3 ways branded Voice Assistants can drive personalisation in Enterprise Marketing

In recent times, the world has witnessed the gradual growth of voice technology, and businesses are actively leveraging the situation. The most prevalent use of voice AI are virtual voice assistants.

Voice assistants uses voice recognition, language processing algorithm and voice synthesis to listen to the users’ commands and provide them with relevant solutions, perform any task or provide information as required.

Voice assistants can be integrated into most devices, browsers, websites, social media and applications. With the growth of smartphones and IoT devices, the significance of voice assistants has also grown drastically.

With voice being the more relevant, convenient and practical part of life, people started preferring voice searches more than text searches. Undoubtedly, voice search and voice search optimisation have become an essential part of the digital world, and soon it will grow multifold.

Businesses today want innovative ways to comfort and provide the best experience to their customers throughout the customer journey, and voice assistants are an excellent feature for it. This article will explore how brands can leverage voice technology into their marketing strategy and how it is largely beneficial.

Voice assistants are a type of virtual digital assistants which can understand human language and perform tasks based on spoken commands. Voice assistants uses AI, voice recognition technology, natural language processing and speech synthesis to respond to humans.

With AI, voice assistants synthesises the user’s message, breaks it down, evaluates it and offers the most relevant and meaningful response in return. There are broadly two categories of use cases of voice assistants – 1) general purpose voice assistants and 2) service-oriented voice assistants.

Voice assistants like Alexa, Google assistants, Siri, and Bixby belong to the general purpose category, where they can assist users in broad areas like playing music, controlling IoT devices, making a call, browsing information, etc.

Conversely, the second category of voice assistants is the ones integrated with websites, apps or software to help their users navigate the service and support the customer journey. These voice bot assistants are trained according to the business purposes; for example, a fitness app with a voice assistant are trained to solve all the fitness-related queries and help users access their service.

Voice assistants can also be categorised based on their working style. Voice assistants that work through smart speakers are called passive listening devices, while other types of voice assistants integrated into apps, websites, or chatbots are touch or tap activated.

There are basically five major steps involved in the working process of voice bots.

All these processes happen in seconds, and it would be an understatement or oversimplification to just say that voice assistants hear human commands and hold a conversation with them.

A report by Statista claims that the global voice market size will grow from 10.7 billion USD in 2020 to 27.16 billion USD by 2026. And a report by google also shows that 27% of the global online population uses voice search on mobile. As mentioned earlier, voice assistants and voice searches are gradually growing and becoming essential to the digital lifestyle.

The use cases and applications of voice cases have grown from a mobile voice assistant which helps to perform tasks like calling, browsing the internet and playing music to many custom-made voice assistants on various websites and mobile applications. So, brands need to have their custom voice assistants who can guide and support their customers through their customer journey. With voice assistants, brands can build relationships with their customers, provide timely support and improve the user experience.

By leveraging the data gathered through the voice assistant, businesses can also enhance their analytics and understand their customers’ problems, expectations and preferences.

The custom branded voice assistants will carry the brand ideologies, marketing strategies and brand voice with every conversation they hold with the users. It will help provide a personalised voice experience, increase brand awareness, customer loyalty, customer retention, and improve sales efficiency.

Businesses can choose between a white-label voice assistant or go for a fully-owned custom voice assistant. Both white label and fully-owned voice assistants have their own pros and cons.

White label voice assistants are built by partnering with large voice AI platform providers like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. Businesses can use their software and build their own voice assistant. White label voice assistants are highly cost and time-efficient solutions. It makes them the most suitable voice assistant solution.

While to have a fully-owned custom voice assistant, brands need to build the voice assistant from scratch. It is an extremely time consuming and complex process. It also calls for ample financial muscle and human resources. From building the bots, testing and training them to deploy them properly and checking their performance requires a rigorous process.

Many global brands and large business enterprises choose to deploy fully-owned branded voice assistants, as they want to hold the entire control over the customer data, data privacy & security and to enhance the brand experience.

Global brands and large businesses are actively integrating voice technology and voice assistant into their marketing strategy. Furthermore, many businesses are likely to have separate in-depth voice marketing strategies, which include sonic branding, recorded audio content, voice assistants and voice search optimisation.

With the rapidly advancing SEO, brands need to incorporate plentiful recorded content and other voice-enabled technologies into their digital marketing strategies to support customers through verbal communication.

The blueprint for delivering a seamless customer journey lies in the businesses’ ability to know and understand their customer needs and expectations and enhance the user experience accordingly. Machine learning and NLP coupled with voice technology is a great feature that helps businesses to provide a personalised and customised tailored user experience. AI Voice assistants also promptly respond to behavioural changes and try to handle the situation.

A fully-owned custom voice assistant will help businesses collect data that can be used to understand customer expectations.

With voice assistants, marketers can easily obtain behavioural and contextual data such as demographical information, what product users are mostly talking about, which service gets the least attraction, friction in understanding the brand, and what kind of platform or source users are using. Businesses can understand emerging trends from the data gathered.

Marketers can use all information to build personalised marketing/advertising strategies and campaigns. They can draft a campaign for the social media audience, while another personalised campaign for the official website and e-commerce sites. Marketers also can obtain real-time insights about the campaigns and make adequate changes accordingly to improve the performance.

Voice assistants can be integrated into the businesses’ omnichannel marketing line-up. Once integrated, the voice assistant will start providing personalised solutions to the users across various platforms and also consistently monitor the customer journeys.

For example, if a user is accessing a voice assistant in a mobile app of a bus ticketing platform and looks for bus information. The same user shifts to the official website of the ticketing platform to book a ticket and uses the voice assistant on the website to confirm the booking; the voice assistant will already know which bus the user was looking for, what destination the person is headed to and other special requirements. Brands can seamlessly incorporate voice commerce into their custom voice assistant, paving the way for the most convenient and personalised user journey and experience.

Voice assistants can be integrated with most business and marketing software like resource management, CRM, HR systems, CMS, etc. They can analyse enterprise-specific vocabulary and drive intelligence from the integrated systems and provide answers to the users’ queries.

For example, in a hospital’s app, the user is getting the help of a voice assistant to book a virtual appointment. The voice assistant will check the doctor’s calendar and fix the consultation call as it will be integrated into the doctor’s calendar. When the consultation hour nears, a follow-up notification can also be set by the user for a reminder.

Voice assistants can connect with the email marketing system and trigger a reminder mail. In the same way, post the consultation, the user can make a fee payment through the voice assistant. Further, voice assistants can collect feedback and update the info in the CRM.

It is no doubt that custom voice assistants can help businesses develop a branded voice that fully echoes their brand identity and awareness. But it comes with many challenges like

To overcome these challenges, you can partner with digitalisation partners like DMG, who will help you with building your custom-branded voice assistant seamlessly. DMG holds expertise in analysing, conceptualisation and creating voice assistants.

With our team of experienced programmers and developers, we have defined the process of building enterprise-level voice assistant solutions. We provide our extensive support from understanding the landscape of clients’ businesses, the need for voice assistants and selecting the right voice assistant platform to develop personalised fully-owned custom voice assistants, training and deploying them into your systems.

We also extend our support in the post-deployment phase in tracking, monitoring and auditing the voice assistant’s performance. We also provide consulting services to initially check on the need/requirement of a voice assistant, and also, we can provide maintenance services if you already have an effective voice assistant.