How do you create a smart device voice experience for your brand?

Creating a voice application for your brand may seem like a cool thing to do, but how do you go about it and is the investment justified? First, let’s look at some of the compelling statistics from the voice landscape:

• Over 38% of adults in the UK owned a smart speaker at the start of 2021

• A milestone 1 billion voice searches per month was reached in 2018

• 50% of all searches were voice searches in 2020

• 22.4% of UK internet users use a smart speaker at least once a month (12.6m adults)

• 65% of people who own a smart speaker can’t imagine going back to life without it

Why create an Amazon and Google voice experience?

We can safely say that voice is no longer a gimmick and with the huge adoption of home assistants, brands might want to consider the business case to invest in the technology by examining use cases and benefits. Amazon and Google are the market leaders so are the main platforms to focus on with the greatest reach and adoption.

“Voice is the gateway for all technologies, the remote control for our lives.”

Mitch Joel, Founder of Six Pixels Group

An obvious use case is that customers can ask questions about your company and products using their home assistants, without human intervention, and therefore deliver the following potential benefits:

• To provide an alternative and new method of information delivery for customers at a time and place that is convenient to them. Some customers may not want to browse websites or phone call centres, so voice provides an additional source of information

• To test and learn emerging technology. To adopt voice into communications strategy is future proofing your business for when it becomes mainstream

• To support accessibility innovation. A proportion of customers with sight loss may prefer to interact with your business via voice, so this should be considered as an important factor

• To reduce no value calls into a call centre. If customers are satisfied with information obtained from their voice assistant, then this could reduce impact on your customer service team so that that they can focus on more valuable tasks

• Bringing mundane and tiresome documents to life. For example, who wants to read the small print on their car insurance policy? Translate this into voice responses and the customer can easily access the finer details of their policy without crawling through lengthy documents

• To secure the registration a brand’s voice invocation (the phrase used to trigger the app into life) before someone else does. A very important step, especially for a major brand

Registering your Brand’s voice app with Amazon and Google

Google voice invocation registration is similar to registering a domain and is first come first serve, so whoever registers it first will own it. If this happened a Brand wouldn’t be able to own it in the future for any voice application.

With Alexa, multiple brands can have the same invocation phrase, but there is an opportunity for your brand to be the first and therefore the most frequently used.

The design and build process

Once the use case has been decided, then the work can begin to consolidate all the source content and how and when to surface it:

• Defining the questions and the answers: Understanding what your customers are likely to want to know from a voice response is crucial. This can be discovered from several sources such as, most read FAQs, most popular website pages, customer service records, live chat interactions, site search data etc. Using previously ‘signed off’ content to form the answers is helpful here and will speed up the process considerably

• Conversation design: The voice app must be able to handle different questions and then based on the answer provided, the user is likely to go in one direction or another. This needsto be anticipated and suitable responses prepared to be surfaced in a logical, conversational fashion. Multiple choices can be incorporated in the system logic

• Transfer the speech to code: Similar to how a web page is written in HTML, there is a similar process for voice. Such is the sophistication of the technology that a website-like content management system like Air Table can be used to simplify this process. This approach will allow future updates to be made simply and quickly with automated interfaces to synchronise with Amazon and Google

Testing and submitting to Amazon & Google

• Like any technical project, the voice app can be tested in a UAT environment by the development team and by users selected from the business. This can also be complemented by an external panel of testers, specialising in voice projects

• Registration is like submitting an app to the app store and can take two weeks for approval from Amazon and Google

Communications plan and launch

When your app has been successfully listed in the Amazon and Google app libraries, then it’s time to start creating awareness so that your customers use it. Some proven ways to do that are as follows:

• Adding a promo to company email transactional, service and newsletter emails

• Publish a landing page on your company website which includes information and direct links to the app stores

• Promote on existing customers and my account web pages

• Promote on your social channels

• Promote voice app information on internal communications channels, intranet pages and perhaps run a competition for staff to win a smart device

BAU and the future

Now that the voice apps are out in public circulation, it’s important to monitor adoption and performance.

• Your chosen CMS will provide access to analytics to understand how people are using the system, how many and how long the interactions are, and which questions are most popular

• Any changes to conversations can be made via access to the content management platform to amend existing, or add new questions

• Evaluate user feedback and app library reviews to improve responses and look at how the responses can be optimised to improve the experience for future iterations

The possibilities for smart speaker and voice technology are endless and it feels like just the beginning. There are now some specialised voice agencies out there such as Rabbit & Pork who can undertake the whole process for you.

If you are thinking about how a voice strategy could help your business, and not sure how to get started, then get in touch.