What Happened
Amazon Prime members can ask Alexa to get their groceries delivered within hours, thanks to the latest expansion of the voice assistant’s shopping capabilities. By integrating Prime Now programs into Alexa, Amazon is pushing the envelope on Alexa’s ecommerce capabilities and make it more deeply ingrained in Prime members’ daily lives. Beyond grocery products, Alexa can also order fast deliveries for smaller items such as video games from local stores. Some cities, such as Seattle, Columbus, and Cincinnati, will even get booze delivery via Alexa.
What Brands Need To Do
As Amazon continues to improve Alexa’s capabilities and integrate it with existing services, users will likely get more comfortable with voice shopping, thus presenting a new dilemma for brands in reaching customers via a voice-based conversational interface like Alexa. Short of partnering with Amazon to put your products atop the voice search results, which Amazon has yet to start doing, a good solution is for brands to develop their own Alexa skills. For example, beer giant Anheuser-Busch recently launched an Alexa skill that guides users through various workout routines designed to burn off the calories of a beer, which is a cool way to establish a brand presence on Alexa devices while providing extra value to customers.
According to a report from analytics firm VoiceLabs, about 33 million voice-first devices will be in circulation by the end of 2017. Therefore, It is up to brands to start working with developers to figure out their brand voice and incorporate conversational tools into their marketing efforts.
How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.
If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland (samantha@ipglab.com) to schedule a visit to the Lab.
Source: VentureBeat