Using Voice To Create Competitive Advantage For Your Business

Guy Redwood, founder and managing director at SimpleUsability reflects on the use of voice technology in business.

We’re in the midst of a fundamental shift in how we interact with computers, with voice becoming an increasingly dominant input method. Several experts have even suggested that voice searches will overtake keyboard searches by 2020.

This is apparent in Amazon’s commitment to selling digital assistants on Black Friday in 2018, when it put huge discounts on voice products including Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Plus, all of which feature Alexa.

But what do we mean by ‘voice’? Voice refers to the user experience of any system which uses speech or mimics a voice interaction. This covers interactive voice response (IVR) systems, chat bots, voice assistants (think Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana) and web chats.

At SimpleUsability, we’ve delivered lots of projects which explore whether customers would use voice to engage with a brand or business; once we’ve understood that, we move forward with finding out the most useful functionality to implement.

This process involves in-depth research with end customers to determine the opportunities that exist for a business. Facilitating internal workshops to align different business functions with voice opportunities, has also proved useful for gaining insight.

If your business would like to start using voice to interact with customers, a good place to start is often securing an invocation. This is the word or phrase that users commonly say to interact with your custom skill or action.

Do you remember the dot-com boom in the late 90s and the mad panic to grab a suitable domain name for your business? This is very similar. Even if you don’t intend to use the invocation immediately, it is important to acquire this before a competitor.

As you undergo your day-to-day business operations, you may not realise it, but you’ve already got a voice capability. These are evident through the conversations that happen between your team and your customers. Perhaps there are common questions from your target customers that you could be providing answers for through voice solutions? This will allow your customer service teams to focus on higher value and more complex enquiries.

In order to understand what those questions and phrases might be, speak with your customer-facing teams and contact centres. They can offer a goldmine of information that will ensure your solution really does meet organisational needs.

As a behavioural research agency, we help our clients to understand what their customers want and then check that their capabilities accurately meet their needs. For clients with nothing tangible to test, we use a competitor’s Alexa skill and quickly recognise what works, what doesn’t and the opportunities available to their own brand. Testing needn’t be expensive and mocking up voice system prototypes can be done very quickly.

Positioning yourself for voice search means giving searchers and customers the exact result that they are looking for. This leads to more opportunity because the customers that find you, will be highly targeted and likely to find your content useful.

Like tablets and smartphones, the adoption of new technology is happening differently across all ages. Older people that struggle with keyboards and mice due to disabilities have found voice to be liberating. There’s a generation of people coming through, for whom their first experience with computers will be voice before they have even encountered a screen or a keyboard.

Consumers are already using voice for a wide range of potential buying activities, from listening to music, to ordering an uber. Remaining competitive is about thinking of new ways to engage with customers by listening to the interactions they have with your business, about your business and about your market.

Voice technology hasn’t changed the world yet. But like mobile, it will find its place and it will change the way we use technology… watch this space.