Business use of avatars
Avatars
save costs, boost sales
University of Texas at Arlington
An
associate professor of marketing at The University of Texas at Arlington says
digital avatars can replace a sales force and customer service employees at a
fraction of the cost.
An avatar can be just as useless as a call center
customer service rep at a fraction of the cost
In this context,
avatars are typically computer-generated representations of people. UTA
Associate Professor Fred Miao says they can fill the void in interactive
assistance that a majority of shoppers says they want.
"An
Accenture survey of online shoppers shows that 62% never completed their
purchases because there was no real-time customer service or support. That
Accenture survey also shows that 90% of those shoppers wanted some sort of
interactive assistance during the shopping process," said Miao, faculty
fellow of the John Merrill Endowed Professorship in Consultative Sales in UTA's
College of Business. "Avatars, used in the right way, can fill this void
at a fraction of the cost of hiring and training human salespeople and service
employees."
Miao's paper,
"An Emerging Theory of Avatar Marketing," appears in the Journal of
Marketing, the premier research outlet for the American Marketing
Association.
In his analysis,
Miao argues that businesses using avatar representatives need to be on the
lookout for misalignment between the form and behavioral realism of their
avatars. Form realism relates to how much an avatar looks like a real human
being. Behavioral realism relates to an avatar's "intelligence" and
whether it acts like a human being.
"Getting those two parts of an avatar matched is difficult," Miao said. "When the physical and the behavioral aspects don't synch up, the effectiveness of using avatars can be inconsistent and at best contingent upon the context, such as perceived financial risk."
In complex
relational exchanges with customers, such as when someone chooses a skincare
product, avatars may be most effective when they are highly realistic looking
and intelligent. When interactions involve privacy concerns, such as in mental
health interviews, customers are better served with less realistic looking
avatars that still act with intelligence.
Miao urges firms
to consider five interrelated areas in using avatars:
- timing
- form realism
- behavioral realism
- form-behavioral realism alignment
- situational factors and context
"The bottom
line is that with budgets being so constricted among businesses, using avatars
for marketing or customer service could not only be a worthwhile management
tool to consider using, but also a means of increasing sales through consistent
service quality," Miao said.
Elten Briggs,
chair and associate professor in the Department of Marketing, said Miao's work
conveys critical insights to businesses.
"Avatars
and other forms of artificial intelligence are increasingly being employed to
deliver services to customers," Briggs said. "Dr. Miao's paper
provides much needed guidance on how businesses can utilize avatars to improve
customers' service experiences."
