially in times of high staff turnover, these benefits turn into crucial advantages that go a long way towards improving the customer experience.
Talk to our team today about how digital assistants can decrease the need to hire new sales staff.
