Voice: The Fourth Sales Channel

Voice-controlled devices have taken a huge upsurge in recent years. They have become increasingly popular at the domestic level, and are now making their presence felt at the organization levels. Alexa, Amazon’s runaway success, is now available for businesses. It can help you at your desk, simplify conference rooms, help around the office, and add voice to your products and services.

Voice-controlled devices are great for helping with self-service and connected back-end bots, and hence can generate a positive impact on the businesses. However, their ‘always listening’ characteristic may raise security concerns at the workplace. However, that issue is eliminated largely with domestic use. As per CTA’s research, one in four shoppers used voice assistants in their holiday shopping during the 2017 season. A brand’s identity is an area where marketers can use the rise in smart speaker sales to their advantage if they haven’t already leveraged it. A good way to do that is to merge your brand with voice assistants and see how you can create content exclusively for that medium. Case in point, something like building a custom, branded skill for Amazon Echo.

2018 might see the emergence of new voice recognition tools as well, which can also be faster than the existing ones and easier to engage with. Alexa’s success is just the tip of the iceberg, tomorrow you can very well have a personal one at your workplace. How would you use it?