Developing Virtual Online Customers for Testing Virtual Online Sales Assistants

Ohud Almutairi; Abdullah Almuttiri

Developing Virtual Online Customers for Testing Virtual Online Sales Assistants

Ohud Almutairi *

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Abdullah Almuttiri

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Developing Virtual Online Customers for Testing Virtual Online Sales Assistants

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Abstract

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.

How to Cite This Article

Ohud Almutairi, Abdullah Almuttiri. 2019. "Developing Virtual Online Customers for Testing Virtual Online Sales Assistants". 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

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Journal Specifications

Crossref Journal DOI 10.17406/GJMBR

Print ISSN 0975-5853

e-ISSN 2249-4588

Keywords

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Classification

GJMBR-E Classification JEL Code: M31

Submission ReceivedDecember 6, 2018
Peer Review Double Blind
Handling Editor
Accepted January 5, 2019
Published January 15, 2019

Version of record

v1.2

Issue date

July 17, 2019

Language

English

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Article Matrices

Total Score: 169

Country: Saudi Arabia

Subject: Global Journal of Management and Business Research

Authors: Ohud Almutairi, Abdullah Almuttiri (PhD/Dr. count: 0)

View Count (all-time): 307

Total Views (Real + Logic): 844

Total Downloads (simulated): 72

Publish Date: 2019 01, Tue

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Total Views: 844

Total Downloads: 72

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