5 ways to wake up your voice experience strategy

Like web & native app channels that came before voice and voice assistants, brands are challenged by emerging technology to remain present in voice and the voice assistant platforms they are delivered on.  For billion-dollar companies the answer is often simple: let your innovation team handle it, treat it as R&D; a necessary evil against the bottom line.  For companies where R&D doesn’t always impact customer experience immediately, this challenge around voice is more significant.

Here you will find practical and executable questions that needn’t all be answered, though it wouldn’t hurt.  Instead based on how your business is organized and its culture, one or more of these questions will be useful in stoking the embers of interest and commitment in voice experience.

So where do you start?

1. Does your brand own a space, or just a transaction?

It’s going to be very difficult to entice customers to engage with you on voice if you are simply transactional.  You make something, you sell it; that’s it?  Voice isn’t for you, yet. Focus on eCommerce.  However, if your brand owns a space, a lifestyle, a purpose or mission, voice experience becomes much more exciting.  And owning something larger than a product is nearly table stakes these days anyhow, isn’t it?

I remember the early days of native apps, where Patagonia released a knot tying app that didn’t need an internet connection to work (bringing critical outdoorsmanship knowledge to the back woods).  They had decided long ago they owned the outdoor lifestyle, so the app made sense and was heavily downloaded.  The interesting thing about the app is this: Patagonia didn’t and doesn’t sell rope.

2. For brands that own a space or a mission, voice, voice assistants and even conversational commerce will have opportunities that seem obvious.  Go with it.

Voice experience like the whole of the customer experience, should fall at the intersection of a Venn diagram of what’s useful to the business and what’s useful to the customer.For many businesses creating something that is of great customer value and lesser business value is a hard pill to swallow.  Brainstorming and force ranking help identify those opportunities which offer value to both. In my experience this is a fun and valuable exercise that involves varied skillsets and roles.  Creating a multi-discipline brain trust for this exercise will help achieve buy in and consensus you can leverage later during execution and adoption.

Like emerging technologies of the past, voice should be thought of in a way that doesn’t always lead to an ‘if this then that’ ROI equation.  It will be more complicated and what is documented today will undoubtedly change in the next six months.  The most important thing to do is to start. To create a baseline from which evolution can begin.

3. If you didn’t buy into CX Journey Mapping before, voice experience is the catalyst to get on board.

Voice is simply the newest technology that is involved in the customer experience lifecycle. So, if you have a journey map, a natural step is to determine where in the existing journey voice assistants fit in.  Once it is mapped out you have a top-level strategy for what the voice app should be.

If you don’t have a customer journey map – leverage this voice as the way to step your brand into it.  In my previous life as a strategist on the agency side this exercise & documentation was easily the most valuable to my clients. When I see former clients today, they tell me they still have those journeys, often in further iterations, hanging on their wall, the wall of their product teams and even their C-Suite.

In the words of Nike, Just Do It.

4. Analyze your top existing content

Many brands don’t have to look much further than their existing top tier content from web and social to determine where to start their voice experience.  The newness of the channel means everyone is new to the space. Which means a few things: 1) it’s a land grab 2) you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be there and 3) users are expecting very similar things to what they have experienced in other channels.

This isn’t to say that the content you have, say, on web, is copy paste to voice – though in some cases it may be.  It means the metrics from one channel should be used to influence another.  Like web, native, and others, voice is to be managed – it won’t be a set it and forget it application.

5. Determine what metrics from voice assistants augment or support your current business intelligence.

With mature technology, platforms and channels attribution can be complex and interwoven with several other systems to show value.  Don’t expect that from voice right off the bat.  Instead think through what metrics from voice support existing metrics or augment the value of the customer experience.  Of course, if you can, tie it to ROI and build a better business case for expansion.  But, with many if not most brands, voice apps will be as creative as they are scientific.  Relish the nascence of this space – it will mature quickly, but for now knowing it’s time to understand business value through experimentation should be strong enough business logic for many brands.

While answering these questions you will be curious about how to get your voice content managed and deployed to one or all of the voice assistant channels; perhaps even chatbots.  That’s where the Voicify Experience Platform comes in.  With a direct relationship on complexity and volume of within the voice app you have planned – Voicify’s voice content management system can get you loaded and deployed in days or weeks, not months. And with our robust and aggregated analytics features, you will know how the app is being used, and even what’s missing based on transcribed user questions that fell outside your apps knowledge base.