Developing Virtual Online Customers for Testing Virtual Online Sales Assistants

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Ohud Almutairi
Ohud Almutairi
2
Abdullah Almuttiri
Abdullah Almuttiri

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Employing virtual online sales assistants is one way to provide smart services to online customers during their online shopping experience, while visiting an online store. Virtual online sales assistants can resolve the absence of social experienced by visitors to the majority of online stores. Each customer’s online shopping behaviour is unique; therefore, the motivations that attract customers to shop electronically are also likely to be different. Employing a virtual online sales assistant can fulfil different needs for the online customers visiting the store. Many developed virtual online sales assistants have disappeared due to not meet the expectations of customers. Therefore, it would be helpful to develop artificial actors to test such an assistant to determine if they can serve online customers satisfactorily. This paper details a novel way to test such an assistant by using Agent-based modelling and simulation (ABMS), which is a powerful simulation tool to simulate autonomous and interactive entities. For our research, we developed four virtual online customer actors with different personalities; e.g. enthusiastic, apathetic, basic, and impatient virtual online customers. These actors then interacted with a representative virtual online sales assistant.

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Funding

No external funding was declared for this work.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

No ethics committee approval was required for this article type.

Data Availability

Not applicable for this article.

Ohud Almutairi. 2019. \u201cDeveloping Virtual Online Customers for Testing Virtual Online Sales Assistants\u201d. Global Journal of Management and Business Research - E: Marketing GJMBR-E Volume 19 (GJMBR Volume 19 Issue E4): .

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GJMBR Volume 19 Issue E4
Pg. 29- 44
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Crossref Journal DOI 10.17406/GJMBR

Print ISSN 0975-5853

e-ISSN 2249-4588

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GJMBR-E Classification: JEL Code: M31
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v1.2

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July 17, 2019

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English

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Employing virtual online sales assistants is one way to provide smart services to online customers during their online shopping experience, while visiting an online store. Virtual online sales assistants can resolve the absence of social experienced by visitors to the majority of online stores. Each customer’s online shopping behaviour is unique; therefore, the motivations that attract customers to shop electronically are also likely to be different. Employing a virtual online sales assistant can fulfil different needs for the online customers visiting the store. Many developed virtual online sales assistants have disappeared due to not meet the expectations of customers. Therefore, it would be helpful to develop artificial actors to test such an assistant to determine if they can serve online customers satisfactorily. This paper details a novel way to test such an assistant by using Agent-based modelling and simulation (ABMS), which is a powerful simulation tool to simulate autonomous and interactive entities. For our research, we developed four virtual online customer actors with different personalities; e.g. enthusiastic, apathetic, basic, and impatient virtual online customers. These actors then interacted with a representative virtual online sales assistant.

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Developing Virtual Online Customers for Testing Virtual Online Sales Assistants

Ohud Almutairi
Ohud Almutairi
Abdullah Almuttiri
Abdullah Almuttiri

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