Best practices: prepare AI Agent for sales conversations (beta)Updated 4 days ago

You can enable Sales skills for AI Agent to help drive revenue by engaging visitors to your online store. Like an in-store sales assistant, AI Agent assists shoppers with personalized sales interactions, recommending products, answering questions, and guiding shoppers toward a purchase.

To help you prepare AI Agent for sales conversations, this article outlines several best practices to optimize AI Agent and your Chat settings. With the right changes to your settings, you can prepare AI Agent to successfully engage with shoppers and convert browsers into buyers.

Before you begin

Before you can use AI Agent for Sales, you should have the following prerequisites set up:

• You must have Chat installed on your store’s website
• You must have Sales enabled for AI Agent

Getting AI Agent ready to sell

In order for AI Agent to successfully handle sales conversations, you may need to make changes to your existing AI Agent and Chat settings.

The goal here is to equip AI Agent with relevant sales knowledge, as well as optimize your Chat widget to increase opportunities for shoppers to start a conversation.

Handovers and excluded topics

Your handover topics define what types of conversations AI Agent should pass off to your team. If you’ve enabled the Rule to Prevent AI Agent from answering, you may also have defined topics that AI Agent should ignore entirely.

• Review handover topics→ remove any topics that might prevent successful sales conversations
  
  
  • For example, today you might have handover topics that relate to: Product Recommendations, Out of stock, Sizing
• Review excluded topics → if you’ve enabled a Rule to Prevent AI Agent from answering, you should remove or modify topics in the Rule that might prevent AI Agent from having sales conversations

Sales-specific knowledge

You can increase conversion with AI Agent by making sure it has the relevant knowledge to handle sales conversations.

If AI Agent doesn’t have knowledge on a topic, it will hand over the conversation to your team.

• Review Shopify product descriptions→ AI Sales Agent has access to your product catalogue through Gorgias’s integration with Shopify.
  
  
  • Make sure your product descriptions are up to date so that AI Agent can answer product-specific questions and make recommendations
  • Give AI Agent sales-specific information→ make sure AI Sales Agent can address common questions in sales conversations, like pricing, sizing, warranties and so on. Here how you can onboard AI Agent with this knowledge:
    
    
    • Give AI Agent access to a webpage, like a page about your product sizing
  • Create public or unlisted articles on your Help Center — for example, a page about your shipping and returns policy
  • Upload files from your computer (PDFs, DOCs, etc.)
  • Situational preferences and guidelines→ if you provide training to your team about how your brand should interact with shoppers or handle different sales topics, you can give AI Agent the same instruction.
    
    
    • For example, today you might tell your agents: “If a customer asks when an item will be back in stock, recommend some alternative choices in addition to answering the core questions”
  • Create Guidance to train AI Agent on situational best practices
  • Review Macros that your team uses to respond to Sales topics on email → add [AI Compatible] to your Macro titles to give AI Agent access to the same content

Chat settings and appearance

AI Sales Agent interacts with your shoppers through Chat. You should review your Chat settings to make sure shoppers have the most opportunities to interact with AI Agent when they have pre-sales questions.

• Review Chat visibility Settings
  
  
  • Is your Chat hidden? → make sure you disable Hide Chat and Hide Chat Outside of Business Hours. Even when your team is unavailable, AI Agent can continue to answer shopper questions.
  • Is Chat installed on all pages?→ make sure shoppers can ask questions no matter where they are on your store
    
    
    • Add Chat to your checkout and thank you pages to address sales questions at the most critical moment in the shopper’s journey
  • Review your offline mode Chat message→ typically brands add a message to Chat outside of business hours — something like “We’re offline, leave us a message”
    
    
    • Consider removing or changing this message to prevent shoppers from thinking that Chat is not an option outside business hours
    • When shoppers use Chat outside of business hours, AI Sales Agent has more opportunity to drive sales conversations
• Review Chat appearance settings→ to encourage conversation, you want Chat to be inviting and obvious
  
  
  • Is Chat being covered by other apps on the page? → go to Settings > Chat > Appearance to change the Chat widget position
  • Does the widget clearly indicate that shoppers can use it to Chat → consider changing the Chat icon to include a label and message, like “Chat with us"