Most e-commerce sites follow a similar guided sales model: homepage, category or landing pages (often called PLP, category or landing pages), search with faceted navigation in the search results, and product pages (often called PDPs) ).
Users can choose to browse the category structure ( category structure) or enter search terms and browse through these results; use faceted navigation ( faceted navigation) to further filter these results—and of course a plethora of other pages.
Merchants are constantly trying to improve this process by adding features like predictive search or creating specific topic categories like "gifts" or "holiday shoes", but this model still relies heavily on customers finding themselves through search and filtering tools product available.
Considering this process in an omnichannel world, it is similar to a customer walking into a brick-and-mortar store and browsing the shelves before deciding what to buy. Brick-and-mortar stores are likely to be organized by category (men, women, pants, shirts, etc.) where customers can browse freely.
This model is very successful in many industries such as fast fashion and supermarkets, but it is not very practical in other industries. Buying furniture, mattresses, computers, TVs, cosmetics and a whole host of more complex tech products often requires the support of an in-store assistant who will help customers find the right product based on what the product is for and what they want to use it and what is their budget , and many other factors.
In-store employees are often trained to engage in conversations and ask a series of questions to help customers narrow down their product choices, rather than just expecting customers to find the right product on their own.
Take buying a new mattress, for example. You'd think buying a new mattress would be very simple, but it's actually quite complicated. Do you need traditional springs, pocketed springs, memory foam or a mix? What's the difference between a $250 mattress and a $5000 mattress? How firm should your mattress be?
If companies selling mattresses don't train their store associates to ask the right questions and equip them with the knowledge to advise customers on options relevant to them, they won't be very successful. In addition to providing their store associates with the product knowledge they need, these retailers will equip their store associates with a sales script, which is essentially an algorithm with questions and answers. The staff added a human touch to the personal conversation, but they asked the same questions to everyone.
Some bedding retailers, such as Dreams in the UK, have gone a step further, investing in in-store tools that can diagnose a customer's body shape, weight and sleeping position before asking questions in order to provide the best advice. This takes the in-store guided sales experience a step further to provide customers with the best recommendations.
So, it begs the question: Why are so many retailers happy to offer this consultative, conversational and guided selling experience in-store, yet rely on customers to find the right products for themselves online? That's where online coaching sales come in. The main purpose of online coaching sales is to replicate the in-store consulting experience in order to provide customers with targeted product listings based on their answers to a series of questions.
This might be as simple as asking some questions about who will use the product, what is the budget, and what color they want, but it can also be a more complex process where the questions asked are based on the answers to the previous questions with a decision tree form. The series of questions asked were designed to mimic the conversational questions an in-store assistant might ask a customer.
To accomplish in today’s omnichannel experience economy, businesses need to provide customers with an online experience that is as good (or even better) than the experience they get in-store. This is especially important when the product being purchased is technical or complex, or the customer may not always know what they want.
These businesses invest heavily in in-store experiences and training their employees to be product experts because they know it's what customers expect, so why do many rely on customers to figure it out online themselves?
Many companies in specific industries have implemented online coaching sales tools with varying degrees of success. They seem to be especially prevalent in the beauty sector, where customers are used to consulting an expert in-store. Customers may not know what product they should use for their specific skin or hair type and need advice from a product expert to help them make a purchasing decision.
A good example is L'Oreal's hair care consultation tool. It's an online tool that provides customers with product recommendations by asking a series of questions, much like what L'Oreal hair care consultants do in department stores:
The next obvious development in guided selling involves chatbots and artificial intelligence. Current guided selling tools are often very linear and not very smart. The merchant will create a set of linked questions and answers and map products or attributes to the question and answer chain. Some third-party coaching sales tools, such as Zoovu, will have some level of machine learning to ensure the most relevant results are provided to customers, but the conversations between these tools and customers are still very linear.
Combining guided selling tools with chatbots will take them to the next level. Many websites now use live chat tools to connect customers with real people. These tools are often used for customer service inquiries, such as "Where's my order?" But other companies use these tools to connect customers with product experts who can help customers find the right product through a conversation, which still requires product experts to come up with A series of questions and a series of suggestions based on the answers given.
If a guided sales tool could be combined with a chatbot with some level of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, it could have a conversation with a customer and automatically adjust the questions it asks of the customer based on the language used in the conversation. These chatbots can be used across multiple channels, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, not just on e-commerce sites. But also in the in-store kiosk. The next step is to combine it with voice assistant tools like Amazon Alexa or Google Home.
I think we're a bit far from being able to do that easily, but it's clearly coming. In some industries, online buying will shift primarily from the process of browsing a product catalog to talking to a system that will provide customers with a set of products curated for them personally.
It's surprising to me that online coaching sales isn't more common than it is now. For some industries, this can be a very valuable tool that can help increase conversions and reduce returns as it puts the right products in front of the right customers. One possible reason for the limited use could be the complexity of the development and implementation of such tools.
While the guided selling process may seem simple, the complexity lies in creating management tools that allow merchants to configure and build them. Instead of trying to build their own tools, merchants should look to third-party solutions like Zoovu or Conversity, which offer sophisticated management tools and simple integration into websites and other channels. Another important factor is how well it performs. As with many online tools, a half-hearted attempt to implement a guided sales tool with a poor user experience is unlikely to succeed.