How to design proprietary speech experiences that engage and benefit customers in the long run

Almost every aspiring brand is trying to build long lasting, sticky relationships with customers and monetize it. However, in 2022, competing for their attention can be a daunting, almost insurmountable task. As the demand for less and less available attention has increased, some desperate tactics have emerged: Hong Kong redesign of the traffic lights to try to catch the attention of pedestrians staring at their phones; or an increasing number brands that rely on “dark patterns” in an effort to access more data and secure more eyeballs.

The good news is that an easier way to productively engage with an increasingly distracted population is emerging. More than a quarter (27%) of the global online population use voice search on their mobile devices, and 500 million people use Siri every day. High-quality voice experiences are a particularly promising medium for engaging with consumers in a meaningful, responsive and consistent way, rebalancing the value exchange between brand and customer.

We have – out of necessity – learned how to use our fingers to talk. Now a much more intuitive and natural form of communication, voice experiences, allows people to do things they already need and want to do – but with the ease and simplicity of talking to a friend.

For brands, voice experiences can provide a direct and immediate bridge between consumer needs and a brand’s products and services, without friction. It is this speed of access that is already changing consumer behavior. Erica, the virtual assistant that Bank of America launched in 2018, is overused a billion time by customers who want information about transactions, refunds and costs.

Voice experiences also enable brands to engage with consumers when screens are cumbersome (i.e. while cooking, driving, or running on a treadmill), or even when multitasking (such as while taking a walk or listening to a podcast). Today’s leading brands are already recognizing the shift in commerce from screens to voice and are taking the first steps to maintain and grow market share in this new channel. Juniper Research Predictions that the value of e-commerce transactions through voice assistants will exceed $19.4 billion by 2023.

We’ve seen SONOS, Disney, Samsung and Bank of America take leading positions in the evolution of proprietary voice services. And as a Wikipedia project sponsor Wikimedia Foundation said: “When a virtual voice assistant answers a question using Wikimedia knowledge, people don’t always know where the information comes from.” That’s justification for their efforts to design a new sound logo that identifies Wikimedia content, and it’s a testament to the growing market demand for speech. The number of voice assistant users has multiplied from 544.1 million in 2015 to 2.6 billion in 2021, says the foundation.

Designing new journeys from the ground up

To unlock the value that speech can provide, brands must design proprietary speech experiences that truly add value to their users’ everyday lives. As studies have shown, “A 20% increase in simplicity results in a 96% increase in customer loyalty. It can lead to consumers being 86% more likely to buy brands and 115% more likely to recommend those brands to others.”

However, it’s not enough to simply add generic voice commands on top of existing screen-based experiences, while continuing to draw attention and interaction to screens to execute the final command. This is also not a matter of moving everything in an app to speech. To gain customer loyalty and maintain brand trust, entirely new journeys must be designed from the ground up – journeys that are optimized for their context of use and often transition seamlessly between voice and visual interfaces.

So what should brands look for when they first start building impactful speech experiences? Here are five best practices we keep coming back to:

Prioritize simple use cases

The reduction in cognitive load is what gives consumers a sense of relief when using speech technology, and that simple sense of relief is what makes voice experiences so fundamentally valuable. Instead of investing in complex use cases with multiple turns that sound impressive, prioritize implementing simple use cases that help you deliver a voice experience that shortens time to value for users and saves consumers’ lives makes it easier. Determined, simpler use cases are easier to learn and more likely to meet user expectations.

Quality is everything

One of the most common complaints about voice experiences isn’t the lack of complex, sophisticated interactions, but rather the frequency of request misunderstandings. Tolerance for latency is paper thin. This means ensuring that every connection point in the voice assistant – from device connection to automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP) (i.e., reliable parsing, tagging and delivering meaning of utterances) – is successfully delivered before it moves on to anything more advanced.

Consider when speech is the most efficient experience (and when it isn’t)

While a branded voice assistant can be viewed through the same lens as a branded app – as a container of use cases associated with one brand and separated from others – creating a voice assistant is not a matter of replicating the functionality of an existing app via audio channels. We’ve already learned that good apps don’t just replicate good websites, and the same logic applies to moving from apps to voice assistants.

When consumers know and can articulate what they want, voice can work beautifully to meet their needs easily and quickly. For many interactions, including when consumers don’t know exactly what they want or when the range of decisions is complex, screens are likely to remain optimal. And as more and more visual interfaces become embedded in our lives (and virtual lives), speech will increasingly complement these rich visual experiences as part of the same product or service experience.

Build continuity across devices

To create a seamless voice experience, you need to understand the variety of devices consumers access throughout the day, then orchestrate an experience across all of those devices. For example, a user wants to order a pair of sneakers through their smart speakers in the morning in the kitchen and check in their order through smart earbuds during their evening commute, so your voice experience should support that. In addition, interaction patterns, audio cues, language and tone must be consistent over time to build familiarity and trust with your brand.

Own your brand experience

Just as apps and websites have become central materializations of a brand’s personality and what the brand stands for, voice experiences can and should evolve to be the same. From your use case to wake work, voice, content and performance, every element must be considered and combined to create the brand experience your customers will enjoy. Creating a direct relationship with consumers through a brand-driven voice assistant is the most effective way to take ownership of your brand and pick up on customer signals to quickly improve your service experience.

Enabling a ‘head-up’ culture

Designing a voice-based multimedia user experience from scratch can be an overwhelming undertaking. Brands need to remember that the best voice experiences simply address existing user needs and make them significantly faster and easier to fulfill. The goal is not to overwhelm consumers with new technology that they will only use once. Rather, the goal is to build daily usage and monetize relationships with consumers in those places where voice can make their lives easier. If we do that, we hope we can avoid having to redesign our cities for distracted citizens and instead enable a “head-up” future where everyone has just a little more presence.

John Goscha is the founder and CEO of Native Voice.