Apple’s Siri.
Amazon’s Alexa.
Google’s Assistant.
Microsoft’s Cortana.
Samsung’s Bixby.
Your {Company Name’s} Voice Application.
Have you been thinking about it? Adding a Voice app to your company? Need to weigh the pros and cons of building versus buying? Want the nuts and bolts of X or a surefire plan for Y?
If so, you’ve come to just the right place as we’re covering all the Voice application basics below, with many proven tips and tactics to make your life easier.
First though, CONGRATULATIONS on taking Voice seriously. Marketers have a bazillion things to do, and being one of the few prioritizing Voice puts you heads above the rest. (I know. I know. Nauseatingly rah-rah, but alas… Voice is the fastest growing medium in history, and many marketers are struggling with the overall concept of Voice, so folks like you, who are already working on the execution? 5 out of 5 gold stars.)
WHAT IS A VOICE APPLICATION?
Voice Apps (aka Voice-Based Applications) rely on speech/voice requests to process queries and accomplish goals.
You can develop your proprietary Voice apps, and you can also create applications for other devices, like Amazon’s Echo (Alexa Skills) or Google’s Assistant (Google Actions.)
Voice apps are meant to engage your audience/target market verbally.
WHAT KINDS OF COMPANIES USE VOICE APPLICATIONS? IS THIS JUST A BIG TECH THING?
Voice apps are in retail, B2B, travel, government, healthcare, food/restaurants, education, and more. You’ll find them in homes, cars, offices, factories, hotels, classrooms, and almost every industry you imagine.
WHY SHOULD I BUILD A VOICE APPLICATION FOR MY BUSINESS?
There are lots of reasons why marketers should consider developing Voice-based applications. Voice apps are good for increasing your audience, building authority and showcasing your expertise, and getting an early mover jump ahead of your competition. They can also improve sentiment, boost retention, and streamline user journeys. The latter is one of the main reasons why companies add Voice app technology to their arsenal. Voice, in general, provides for a better customer experience.
SHOULD I BUILD MY OWN VOICE APP?
When it comes to Voice apps, this is the #1 area that people struggle with, as there are solid pluses and minuses to both choices. You can make your life a lot easier by figuring out precisely what you want your Voice app to do, your budget, and when you want it to launch before you start weighing whether to build or buy. By identifying your needs upfront, you may also find that you require additional time – or frankly, expertise — that you don’t have available internally.)
PROS
You own the app. Captain Obvious reporting for duty, I know. In today’s uber-competitive environment (where we’re all inevitably headed to a one-ask-one-answer world), this is a BIG deal.
Provides a bespoke experience for your users. Because your app is custom-designed to suit your needs, you’ll create an ideal journey for your users and not an off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter experience.
You’ll control the data and standards (privacy and security) differently (and better) than you can use a middleman solution.
CONS
It can be pricey.
Often difficult to find “just the right talent” for your project at a price you can afford.
Far too many companies recreate the wheel, wasting valuable time and resources. Depending on your team’s experience, there can be a steep learning curve in an area where documentation/info sharing lags.
There’s a lack of been-there-done-that expertise when integrating with your backend system(s) and the most commonly used tools.
WHAT KIND OF VOICE APP SHOULD I BUILD?
There’s no limit to what you can offer with your Voice App. With that said, it’s essential to keep in mind that although it’s easy(ish) to get people to use an app once, if you want folks to use it on a frequent/ongoing basis, you’ll need to create something that keeps them coming back.
Most Voice apps fall into one of 5 main categories:
Fun and Games (let’s face it, these are the most popular)
News
Customer Service
Informational
Hybrid (a little of everything)
The type of app you should build depends on what you can do/offer. If you’re like most, you’ll have lots of ideas for things you want to do. Some of them will be too difficult to pull off short term. (This is especially true if you’re new to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and/or topics like natural language processing and conversational commerce.)
