The road to voice: How you can join the revolution

Voice is hot right now, especially if you’re tuned into to the guys with the voice platforms who are “KPI’d” on getting you to join the revolution. Now, if you’re like the majority of businesses, you’re only just getting the tech, experience and talent in place to deal with your current digital ecosystem and the data/effort that provides and requires, then how the hell are you going to handle the paradigm shift to voice? Don’t stress.Whilst voice is definitely the destination, the journey for each business/sector needs to be broken up into phases and treated as just that – a journey. If you think about where you are today, there are five key stages that we see from our clients, globally, that seem to line up and provide some “gates” for you to aim to get through. No voice Voice light Voice intermediate Voice heavyPure voiceThe first stage is where many organisations begin: a state of no voice support. Once they’ve decided to begin supporting the technology, they enter the next stage: voice light. These brands might offer text-based chatbots that can eventually be trained or converted into a voice interface.Common use-cases for voice-light brands are things such as customer service, as it’s an accessible touch point to automate. Voice-light brands continue to be screen-first, and often aren’t using voice (yet), but have laid down the conversational data foundation to support it in the near future. These two areas are where most brands currently lie.The following stage is voice intermediate. Brands in this stage have some sort of voice offering allowing users to search for, access and interact with content through speech. These brands still make use of screens for assistance or providing added context, but aren’t dependent on them. This is the sweet spot between achieving voice maturity while applying learnings and insights from other, more visual touch points within the brand ecosystem. The Tide Alexa skill, which is Alexa’s ability in answering over 200 laundry questions that users may have, is a great example of this by providing users with step-by-step instructions on how to reduce stains via voice and through text, so they can refer back to them later.On this end of the spectrum, you’ll also find voice-heavy brands, which have little reliance on the screen, as well as brands that have gone pure voice. Few have made it that far with success.This is why I recommend that those road-mapping their voice strategy ground themselves in what they do know given their current digital maturity, then incrementally work from there to reduce screen dependence bit-by-bit.Especially if your brand is still mastering your existing marketing channels— such as offering a best-in-class website, mobile app, social media presence and content strategy—then the time isn’t yet right for you to worry about voice. Establish a strong digital ecosystem first, which will serve as the foundational starting point for your foray into the wonderful world of voice.So, how does a brand graduate from the first stage to the second, or second to third? Below you’ll find guiding steps on how to achieve the voice experiences that users have come to expect.Understand: The key part to this is understanding your audience and how you can intervene with voice that will enhance their experience with your products and services not disrupt this just so you can say you have a voice strategy. Think back to the auto-play videos in early websites that frightened, then pissed off your consumers, prompting them to swat “x” boxes and pause buttons like flies just so you could say you had a multi-media strategy.Plan: Plan to take your users on a journey, plan for change, plan for delivering the absolute best customer experience you can. Plan for setbacks, plan for success!Test & Learn: Too often, transformational projects such as this try to boil the ocean. Pick a segment of your audience, ideally the lowest hanging fruit (early adopters) and test it on them. Offer them something to be part of the test, so even if it goes “squonk”, you haven’t damaged your relationship. Then identify the next segment most likely to adopt your voice offering. Test, learn, test, learn. Campaigns such as this from KFC in India, which recently developed a chatbot with the help of Alexa to make food ordering easier, are great ways to test out how voice could play a role in your ongoing marketing plans. Optimise, optimise, optimise: Just as digital has changed, voice will change. So to will your consumers. So this is not a set and forget initiative, this is a living, breathing extension of your business, even more so than your digital properties/campaigns as we’re talking about a totally new sensory experience, a much more personal one IMHO.Invest: Invest in talent, invest in technology, invest in innovation, invest in your business.Run the numbers: The glue holding all of this together is the data. You need to set some KPIs upfront, but they need to be fluid and grow with the initiative but they need to be upheld, not hidden from. If you don’t have success metrics for this, it’s already destined to fail. The recycling bin in every large business is full of failed innovation projects because they didn’t succeed. Most of them only to be resurrected later, at 10 times the cost by one of the big consultancies who changed one thing…. They did the numbers.In conclusion, even brands that support a myriad of digital platforms are easily stumped by voice; it’s unique over other digital campaigns in that it provides a new sensory experience and strikes a highly personal chord with users. This, paired with its newness, can certainly make the technology a bit intimidating if not downright daunting for brands to support. But by sticking to what you know and taking a measured approach, brands can support the personable platform with confidence.The writer is Tobias Wilson, VP of growth, APAC at MediaMonks.