Voice Assistants to Enhance Your Customer Experience

Voice is a relatively new marketing channel. We are just beginning to understand its full potential. Through voice assistants like Siri, Bixby, Google, and Amazon’s Alexa, e-commerce merchants gain access to an invaluable tool that positively impacts every aspect of their business. In 2020, we saw the voice commerce channel enjoy exponential growth. More end-users than ever took advantage of the ease and convenience that voice-driven services provide. Headed into 2021, the sky’s the limit. Nearly 24 million people in the US alone are expected to make purchases using voice assistants this year. The future of voice commerce looks exciting. Now is the perfect time to add the voice commerce channel to your e-commerce repertoire. Let’s take a look at the concrete ways that voice assistants can enhance your customers’ shopping experience.

What Constitutes Voice Commerce?

Voice commerce is a natural extension of e-commerce. It harnesses assistants like Google, Siri, and Alexa to help online shoppers complete their transactions quickly, conveniently, and 100% hands-free. With more than 90,000 voice-enabled devices in the US alone —60,000 of which are compatible with Alexa— the voice commerce channel has prolific reach.

Voice commerce is an end-to-end solution. It helps customers with everything from pre-sale questions to post-sale follow-up. Voice commerce provides e-merchants with a fully-realized channel right out of the box.

The Convenience of Voice Commerce

What makes voice commerce such a powerful part of the consumer experience?

For the customers, the ease of the overall experience. It gives consumers a way to shop their favorite merchants and brands completely hands-free. The result is a high-quality experience similar to 1-on-1 sales and customer service at a brick-and-mortar store. Using a voice commerce storefront like Rep via an Alexa-enabled device allows the customer to browse your products, receive information on them, get additional suggestions, and even collect reviews from across the web to comparison shop. At check out customers can complete the order using a one-step process. Their billing and shipping information pulls directly from their Amazon account. For the busy millennial balancing family and work, hands-free voice shopping is a godsend.

For merchants, however, the benefits are much more profound. Using a tailor-made voice app with custom Alexa skills, merchants can offload a significant portion of their workload onto the voice platform. You turn over custody of your sales funnel and lead-qualification process to the voice app.

Not only can the voice app answer simple customer questions, but it can also help you efficiently qualify leads and move them down your funnel. The voice app gathers crucial customer information quickly and naturally. Voice apps make an incredible impact during the awareness and consideration phases of the customer journey.  

As an additional benefit, if your e-commerce operation maintains a physical outlet or brick-and-mortar fulfillment options, the voice app can help steer customers with product and store locator services. The bottom line from a marketing perspective? Voice commerce with Alexa gives you extra channels for qualifying and converting shoppers into paying, repeat customers.

Beyond Utility: Fun and Engaging

oice apps have emerged as an incredible marketing tool. But there’s more to the picture than just utility.

The voice commerce channel holds a vast yet unmeasured level of potential for consumer engagement. Voice assistants can help drive your sales process and move leads efficiently through your sales funnel, but they can also boost your brand’s visibility by encouraging social media engagement from customers.

New, unique Alexa skills are continuously hitting the Amazon Marketplace. Alexa helps you with productivity by helping you manage your household and personal finances. It also opens people up to new forms of entertainment and social opportunities. One of the biggest advantages that Alexa, and other voice assistants Siri, bring to the table is the ability to send curated content directly to your customer base. From news to weather, to specialized podcasts, the ever-expanding library of Alexa skills provides e-merchants with an unprecedented level of penetration directly into core customer demographics.

Voice Assistants for Delivering Branded Content

Dr. Teri Fisher, creator and host of the podcast “Voice in Canada Briefcast,” a show that explores the versatility of amazon’s evolving voice apps, found a way to leverage one particular Alexa skill. It is known as the flash briefing. Flash briefings are quick, curated updates that allow a marketer to deliver tailor-made content to their end-users. Dr. Fisher took the concept of the flash briefing and used it to novel effect. He gamified his updates with a daily contest that required listeners to tune in daily. In turn, he made all that content point back to his social media.

Rep offers a similar innovation. Our new service, called “Voice Followers”, lets consumers subscribe to brand-specific content through voice. The process is simple and customer-oriented. With Voice Followers, customers get weekly content like recipes, podcasts, and blogs delivered via voice assistant. All they have to do is say “Alexa, ask brand X for content Y” to initiate their subscription.  

