How Voice Assistants are Impacting the Shopping Experience
By Ben Rudolph
“Hey Siri”, “Hey Google”, “Alexa”... The combination of smartphones in our pockets and smart speakers in our homes adds an additional form of user input into the mainstream for marketers to harness. Siri and Google Assistant are found on over 3 billion phones in the world. Smart speakers represent the fastest growing consumer technology since the smartphone and are now in more than 66 million homes in the US. Thus, a key question for brands is how will a voice assistant affect the way your consumers shop for goods, and how will you need to alter your current marketing operations to adapt to the medium of voice?
Before we dive into these questions, a quick history lesson on how humans have balanced between oral and written communication throughout the past centuries should suffice to lay the groundwork for this topic. Prior to the invention of the printing press in Europe, humans mainly exchanged information through the “oral tradition”. Coined by Harold Innis, the oral tradition allowed for thoughtful consideration and contemplation of ideas and facts. With the invention of the printing press, the majority of information was presented to us through text. While allowing for better longevity of ideas, the “written tradition” suffers from lack of in depth deliberation. This tendency has carried through to present day with the digitization of information on the internet and the ways we communicate with our electronic devices. With a reemergence of the oral tradition through speech input, brands will need to consider the following insights and use cases when marketing to consumers through this new medium.
1. How product discovery will change: Simply put, communicating through voice happens faster than traditional touch or point-and-click user interfaces. This means voice assistants can increase the speed of the shopping experience. We can speak faster than we can type. Voice assistants also provide an opportunity to offer a frictionless shopping experience. There is no need to pull out a device, unlock it, swipe to find the right app, wait for it to open and load, and so on. Conversing with assistants, like Alexa, through natural language gives customers the reassurance of having their own personal sales associate in the palm of their hands, or in their living room. Of course, there are instances where an assistant fails to answer your question and you are left yelling at Siri. While the competency of assistants is increasing - Google Assistant recently hit the milestone of 85% competency (meaning that it can answer approximately 85% of questions asked) - it is important to continuously update the voice content you create as well as assistant skills so you don’t impede on the frictionless experience on these devices.
During the market-altering power of the internet during the dot-com bubble, if you were a brand without a website, you were invisible. Brands had to transition analog content into digital content. The transition to mobile and smartphones did not require as significant an effort for brands to transition content to a new platform, since smartphones came with mobile browsers. On the other hand, the shift to voice input represents a similar type of transition to the one that was made when internet use became widespread. Not many brands possess large libraries, if any, of voice or audio based content that is packaged in a way that can be understood by voice assistants and translated into Alexa or Google skills. Skills (i.e. Alexa skills) are basically “apps” for your voice. Developers are able to use APIs offered by Google and Amazon to build voice experiences for brands. Even if you are a small brand lacking software engineers, Amazon provides the ability to use a “blueprint template” to fill in blanks and add audio to build a skill in just minutes. Once your brand’s skill is complete you can upload it to the skill store for consumers to discover and activate on their Echo devices.
Brands without voice content could be left behind in a similar fashion to those who did not operate a website during the late 1990s. Discovery is a necessary part of the consumer product journey with 20% of US adults already having used voice as part of their shopping journey.
One brand that has recognized the potential for using voice as a touchpoint in the consumer product journey is Tide. If you ask Alexa, “how do I get rid of this stain?”, Alexa will redirect you to a Tide Alexa skill. The skill will ask you what the stain is and the type of fabric of your clothing. Campbell’s Kitchen’s skill taps into a database of thousands of recipes to offer users time tested recipes. While you are not “buying” any Tide or Campbell’s Soup directly with their respective skills, both companies have successfully “captured” these moments, and Tide and Campbell’s will stay top of mind for consumers the next time they are shopping for detergent or groceries.
2. How shopping will change: While there are conflicting numbers about true levels of voice shopping, research by firms such as Voicebot.ai show that close to 1 in 5 people have used a voice assistant along their shopping journey. This is even greater for millenials, where 45% have reported using voice assistants for shopping. When using a voice assistant for shopping, the statistic for example, does not mean that millennials are completing a purchase using a voice assistant each time but they could be asking their voice assistant for a product review while shopping. RBC Global markets predicts that voice commerce on Alexa could generate $5 billion in sales annually in 2020.