Some of the things you might want to think about:
What is your main goal for your app? Increasing traffic? Finding new customers? Reactivating and retaining old ones? Streamlining your brand experience? Taking orders? Obtaining and improving sentiment from your users? Showcasing company/market news? Jumping ahead of your competition? Talking pressure off the call center by answering frequently asked questions or helping with after-order instructions/support? Offering a fun and engaging experience? Establishing authority/credibility in your marketplace?
Do you want to give out information or get people to take action? Taking action would include things like ordering, booking appointments/reservations, signing up for a free webinar, or asking for a quote.
How can you use your Voice app to improve your customer retention? Loyalty clubs? Special VIP info? Automatic delivery programs? Bulk buying discounts?
How conversational do you want to be? You should first identify where your business is already conversational when determining this.
Do you want a plain (aka static) Voice app or a dynamic Voice app? A “plain” app typically has predefined information and answers. Dynamic Voice apps, on the other hand, offer real-time content. (Dynamic apps typically get their content via third-party APIs.)
Do you already have a Voice brand? Sonic signature? Spokesperson? What languages do you want your application to be available in? Thinking about stuff like this can seem premature, but it’s not, especially since it can have an impact on your budgets, timelines, and vendor choices.
Do you want to interact with the user or just want to give them information?
Will your application require push notifications? Notifications let users know that you have something new for them. New content. New updates. Etc. They can be triggered manually or automatically.
Are your departments (Customer Service, Sales, Marketing, etc.) ready? Will you need routing policies? Escalation? Do you have established privacy, security, and accessibility standards? Where do you want your application to be available? The US? The world?
Do you want your application to link with your customer accounts? How will you handle login? Authentication?
How often will you update/improve the content/experience? For many companies, creating the app is easy, but maintaining it? Oy. That’s where many folks struggle.
What devices do you want your Voice app to be available on? Are there any limitations?
How will you promote your Voice application? What kind of budget do you have? Is it enough?
What kinds of resources do you have available? Tech? Marketing? Creative? Content? Conversation designers? Customer Service? Testers? Monitors? Trackers? Project Management? Hosting? Etc. Building a Voice application is one thing, but maintaining it is another, so it’s essential to recognize what you can do in-house and how/where you need help. Being crystal-clear about your goals and related boundaries can help keep the project within scope. Again, building an app is the easy part. Growing/improving it takes some consideration.
Need help choosing the Perfect AI vendors? Read more here…
WHAT ARE THE MOST COMMON MISTAKES MARKETERS MAKE WHEN IT COMES TO CREATING VOICE APPS?
The biggest mistakes I see are people creating apps just to have an app. For example, I recently saw a huge retail company market a Voice app that was basically just their hours and locations. Nothing else. They could have done that with schema markup. Incidentally, this is also why it’s important to clearly outline what your Voice app will do before you create it. It gives you a chance to poke holes in your strategy and evaluate whether you can do the same thing in a better, faster, cheaper way.
One of the other errors I see marketers frequently make is biting off way more than they can chew. It’s cool if you want your Voice app to do more than one thing, and it’s typically best to start conservatively and then build up from there.
When building Voice apps, traditional marketers often forget that Voice itself is conversational. That doesn’t necessarily mean that your app needs to be conversational. However, you must remember that you’re creating something that will live within a Voice experience. Not to mention, your app will be hosted in an environment powered by artificial intelligence. AI is a workhorse – processing and analyzing oodles and oodles of data – in real-time and at scale. This means it’s continuously changing, often putting pressure on anything with a symbiotic relationship.
You’ll want to spend some time figuring out your invocation name. Your invocation name is what users will say to find and access your Voice experience. It’s kind of like your domain name but for Voice. (Yes, it’s really that important.) You’ll want to decide whether or not to include your brand; ensure that it’s easy to say and to remember; whether a Voice assistant/device will be able to hear it quickly, and without mistaking it for something else, if it works with existing launch phrases and so on. Incidentally, the device manufacturers have guidelines to help you choose your name. And, before you’ve entirely finalized your name, have several people test it with one or more of the available testers.
