Activating Conversational Marketing
A lot of the conversations we have with prospects and customers alike is ‘how do we get started in voice?’
It becomes clear to everyone we speak to, the value, simplicity and extensibility of the Voicify Conversation Engagement Platform™; but where to start, is a critical question.
Like anything in digital, it is always best to start with a documented plan or strategy. In fact one of the reasons we began Voicify was to drastically reduce the need for repeatable or automatable tasks and let the brand focus on what is critical to success, what is of value to the customer and how can it be valuable to the business.
So the underlying question to us is, how do you go about determining what the plan should be?
What is following is a general process for identifying and creating a conversation strategy. It may be created by a small team of just a few, or demand buy in from senior executives. We won’t go into detail on the nuances of internal processes, though they will be peppered throughout our recommendation.
The top three compelling features in the use of voice assistants are, Fast and accurate replies (82%), Understanding diction & accent (81%, and relevancy of recommendations (75%).
1. Locate the Customer Journey Map
Sometimes marketing holds this asset, other companies assign it to a Customer Experience group. Regardless, your business likely has a documented visual, or list of moments where the customer comes in contact with the brand across the enterprise: support, sales, events, store, supply chain – wherever YOUR customer may be.
2. Dig into every touch-point you have documented
Take some time to review each touch-point or ‘micro moment’ as Google calls them. At this point you don’t need the SME for each moment, or a deep understanding of process and nuance. Just get your head around them.
3. Run through possible conversation channel support/engagement for each micro moment
Perhaps in a work-session setting, leverage some critical thinkers to do real time analysis on the appropriateness of and likelihood for each touch-point to have a supporting or primary use with chatbots or voice with virutal assistants.
4. Disregard all touch-points with no conversation opps
You likely have a series of touch-points which are not appropriate for voice and/or chatbot. That’s good. Strategy is as much about choosing what not to do, more so than what to do. You will dismiss these moments with no conversation support opportunities. They aren’t rejects, just not what we can deal with right now.
5. Build a prioritization table with the remaining opps
Create a table, with each opportunity as a row. Identify a series of criteria for judging the value of each opportunity which will become the columns. These can be generic and simplistic, or specific to your company and complex.
6. Rank in each category
You can force rank them on the whole (e.g. 1-10 where no opportunity can have more than one ranking). Or, give each opportunity a 1-10 ranking (where you define the scale appropriate to your business, which will offer an aggregate top level ’score’ you can create with an equation.
7. See what’s on top
After running the process you will be able to discern which of these opportunities are most favorable for your strategy. You can now assemble these into a plan, roadmap, pro-forma or what ever format your company typically uses.
8. Validate it with peers, decision makers and/or customers
Some of your opportunities will be low risk, meaning validation may not be necessary. Some will be heavy investment, which means more than this process will be needed to bring them to life. So run the processes and be sensitive to the culture of your organization, while generating excitement and gaining consensus across the enterprise.
Throughout this process Voicify can be a tool for showcasing capabilities, experience and prototyping – with the added benefit of no-throw away work. Anything you do with Voicify before deployment to chatbots or voice assistants remains in the system for deployment use. So even early in the process, leveraging Voicify is valuable.