Alexa skills like the flash briefing and Voice Followers are one of many marketing tools that a voice app can employ. The true result is understanding the incredible engagement opportunities that voice commerce apps, like the Rep Platform, can provide. Not only can you streamline your sales process, making it quick and convenient for your customers, but you can also make your marketing efforts reflexive, always pointing back to your social media presence in an attempt to boost customer engagement.

Voice Commerce’s Future Potential

At its heart, voice is a quality-of-life upgrade for the e-commerce channel. It provides a frictionless sales process directly tailored toward the busy life of the modern working adult. It is also an enhancement from the e-commerce merchant’s point of view, by helping pre-qualify quality leads and moving them through your sales process seamlessly. Voice is a channel that’s comfortable and easy to engage with.

Voice searches and their utility are increasing every day. Soon enough, the voice will become the dominant way to browse the web. New and exciting voice apps, like the Rep platform, are helping to usher in a new wave of online commerce with the quality of the customer experience at the center. For more information about the power, advantage, and versatility of the Rep platform, please contact us today.

Quick Answers and Applications

How can integrating voice-enabled technology enhance personalized shopping experiences for customers?

Voice-enabled technology transforms personalized shopping by leveraging artificial intelligence and natural language processing to create intuitive, hands-free experiences tailored to individual customers. Voice commerce represents the next evolution in e-commerce, allowing shoppers to interact with brands through natural conversation rather than traditional interfaces. This technology creates a seamless shopping journey that feels remarkably similar to in-store assistance while collecting valuable customer data that drives increasingly personalized experiences with each interaction.

Strategic Application

Voice-enabled technology enhances personalized shopping through several key mechanisms:

AI-Powered Recommendation Engines

• Voice assistants analyze purchase history and browsing patterns to suggest products aligned with customer preferences
• Natural language processing interprets nuanced requests like "find something similar to what I bought last month but in blue"
• Recommendation algorithms continuously refine suggestions based on customer feedback and interaction patterns

Contextual Understanding Through Conversation

• Voice technology maintains context throughout shopping sessions, remembering previous queries for more natural dialogue
• Advanced NLP capabilities interpret customer intent beyond literal requests, understanding tone and implied needs
• Conversational interfaces adapt to individual speaking patterns, creating more personalized interactions over time

Seamless Multi-Device Shopping Experiences

• Voice assistants maintain consistent personalization across smartphones, smart speakers, and other connected devices
• Customer profiles sync across platforms, allowing shoppers to start a voice search at home and complete it on mobile
• Voice interfaces integrate with visual displays when needed, providing the perfect balance of convenience and information

Frictionless Purchasing Processes

• Voice commerce streamlines checkout by storing payment and shipping details for one-step ordering
• Natural language commands enable easy product comparisons, review checks, and price monitoring
• Voice assistants can proactively notify customers about personalized offers, restocks, or price drops on watched items

Voice commerce represents a fundamental shift in how customers interact with brands, moving beyond the limitations of traditional interfaces to create shopping experiences that feel more intuitive, personal, and effortless. By implementing voice technology, merchants can engage customers in natural conversation that builds lasting relationships while gathering unprecedented insights into individual preferences and behaviors.

What are the key benefits and challenges of adopting voice commerce in e-commerce platforms?

Voice commerce represents the natural evolution of e-commerce, offering hands-free shopping experiences through voice assistants like Alexa, Google, and Siri. As this technology continues to mature, it presents both significant opportunities and challenges for e-commerce platforms looking to integrate this innovative channel.

Strategic Application

Implementing effective voice commerce requires a balanced approach:

Optimize Content for Voice Search Patterns

• Structure product descriptions around natural conversational queries rather than traditional keywords
• Create FAQ content that addresses common voice search questions in your product category
• Develop voice-specific landing pages that deliver concise information optimized for audio delivery

Streamline the Voice Transaction Process

• Reduce the number of confirmation steps required to complete purchases
• Implement voice authentication protocols that maintain security without friction
• Design voice-specific checkout flows that minimize cognitive load on customers

Address Privacy and Security Proactively

• Implement end-to-end encryption for all voice commerce transactions
• Provide clear opt-in/opt-out controls for voice data collection and storage
• Regularly audit voice commerce systems for potential vulnerabilities

Focus on Seamless Cross-Platform Integration

• Ensure consistent voice commerce experiences across different devices and assistants
• Synchronize inventory and pricing data in real-time across voice and traditional channels
• Create unified customer profiles that maintain context between voice and screen interactions

Voice commerce isn't just another sales channel—it's a conversational gateway that builds lasting connections with customers through natural dialogue, creating personalized shopping experiences that static product pages simply cannot deliver.