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 right at four percent. That means power is squarely in the hands of job seekers.
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the number of current job openings (around eight million) is outpacing the number of currently unemployed adults (around 6.8 million). That not only means job openings go unfilled, but also that those unemployed have more choices than ever in where to apply and what positions to accept.
This is why, according to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than three million workers voluntarily quit their jobs to seek better opportunities elsewhere.
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 perks like benefits and 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’s 2024 Customer Experience Index shows that the average ratio of positive to negative brand interactions continues to fall year-over-year.
The Struggles of Filling the Hiring Gap
A continued decline in customer experience makes hiring quality sales staff more important than ever. However, given the current labor environment, the hiring process also continues to be difficult.
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. Your prospect and new customer experience are at risk, resulting in tangible negative impacts on your bottom line.
Difficult, of course, is far from impossible. As it turns out, the solution may be to find alternatives to filling positions and investing in the right technology instead.
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.
In doing so, digital assistants are able to integrate into the sales channels audiences across industries are gravitating towards. Social media, websites, and texting are among the most popular and most successful digital marketing channels today, and digital assistants can integrate into all of them.
The biggest benefit of integrating digital assistants into these text-based outreach channels: they take the burden off human sales staff. Especially repeated and routine questions can be answered instantly, while more personalized and custom requests can be rerouted 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 competitive job market like the one we are currently experiencing. They can handle many of the functions that candidates for unfilled job openings would otherwise take on, with a few comparative advantages that are important to keep in mind.
The five most important benefits of digital assistants, especially when compared directly to hiring sales staff, include constant availability, multi-language capabilities, more centralized answers, scalability, and immunity from staff turnover. Each of these benefits is worth examining in more detail.
1. Constant Availability
Digital assistants are available 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.
That’s an especially important nuance for today’s digital audiences, who expect near-instant responses to their questions online. In fact, numerous studies and surveys have suggested a direct and tangible link between speedy response time and a lead’s likelihood to convert to a customer.
2. Multi-Language Capabilities
The ability to communicate in multiple languages 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.
This is a capability that even the most qualified sales staff you hire simply won’t have. Driven by the right technology and database, you can unlock new audiences and markets and multiply your revenue potential in the process.
3. A Single Source of Truth
Digital assistants draw their answers in a central database. AI-enabled digital assistants take it one step further, learning over time to expand that database—but the information will always come from that single source of truth.
Compare that with new employees, who might misunderstand information or accidentally provide wrong information to your leads and customers. In contrast, the digital assistant will always be as truthful and accurate as the database it relies on.
4. Instant Scalability
There’s often a slow ramp-up when you hire sales staff. Extensive training will be necessary. According to one estimate, it takes nine months for new sales staff to get up to speed with everything they need to know, from processes to product details.
On the other hand, 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—without a long time needed to ramp up.
5. Immune from Staff Turnover
Finally, digital assistants win because they don’t suffer from one major drawback of any employees: they 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.
Connecting Digital Capabilities With the Human Element
Due to these benefits, digital assistants have become an increasingly relevant option in the typical B2C or B2B sales environment. Just as importantly, audiences have embraced them, with the vast majority of online users having a positive experience with this technology. As a result, it’s not difficult to understand its continued growth across industries.
At the same time, digital assistants cannot and should not fully replace 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.
Make no mistake: 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.
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 toward improving the customer experience.
The current job market has made it difficult for many companies across industries and sizes to hire the right people for their open sales roles. At its worst, that struggle can lead to a decreased customer experience. Thanks to AI-enabled digital assistants like AtlasRTX, you can turn that trend around, providing a positive experience while enabling your human sales team to focus on more in-depth relationship building.
Talk to our team today about how digital assistants can decrease the need to hire sales staff.
