Читать книгу The Innovation Ultimatum - Steve Brown - Страница 57

Every business should have a digital voice strategy. Voice platforms offer customers a new way to interact with your brand, will complement customer support capabilities, and can be helpful for employees who use their hands to perform their work or don't work in traditional office settings.

First, determine the goals for voice platforms within your organization. Find areas where information delivered via voice interfaces improves worker efficiency or boosts their collaboration. Ask what conversational capabilities your brand should create for existing customers, and how voice might be used to attract new customers. Consider the role of interactive, talking online ads, e.g., “Click to ask me questions about our latest model!” Explore how digital voice agents can reduce support costs and open new sales channels.

Customers always want more choice. When brands give us more choice, they honor our desire to be recognized as individuals. Consumers expect to interact with brands through many channels: face-to-face, phone, web, mobile app, social media, virtual reality, interactive augmented reality objects, chatbots, voice agents, and more. Each brand will offer as many of these choices as makes sense for them. A voice interface is a new front door to your business, and voice agents are ambassadors of your company's brand. You must secure that front door the same way you secure your website. And you need to teach your ambassador to always put your best foot forward.

Businesses will need to train their chatbots to interact with a “tone” that is consistent with their brand voice. Marketing departments will need to define appropriate design parameters: Should the voice agent strike a casual or a formal tone? Calm and efficient, or excited to serve? Serious, or with a sense of humor? Rated G for everyone, or more PG-13? Voice agents for Disney, Harley Davidson, and Moët & Chandon will sound very different from one another.

Decide where to develop your voice agents: in-house, using third-party frameworks, or on existing voice platforms. Google, Amazon, Apple, and other tech giants enable developers to create apps for their voice services. Google calls these apps “actions” while Amazon calls them “skills.” The make-versus-buy decision will vary by brand. Most will build a presence on the major tech platforms. For competitive or security reasons, some brands may elect to build a dedicated voice agent that is embedded inside their apps and websites. Banks may prefer their own voice agents for security reasons. Bank of America's Erica virtual assistant is a good example.

The future of voice may become more open. Today's main voice platforms, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, resemble AOL and Compuserve, the walled garden online services of old. The rise of the internet, with open standard web pages and browsers, broke down the walls of the online services and opened up the online world to anyone who wanted to participate. Efforts like the Open Voice Network seek to build standards for online voice akin to HTML for webpages and enable brands to build their own voice capabilities. Time will tell if this will fell the initial duopoly of the tech giants.