Hello, who is this? Or the future of voicebots!

Need an assistant to help you take notes while driving? Need an assistant to take the burden off your call centre colleagues and eliminate the repetitive boredom factor? We can do one, for free! If you’re interested in more details, stay tuned and we’ll have the best assistant candidates by the end of this article.

Seriously, when our team compiled the top 19 e-commerce trends for 2022 earlier this year (if you haven’t read it yet, head here and we’ll wait for you back here), we had to devote two points to voice solutions. It’s already clear that this year will be the year of e-commerce again, which makes it worth spending a little more time on the subject.

Let’s get started! Find out what you need to know about voice assistants and chatbots. We’ll tell you what voicebots are all about and why you should start using them in e-commerce as soon as possible!

Hey, Google, what’s a voicebot?

The star of voice-using assistants (VUI) emerged around 2017 on the never-ending horizon of artificial intelligence surprises, and today nearly 33% of consumers use voice assistants daily instead of traditional search. Not surprisingly, it’s a smart, fast and easy-to-use feature, not to mention versatile and can be used with a variety of devices. In fact, thanks to its rise, a wide variety of smart devices now have voice assistant functionality, and they are not only increasingly capable of more tasks, but also more realistic. And it’s no coincidence that both Apple and Amazon are dominated by “girls” when it comes to assistants. One of the Kaspersky research commissioned by a leading cybersecurity company has shown that Hungarian consumers prefer their assistants to speak to them in a female voice, which reflects global market trends.

As voice search becomes more popular, it can directly influence search results and purchase rates. So much so, that the total value of purchases through voice shopping is expected to reach $40 billion (13.3 trillion forints) by 2022, with a 55% increase in the number of these users.

Hey, Google, when does my next meeting start? Hey, Alexa, what’s the weather like today? Cortana, find me some red shoes. Hey, Siri, tell a joke. It’s likely that the above phrases will be on the tip of our tongues more and more often, as voice assistants are available to help with note-taking while driving, reading the news in the shower and many other tasks.

And to optimise e-commerce sites, the first step is to make sure that we have made the site suitable for voice search by prioritising and updating the questions that customers ask most frequently. For example:

• company and business information

• transport and delivery options

• cancellation and return policy

• customer service

• product use

Plus, for e-commerce stores, it is useful to have a product search bar based on voice. And if all that wasn’t enough, now comes the fun part, because it’s great to have a chatbot on your site, but it’s time to get voicebots to help drive traffic to your site!

Chatbot vs. voicebot

Many people are familiar with the concept of chatbots, as most users have encountered them, mainly in customer service channels. A chatbot is a computer application that can automatically chat with a user. And in fact, voicebot is a chatbot, only it’s voice-based instead of text-based. While the chatbot needs you to type in your questions and the answer is in writing, the voicebot understands human speech and gives you the answer in the form of speech. A voicebot is actually a voice assistant. And although chatbots debuted in 1966 and have evolved since then, Siri was the first VUI-enabled virtual assistant in 2011.

The key difference is that voice bots require an extra step, i.e. recognising human speech and converting it into written text. From here on, the voicebot basically behaves like a chatbot, until you get a reply, which you have to convert back into a voice.

Source: freepik.com

The disadvantage of voicebot

➖ The voicebot is usually “busted” sooner, because the user quickly realises that it is not human-assisted, as the machine-synthesised speech sound is recognisable. But this negative effect will be completely eliminated in the foreseeable future, because companies are making gigantic improvements in this area.

SOLUTION: It is advisable to make it clear at the very beginning of the conversation that this information is coming from a machine, to avoid any suspicion of deception.

The advantages of voicebot

➕ A big advantage is that the user’s spelling doesn’t matter, because you can’t misspell in the spoken language. A recurring problem with chatbots is that many customers communicate with very poor spelling or simply misspell words, or even don’t use accented letters. In such cases, chatbots should always be specially prepared with careful training. With voicebots, you can save this step.

➕ Extremely cost-effective. An excellent alternative for call centres. And it’s not that machines are taking people’s jobs, but rather that the voicebot is filtering customers. It is able to answer 80-90% of the most common customer service questions, and for the rest it still hands the user over to the live workforce. So your colleague doesn’t have to spend his or her day answering the same questions over and over again.

➕ Available 24/7, including nights and holidays.

➕ They build a database based on user questions, proactively interacting with users, from which many useful conclusions can be drawn later. Bots can initiate conversations and monitor how users navigate websites, resulting in the ability to offer customer-specific incentives.

➕ S ave time. Sticks are the new frontier of business. They can automate tasks that need to be done frequently and at specific times, freeing up valuable human time to focus on other, more pressing issues.

➕ An immediate response without waiting improves the company’s image among customers. The hours of Für Elise silence are over. You don’t have to wait for the lines to open and finally connect an administrator.

➕ A simple communication process can also improve conversion rates for e-commerce bots.

➕ They make it easier to expand your business by helping you to expand your business into global markets by addressing customer problems and questions in multiple languages. Plus, continuous access around the clock allows customers to use them regardless of their time zone – making businesses more accessible to everyone.

Areas of application of the sticks

It is essential for customers to be able to contact the service provider or e-commerce site operator immediately and as easily as possible. Voice-based solutions therefore further increase customer satisfaction. And the range of uses is vast, almost unlimited, and growing dazzlingly by the day.

• Taking restaurant orders and making reservations

• Delivering promotions to users

• A marketing campaign that interacts with users

• Market research

• Assistance in online shops

• Handling customer service issues

• Booking a theatre ticket, flight ticket

• Here comes your solution!

The use of bots is also very useful from a marketing perspective. Because…

… we can deliver personalised messages. Think about it, bots can address the consumer by name.

… we can increase engagement. We can offer a direct solution to your problem, based on the information we have collected about you.

… we can collect qualified leads. A lot of valuable time can be saved by having the bot ask pre-defined qualifying questions during the conversation with the customer, so that the salesperson can actually contact the customer with an offer that they are really interested in.

A good example

Do you want to provide a personalised experience for consumers? Using voicebots and optimising for voice assistants, this is already possible. But why stop there and be satisfied with that? Take the example of Burger King, who proved back in ’17, when Google VUI debuted, that we live in a world of infinite possibilities, all it takes is a little creativity to get it right.

Click through for the video where the guys at Business Insider show you what the Florida fast food chain’s campaign was and why it was genius.

The use of chatbots in the lives of companies is clearly increasing customer satisfaction. As a result, the number of companies using chatbots is growing exponentially.

At the same time, the growing demand is a major challenge for developers and it is true that in many areas the technology is still in its infancy. But the capital that will flow into the industry will allow us to close current gaps in the short term, opening up new areas of application that we are currently too scared to think about.

Don’t get left behind, optimise to deliver a higher experience and increase engagement! If you found the ideas shared interesting, read our previous publications, and become the emperor of e-commerce in your country!

And if you need help and more information, just say: hey, (name of your favourite assistant)

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