How to design branded voice experiences that engage and benefit long-term customers

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Almost every budding brand seeks to build and monetize long-lasting, long-lasting relationships with their customers. In 2022, however, competing for their attention can seem daunting, almost insurmountable. As demand has grown for less and less available attention, some desperate tactics have emerged: Hong Kong has redesigned its traffic lights in an attempt to grab the attention of pedestrians staring at their phones; or a growing number of brands relying on "dark models" in an attempt to access more data and secure more eyeballs.

The good news is that there's an easier way to engage productively with an increasingly distracted population. More than a quarter (27%) of the world's online population uses voice search on their mobile devices, and 500 million people use Siri every day. High-quality voice experiences are a particularly promising way to engage with consumers in meaningful, responsive, and consistent ways, where the exchange of value between brand and customer is rebalanced.

We learned, out of necessity, to use our fingers to talk. Now a much more intuitive and natural form of communication, voice experiences, allows people to do things they already need and want to do, but with the ease and simplicity of talking to a friend.

For brands, voice experiences can create a direct and immediate connection between consumer needs and a brand's products and services, without friction. It is this speed of access that is already changing consumer behavior today. Erica, the virtual assistant that Bank of America brought to market in 2018, has been used more than a billion times by customers seeking information about transactions, refunds and fees.

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Voice experiences also allow brands to engage with consumers when screens are cluttered (i.e. when cooking, driving, or running on a treadmill), or even when performing multiple tasks at a time (for example, going for a walk or listening to a podcast). Today's major brands are already recognizing the shift in commerce from screens to voice and are taking action first to maintain and grow their market share in this new channel. Juniper Research predicts that the value of e-commerce transactions via voice assistants will reach $19.4 billion in 2023.

We've seen companies like SONOS, Disney, Samsung, and Bank of America take leadership positions in the evolution of branded voice services. One...