Explain technical product or service information to customers
Part of the output can be produced by software today.
Software drafts well and sends at volume, and vertical support agents now resolve a large share of inbound questions end to end. What does not transfer is the relationship, and the judgment about when a message should not be sent at all.
| How automatable | Partly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Routine communication and explanation |
| Jobs that do it | 17 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents, Builders |
| O*NET activity | Interpreting the Meaning of Information for Others (4.A.4.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 17 occupations that perform it.
- Listen to and resolve customer complaints regarding services, products, or personnel.
- Assist customers by providing information and resolving their complaints.
- Provide information about rental items, such as availability, operation, or description.
- Assist customers, such as responding to customer complaints and updating them about back-ordered parts.
- Describe merchandise and explain use, operation, and care of merchandise to customers.
- Explain to customers how specific types of advertising will help promote their products or services in the most effective way possible.
- Contact prospective customers to present information and explain available services.
- Emphasize or recommend service features based on knowledge of customers' needs and vendor capabilities and limitations.
- Emphasize product features, based on analyses of customers' needs and on technical knowledge of product capabilities and limitations.
- Provide customers with information, such as quotes, orders, sales, shipping, warranties, credit, funding options, incentives, or tax rebates.
- Contact regular and prospective customers to demonstrate products, explain product features, and solicit orders.
- Demonstrate or explain products, methods, or services to persuade customers to purchase products or use services.
- Display commercial, industrial, agricultural, and residential properties to clients and explain their features.
- Prepare and deliver technical presentations that explain products or services to customers and prospective customers.
- Explain products or services and prices, and answer questions from customers.
- Explain products or services and prices and demonstrate use of products.
- Help customers select bicycles that fit their body sizes and intended bicycle uses.
- Answer customers' questions, and provide information on procedures or policies.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for routine communication and explanation, and what it costs.
Drafting replies costs nothing beyond the assistant you already pay for. Only move to a support agent billed per resolution once the inbound volume is large enough that the per-resolution price beats the hour it takes you.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
17 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Advertising Sales Agents
- Bicycle Repairers
- Cashiers
- Counter and Rental Clerks
- Demonstrators and Product Promoters
- Door-to-Door Sales Workers, News and Street Vendors, and Related Workers
- First-Line Supervisors of Non-Retail Sales Workers
- Parts Salespersons
- Real Estate Sales Agents
- Retail Salespersons
- Sales Engineers
- Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel
- Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Except Technical and Scientific Products
- Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Technical and Scientific Products
- Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents
- Solar Sales Representatives and Assessors
- Telemarketers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Explain technical details of products or services”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.