Dell Ready to Go Live at Retail

Round Rock, Texas — Dell Inc. has created a “live” virtual sales assistant display to help brick-and-mortar retailers win the online research battle.The display enables video-chatting with a multilingual sales force and shared-screen online browsing to leverage content such as reviews, videos and up-sell options and move shoppers along the omnichannel path to purchase while keeping a single retailer front and center.The project began nearly two years ago when Dell took a hard look at what core values the manufacturer brought to the market and how it could leverage those values within the retail environment.“We’ve been in direct selling for 30 years – we started the model – and we took that core competency and brainstormed, ‘How can we bring the very strong direct selling model we have to benefit our products in Best Buy, or Walmart, or Staples or Office Depot?’” says Dan Seymour, Dell’s director of North American shopper marketing.Realizing that physically implanting its sales force into stores would be difficult and costly, Dell turned to technology for a scalable solution. After a few renditions, the manufacturer unveiled its virtual sales assistant in March at its Dell @ Retail 2016 event in Austin, Texas.The display connects shoppers with a live salesperson via video chat to help them find a product that fits their needs. It can be deployed on an endcap, inline or on a table display in virtually any part of the store. The display utilizes multiple components including a touchscreen monitor, operating system, web camera, microphone and Turtle Beach Corp.’s HyperSound directional emitters that project sound in a straight beam to keep conversations private and minimize distractions for other shoppers. Additional partners included OnQ and Stitch Design Co.“The shopper can walk up to the physical store and touch the screen to talk to the representative about the physical product in front of them,” Seymour says. “[The reps] will qualify the shopper, asking all the right questions about intended usage, and then they’ll get to the actual product and talk about how that product might fit those needs. Then they might check out the retailer’s dot-com to find other specific products that might better fit the shopper’s needs, or they might go to that same product on the retailer’s dot-com site and pull out a little more content around the ratings and reviews or the specifications and certain features and functions to help educate the shopper and get her ready to purchase.”The salespeople can also bring up a keypad for the shopper to enter her phone number to receive a link to the content that was discussed or to an e-commerce page with a time-sensitive coupon offer of varying value depending on the shoppers’ point in the purchase cycle. Dell is working on adding the ability to email that information as well.“It’s one of the bigger benefits that I think the retailers see here: the way that our sales associates can leverage the endless aisle – the ability to look at the online and in-store assortment strategy that buyers for our category clearly take into consideration,” Seymour says. “We can show the shopper that the SKU in the store might have two or three different versions online that are a more optimal fit for that shopper, connect them to that product and then send that information directly to their phone so they can finish the transaction.”The salespeople know exactly what city and store a call is coming from, what inventory the store has, and what promotions are going on to provide a richer shopper experience. Retailers, meanwhile, can see who interacted with the display and how the experience progressed, as well as get access to broader analytics from Dell’s cross-device intelligence.The manufacturer says the display’s value is the Dell expert fulfilling the sales associate role, yet the manufacturer is not opposed to placing someone else behind the screen.“We have not gone live with any retailers yet but are talking to some about other options, i.e., leveraging some of their sales associates,” Seymour says. “On the small-business side we have partners like Staples and Office Depot who have their own call centers and their own sales teams. We have the capability of mixing the two and/or directing some to them and some to us … and bringing other third-party sales associate support into the mix as well.”Dell has designed complementary versions of the virtual sales assistant for all three of its product segments: gaming, consumer and small business. The gaming display for its Alienware sub-brand has a unique display and interface that matches the brand’s black and dark graphics. The consumer version highlights Dell’s standard line of products and the small-business version is outfitted with a more professional interface.Qualitative and quantitative research conducted while developing the display affirms its usefulness, with Dell reporting that nearly half of shoppers would choose a store with a virtual sales assistant display versus a store without the display, all other things being equal; one-third would use the display on multiple trips and nearly two-thirds would recommend it to others; and more than half would make an immediate purchase if the display helped them find a needs-matching device.

Dell Ready to Go Live at Retail

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