Your sales team is often bogged-down with repetitive questions: availability, community amenities, tours, and COVID precautions. While there are many ways to handle these inquiries, a Virtual Sales Assistant (VSA) is a valuable solution. Let’s dive into what a VSA is, what they do, and the benefits of adding one to your senior living community’s website. 

What is a Virtual Sales Assistant?

Do you ask Alexa about the weather, or Siri simple questions? Imagine adding a rockstar to your sales team. They work all the time and flawlessly answer questions from your future residents and their families. Psst! This isn’t too good to be true, we promise. 

A virtual sales assistant connects with seniors, and their loved ones, on your website to answer questions immediately. Today’s instant-everything consumers expect immediate answers. The good news? VSAs are ready. You won’t miss a moment to engage with potential residents. This allows your sales team to focus on high-impact discussions with seniors and their families while ensuring easy-to-answer questions don’t fall through the cracks.

In addition to answering frequently asked questions, a VSA can use Natural Language Processing (NLP) artificial intelligence to understand more complex requests. A VSA is ready to answer your future residents’ most pressing questions including availability, community amenities, activities, culture, dining, tour scheduling, and COVID-19 safety measures. A VSA streamlines your on-site sales and marketing teams’ ability to provide consistent, friendly customer service and increase occupancy. 

Five Benefits of a Virtual Sales Assistant:

1. A Welcoming First Impression 

You only get one opportunity to make a first impression. According to databox, the average website session duration is between 2-3 minutes. All of this is to say, a virtual sales assistant is always ready to greet potential residents and ensure your community consistently provides a memorable, friendly, welcoming experience. According to FURTHER, 25% of website users engage with the VSA and of those, 19% turn into leads.

2. Efficient 

A virtual sales assistant makes sure your sales team isn’t inundated with easy-to-answer questions via form-fills and phone calls. The VSA interface allows seniors and their families to view floorplans, schedule virtual tours, and view photos of the community. Additionally, information within the VSA interface about care-levels and community amenities allows residents to self-qualify based on their individual needs. Above all, this allows your sales team to focus wholeheartedly on decision-ready seniors and their families. 

3. Fast 

The average virtual sales assistant’s response time is less than 2 seconds, compared with a human response time of 76 seconds. Consumers expect immediacy, and a 74 second difference is likely to make them leave and look for answers elsewhere. According to Northridge Group’s State of Customer Service Experience Report, 63% of consumers felt that there was an ease to contact a business via online chat, and 66% found their questions were answered most quickly via online chat. If this isn’t compelling enough, know this: many consumers will contact your community via a different channel if their questions aren’t answered within an hour. Meaning, your workload doubles as you answer the same questions in different places — essentially the customer service version of playing whack-a-mole. 

4. Effective

Six-feet apart is the new norm and it is vital to engage with your next residents and their families in safe, accommodating ways, before they explore other communities. Certainly, your community isn’t simply concerned about the quantity of leads — but quality, too. Each interaction with a senior and their family matters. According to FURTHER, a trusted leader in AI-powered prospect engagement technology for senior living, their VSA generates 1.5x to 2x the lead volume of website forms. This is big. Since the user interface guides potential residents through a series of questions including where pricing begins — your leads arrive through this digital-door self-qualified and with a higher likelihood of joining your community. Additionally, FURTHER’s highly-intelligent VSA is able to score leads, handoff hot prospects, and share data to empower your sales team to be more effective through their reporting. 

5. Always On

A VSA never needs a day off — or a break for that matter. They’re ready to greet prospective residents and their families anytime, day or night, weekends and holidays too. We know that families are juggling a lot of priorities — particularly right now. To sum up, a VSA is an easy, accessible, 24/7/365 channel to answer easy questions. Moreover, it will simplify the research process for seniors and their loved ones, and deliver qualified leads through your website. 

Above all, to balance the demands of instant-minded potential residents, and finite resources at the community level, adding a VSA to your website offers an experience that’s fast, effective, and always on. When you consider high-quality leads, time, and cost savings, adding a VSA to your website is a win-win for everyone. Learn more about G5’s preferred VSA partner for senior living by watching this video:

Let’s Do This

Curious if a Virtual Sales Assistant is right for your community? Learn more about our partnership with FURTHER by watching our Partner Insights session from Futr Forum. To access this, first register for our Futr Forum event, and then view the session.