Upsy, our digital salesperson, is ready for growth. We aim to be the number one tool for growing SME webshops’ sales in Finland and internationally.
When we founded Upseller seven years ago, our vision was to automate sales in the web pages and in webshops using the newest technology. We’d bring an active and knowledgeable digital salesperson to companies’ web pages. The digital sales assistant would appear next to the customer, help find the product that fills their needs, recommend a few useful additional products, and gently guide the customer to the cashier.
At first, we brought real people to digital environments to serve and sell using chat applications. This way, we learned a lot about the customers’ needs in the digital space and how to best engage with them. While doing this, we understood how many of the customers’ needs were repetitive and mechanical and could relatively easily be serviced using chatbots. We also learned when real human interaction is needed to handle a customer support situation or close a sale.
In the next phase, we introduced AI-powered chatbots to augment the efforts of our human customer support staff. Many needs could be serviced using bots, but whenever the situation called for it, the bot handed the customer over to a person. Watching the bot interact with the end customer taught us a lot about supporting the sales situation. We were also able to collect valuable behavioral data.
One of the critical lessons during this phase was that while chats and bots are irreplaceable in B2B customers service and leads generation, in webshops they don’t work. Webshops need solutions that can automate the work that a human sales person would do.
The need for fast and comprehensive services becomes even more pressing when we stop and think about the situation of a webshop customer. They enter, either organically or aided by advertising, a vast virtual warehouse filled with thousands or hundreds of thousands of products, among which they should find what they are looking for. Here a customer service assistant will not be enough. An expert salesperson is needed.
When we focused on webshop sales situations, we quickly returned to our original mission. Only a fully automated salesperson would do. Luckily our skills and our data set were on a whole new level. Also, the price and availability of artificial intelligence had changed drastically, and AI was now available to our main target group, SME webshops.
After eighteen months of intensive development, we have just launched a new product, Upsy Shopping Helper, which we will spin off to a separate company. Upsy is an AI-based automated salesperson that connects directly to the customers’ product database. It greets the customer, finds what they are looking for, throws in a couple of smart suggestions for other purchases, and helps the customer to the checkout.
The need for Upsy could not be clearer. Ecommerce sales keep growing, and SME webshops must find their competitive edge by carving out a niche and optimizing the store’s customer experience and sales process.
Upsy will be incorporated as its own entity during this fall, and the service aims at being the number one choice of SME webshops seeking to boost their sales. The way Upsy ‘thinks’ always begins with the end customer’s situation. Then it uses robust search and recommendation algorithms and customizes the results for the customer using AI. As an entity, Upsy will be a pure SaaS technology company. Personally, I am going to focus all my energy on growing Upsy as the CEO and Founder of the new Upsy Company.
Upseller, the mother company, will spin Upsy into its own orbit and focus entirely on what it is best at, such customer interactions where the combination of human and AI produces the best results. It will keep delivering stellar results to its customers, especially in B2B sales and customer service. The committed Upseller team consists of the best experts in the business and will carry on its mission uninterrupted.
In my blogs, I often return to my days as an athlete because that’s when I learned what the road to success looks like. I also understood that you always take bits of what you’ve gathered before and incorporate them into your new thing. What I learned in snowboarding I can now use in my new sport, wingsurfing. While getting the hang of a new thing is based on previous knowledge, it forces you to be humble, yet at times also combative, to learn. With Upsy we are not beginners. We have been preparing for this moment for seven years. But still, I feel like I’d be watching virgin powder from the top of a mountain or a blue and breezy ocean from the shore. Here we go!