Gather customer or product information to determine customer needs
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
An agent can find, read and summarise the sources this work depends on, and it can cover far more of them than a person would ever open. What it does not do is decide which sources deserve trust, or what the findings mean for your situation.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Research and retrieval work |
| Jobs that do it | 16 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Getting Information (4.A.1.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 16 occupations that perform it.
- Hear testimony from constituents, representatives of interest groups, board and commission members, and others with an interest in bills or issues under consideration.
- Develop an understanding of customers' needs and take actions to ensure that such needs are met.
- Conduct user research to determine design requirements and analyze user feedback to improve design quality.
- Visit retailers and sales representatives to promote products and gather information.
- Greet customers and discuss the type, quality, and quantity of merchandise sought for rental.
- Read catalogs, microfiche viewers, or computer displays to determine replacement part stock numbers and prices.
- Greet customers and ascertain what each customer wants or needs.
- Obtain and study information about clients' products, needs, problems, advertising history, and business practices to offer effective sales presentations and appropriate product assistance.
- Interview prospective clients to obtain data about their financial resources and needs, the physical condition of the person or property to be insured, and to discuss any existing coverage.
- Interview clients to determine clients' assets, liabilities, cash flow, insurance coverage, tax status, or financial objectives.
- Converse with customer to determine destination, mode of transportation, travel dates, financial considerations, and accommodations required.
- Visit establishments to evaluate needs or to promote product or service sales.
- Gather information from prospective customers to identify their solar energy needs.
- Learn about competitors' products or consumers' interests or concerns to answer questions or provide more complete information.
- Interview clients to determine what kinds of properties they are seeking.
- Confer with customers and engineers to assess equipment needs and to determine system requirements.
- Determine replacement parts required, according to inspections of old parts, customer requests, or customers' descriptions of malfunctions.
- Confer with clients to obtain and provide information when claims are made on a policy.
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 research and retrieval work, and what it costs.
Research is the one shape of work that needs no integration at all, so a single $20 assistant with browsing is the whole stack. Add a crawler only once you are pulling hundreds of pages on a schedule rather than reading a few.
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.
Generalist agents
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
16 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Advertising Sales Agents
- Counter and Rental Clerks
- Demonstrators and Product Promoters
- First-Line Supervisors of Non-Retail Sales Workers
- Insurance Sales Agents
- Legislators
- Logisticians
- Parts Salespersons
- Real Estate Sales Agents
- Retail Salespersons
- Sales Engineers
- Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Technical and Scientific Products
- Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents
- Solar Sales Representatives and Assessors
- Travel Agents
- Web and Digital Interface Designers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Collect data about consumer needs or opinions”. 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.