Remember, it’s critical to build out your analytics. Surprisingly, many marketers don’t consider this when creating an app. Far too many folks say they’ll just “tack Google Analytics on to it” at the end. Yeah, so that doesn’t work. Apps need additional analytics. Plus, when you’re doing anything with Voice, you need a whole different set of tools to measure what’s working and what isn’t. You’ll want to track sentiment, utterances, length of visit, response effectiveness, etc. (You can read more about voice analytics here.) Using an outside vendor to develop your Voice app? Please don’t assume that you’ll get great analytics out of the box – a lot of the vendor reporting is also VERY limited in scope.
WHICH VOICE ASSISTANT SHOULD I BUILD MY VOICE APP FOR?
Many consultants tell you to look at your device usage and prioritize from there. Although it sounds great in theory, this can be abysmal advice. Your device stats only tell you part of the picture and don’t often extrapolate. Even worse, they often don’t include Amazon’s Alexa/Echo, which can be juicy and is also one of the easier platforms for which to build.
Google Home, Apple HomePod, and Amazon’s Echo are the most popular devices to build for. However, your mileage will vary depending on what you sell and to whom.
By the way, because you’re likely to be working with multiple devices simultaneously, you will want a centralized content repository (aka content store.) A content repository is a centralized location where your content is stored. It’s key to ensuring easy access to all your content and materials. Plus, it allows for better messaging control and easy syndication when you make a change.
And because I know, I will get emails about this…. Companies like Amazon and Google have made it easy to build Voice applications. There’s a lot of FREE, step-by-step documentation available. Or you can use a vendor. There are a bazillion of them. Like app builders, though, there are a lot of smarmy folks in the space, so do your homework – and please pay extra attention to any additional licensing agreements.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS FROM READERS:
The following two questions were added after the article was initially published…. The first is from the VP of one of the US’s most prominent B2B direct marketers. The second is from a small B2C start-up.
WE BUILT AN APP FOR OUR BUSINESS YEARS AGO, AND IT WAS A COMPLETE BOMB AND NEVER PAID FOR ITSELF; HOW IS A VOICE APP GOING TO BE ANY DIFFERENT? MY IT DEPARTMENT IS ALREADY BACKED UP.
Whenever the topic of Voice apps comes up, I inevitably get a variation of this question.
As someone who has reviewed hundreds of traditional apps over time, I can say 95% of non-game/non-utility traditional apps are garbage. And I’m being generous here by counting the gateway apps, which most people wouldn’t.
You already know that the Voice market is exploding, but you may not know that there is typically a tremendous early-mover advantage in Voice. Securing your invocation name, taking advantage of the multitude of SEO benefits, and being in a place where your competitors aren’t are just a few of the benefits.
Voice isn’t going away. It’s only going to get stronger. Unlike traditional apps, which were mostly just variations of a company’s website with maybe one bell and a broken whistle, your Voice app will be housed on devices where apps (skills, actions, etc.) make it work better and improve the user experience.
Can you build a garbage Voice app? Absolutely. I see lots of them that are junk. However, it’s still the (early) Hampster-Dance days of Voice, and you don’t have to do much to make it count. When many companies built their website apps, they dumped a version of their website into an app and thought people would flock to it. Didn’t happen. Then, businesses offered starter coupons to get their customers to try their app. Even with huge incentives, there wasn’t as much adoption as marketers wanted. So, they slowly stopped improving their apps or dropped them like a hot potato altogether. It’s still early, but that doesn’t seem to be happening as much with Voice. Plus, Voice apps are not as expensive, and there is often a nice bump in traffic when you launch.
DOES EVERYONE NEED A VOICE APP?
No. However, all marketers should learn about Voice. Even if you’re not in the time/place/mood to do things like build a Voice app or create a custom Voice assistant today, you should get a solid baseline of Voice; what you want your Voice brand to be; what things you should secure now before it’s too late; and how things like artificial intelligence and natural language processing are changing the game.
And for those in the back, I want to say again; Voice will be bigger than the internet was when it first started.
Do you already have a Voice app and want to share your best tips? Have a question that you’d like to ask? Tweet @amyafrica or write info@eightbyeight.com.
Catalogers and other offline marketers have many advantages when it comes to E-Commerce. 