One potential concern with voice shopping lies in the frequency of shopping in general. Currently, the amount of daily and weekly use of shopping using voice assistants amounts to nothing more than a “rounding error” and only 10% of the smart speaker install base shops monthly using their devices. Perhaps this should not be surprising since very few people shop/buy things daily, apart from food. As such, food delivery and groceries comprise 34% and 31% of current purchases, respectively. This infrequency of shopping/purchasing is also paired with a certain trust issue. A report from PwC highlights that the majority of items purchased using a voice assistant are small and are items that someone could buy without necessarily having to see it physically. Yet for some items a personal visit will always be required. A participant from the PwC study on shopping with voice assistants echoes this concern saying: “I would shop for simple things like dog food, toilet paper, pizza… but ‘can you order me a sweater?’ That’s too risky.”
While conversion from mere browsing to an actual transaction remains a difficult task, many brands are testing ways to use voice assistants to drive the conversion to sales in offline settings. Mattress Firm used their Alexa Skill to include promotional codes that could be used in their physical retail locations. BevMo!, a beverage company in California has installed Amazon Echos in aisles to respond to customers with information about certain types of whisky.
3. How SEO will change: Traditional SEO is now a science. People and brands are able to surface their content through a combination of using keywords, backlinks, schema markups, etc. Voice SEO is currently a bit of a black box. When using a smart speaker, if you say, “Alexa, I want to buy some red shoes”, often, the smart assistant will only offer one choice, and only Google or Amazon know why/how this is the top result. Thus, this “position zero” is often the only product that the consumer hears about and the one that enters their decision matrix.
Voice SEO will become extremely important in the future. In a world of cognitive and choice overload, the ability to ask a device a question and have the top result returned instead of a sea of search results may be preferable for consumers. Not wanting to be left behind, brands will have to determine how to get in on the action. Google and Amazon’s algorithms will consider factors like the ability of a brand’s voice apps/skills and its current digital content to answer requests. Achieving this top position is more likely if you have your own voice skill that is optimized to answer consumer questions. If you are considering going down this path the best way to fine tune your voice content is to actually take time to listen to your customers and understand how, when, and why they might ask questions about products within your industry. Currently, although you may want to, you can't advertise or pay to be the first result that is given after a voice enquiry is made in the same way that you can pay to be the first Google result. No sponsored content exists in this space... yet.
4. How AI and “agency” will change everything: Eventually, voice assistants and AI will be able to do things without us needing to tell them. The term agency refers to the capacity to act in a certain environment. Humans, clearly have agency. Currently, our voice assistants require our direction. If voice assistants begin to execute actions without the need for our commands, they too will achieve “agency”. This leads to the idea that they will do things for us because they will know what our preferences are. NYU professor, Scott Galloway, has already propositioned that Amazon will introduce “zero-click” buying. Through your past order history and what your Echo hears in your home, you will receive a box of essentials from Amazon when you need it, along with an empty box to return what you don’t need. Through fine tuning and what you return, your Echo will learn and the return box will get smaller and smaller. In a world of free returns, this isn’t that big a deal. And after all, most of the time, these AI infused assistants are going to be right.
Now time for the major red flag. At the same time firms are creating authentic branded content for voice assistants, they must recognize that to be heard by voice assistants, you need to go to where the people are. This means using either Amazon’s Alexa Skills or Google’s Assistant platform. Unfortunately, this means that your brand is once again dependent on these companies and you are granting them access to your skills and to what your customers are asking about and buying. Further, since Amazon controls both the marketplace and competes on it, you may find that its places its products in position zero which is a conflict of interest. In addition, there is the platform “tax”. Similar to Apple’s App Store, brands must pay Google or Amazon a cut of their sales (usually 30%) when using its platform. Obviously, brands will want to use their skills to make money. To allow for in-app and native purchase payments, you will need to use Amazon or Google’s payment transaction system and cough up some of your hard-earned cash.
In conclusion, brands need to recognize that “v-commerce” has arrived and prepare sufficiently. Brands and retailers need to ensure they build a presence on voice enabled platforms with their voice content to help the increasing number of customers that are using voice as a touchpoint in their product discovery path. Getting a product to surface properly in voice search is not as easy as it may seem and understanding how potential customers’ vocabulary about your product category may change must be considered as part of any voice strategy. As adoption increases, and more consumers turn to voice assistants for the entirety of their purchase journey, brands need to incorporate voice into their marketing strategies. Most importantly, don’t create voice content for the sake of having it; make sure your skill addresses a true pain point for users and effectively solves the problem.
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