Creating engaging and (actually) enjoyable interactive voice experiences for marketing campaigns or customer service touchpoints must address several variables. Ultimately, it is the quality of the brand experience and the degree to which that experience plays to the strengths of voice as a medium that determines whether brands’ two-way voice interactions will be successful. There’s much to gain as voice-enabled devices and smart speakers increasingly surround us. But engagement through interactive voice will favor those brands who truly understand it.Â
Brands are right to be looking to interactive voice campaigns as a new way to make a measurable impact on audiences, and strategy must be crafted around these seven questions:
1. What Value Does the Experience Deliver to Consumers?
The core consumer benefit of a voice experience must be at the heart of all decisions that go toward shaping it. For example, does the voice interface make it easier for someone to save time or money? While these are common advantages delivered across many interfaces, voice has unique capabilities for providing near-effortless interactions with consumers that are more convenient than typing or clicking.
Playing to that advantage, voice experiences can provide time and money savings through seamless access to coupons, personalized product recommendations, order management and more; the creative applications for this still-nascent medium are particularly vast. Voice interfaces can also re-engage and remind consumers of demonstrated interest in products or offers through follow-up experiences. Brands should take the opportunity to communicate brand value, in the brand’s own personality, as part of their voice experiences.
See More: Why Immersive Commerce Is the Next Standard in Customer Experience
2. In What Context Is the Consumer Engaging in the Voice Experience?
Hands-off voice experiences allow users to multitask – which means they could be engaging in a variety of activities during interactions. That said, brands should leverage available context to shape more appropriate and engaging interactions. Interactions should consider the user’s device: voice-only devices should direct task fulfillment to users’ phones as necessary, while devices with screens should allow users to tap buttons in addition to spoken interactions. Brands must consider the user’s location as well, tailoring appropriate experiences for those who are driving versus those who are relaxing at home. The time of day also provides crucial context; for example, voice ads offering food items will be more successful just before the lunch and dinner hours.Â
Case in point: Pizza Hut India ran an interactive voice campaignOpens a new window offering a buy-one-get-one pizza offer, using custom dialogues for ads airing at lunch and dinner times. For example, creative airing at dinner time invited the listener to share a meal with friends or family. Approaching listeners with creative dialed-in to listener’s context (or hunger) at the correct moment was vital to the campaign’s success.
3. How Long Can a Voice Experience Realistically Hold a Consumer’s Attention?
A recent study from the scientific journal Psychology & MarketingOpens a new window finds that essential brand and product information can be communicated in 10 seconds or less. At the same time, interactive voice audio ads can quickly form memorable brand experiences, even in scenarios where users are multitasking. In shaping voice experience duration, a less-is-more approach is best for holding consumers’ attention without wearing out your welcome.
4. Is Your Audience Prepared for Voice Interactions?
Interactive voice experiences are relatively new to most, and that’s especially true for voice advertising experiences. Brands should ensure that their audience understands how to engage with these experiences by beginning interactions with an explanatory prompt, for example, stating, “This is an ad you can talk to.†Such prompts demonstrably increase engagement with interactive voice content.
5. What Is Your Brand Voice Personality (And How Do You Use It)?
Brands that create a unique and authentic brand voice and utilize that voice in interactive experiences across channels earn higher engagement. Recognizable spokespersons or characters can certainly contribute to success in creating a brand voice. The interactivity enabled by voice technology platforms further allows for wide-ranging creativity and customization. Dialogues need not be yes/no responses; brands will benefit if they take advantage of the ability to be in a conversation, not sound like a bot or IVR system.
For example, interactive voice ad campaigns can address customers with different creative content at different brand touchpoints and dynamically adapt subsequent ad experiences based on past ad responses and stated preferences. In this way, brands can demonstrate understanding and build relationships through meaningful spoken conversations with customers.Â
6. How Is the Brand Guaranteeing User Data Privacy?
Modern ad technology creates fear when its mechanisms aren’t transparent to the user. For example, most consumers don’t understand how retargeting ads work, so they may react negatively when they see the same banner chasing them across the internet. In reality, ad tech companies know far less of users’ personal information than it might seem.
 With voice ad experiences, customers can decide what information they want to share with a brand while speaking aloud. Voice ads can therefore provide transparency rather naturally by referring to preferences stated in past conversations. For example, if a customer responded to an initial ad for a coffee shop with “I don’t drink coffee,†the follow-up ad can say, “I know you said before that you don’t like coffee, but do you like tea?†It’s completely clear to the user how the brand knows what it knows and uses that information, and the positive result is less repetitive and irrelevant ads.
7. How Can Brands Measure the Impact of Voice Experiences?
Voice engagement interfaces built for informational and transactional purposes can measure success through their usage rates and the resources saved through automation. For example, adding voice experiences may measurably decrease the number of inquiries or transactions that human customer service workers need to handle. A brand app that adds voice functionality might see increased downloads and an improved user rating. Voice experiences for product ordering offer particularly clear metrics: has the convenient voice interface increased purchases?Â
See More: How To Raise the CX Bar by Strategically Collecting and Operationalizing Data
Interactive voice marketing also provides a depth of metrics unavailable with passive campaigns, with actively engaged users speaking aloud to make their reactions to offers and creative content very clear (versus audio ads that essentially go in one ear, out the other). Pedigree, for exampleOpens a new window , ran a voice ad campaign that received conversation engagement from 14% of its audience, a number that blows traditional audio ad engagement out of the water. Metrics like these offer the opportunity not only to understand when ads are successful but also to leverage feedback and adapt new offers to match individual preferences. This is a marked and important contrast to passive campaigns that repeat offers to users who aren’t interested.Â
An Opportunity for Brands To Be at the Forefront of Interactive Voice
Brands that take a ground-up approach to develop voice experiences will have the most success in harnessing the unique advantages of the medium. By answering the questions above and considering consumers’ needs in relation to a carefully cultivated brand voice, brands have a new opportunity to build compelling experiences that deepen customer relationships and enable conversations as never before possible.
How are you making your voice campaigns more enjoyable and engaging? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .