2019 has been immensely successful when it comes to various brands adopting voice as a new frontier to increase their customer engagement.
Here’s a curated list of the brands which stand out when it comes to engaging with customers over voice-first mediums like Amazon Alexa devices.
Pizza Hut
Alexa, open Pizza Hut
Pizza Hut also has come up with the idea of an Alexa Skill, which can help its users to browse and order from a select menu and repeat a past favourite order by just using a single voice command to make food ordering easier than ever. The new Pizza Hut skill for Alexa will make it easier for customers to reorder food from Pizza Hut’s network of millions of customers using only their voice. All it needs to Login is a Pizza Hut account with a delivery address, and a default payment method and the rest can be handled by using the Alexa Skill.
For a first-time user, Alexa will ask for their preferred delivery address and payment type. They select their preferences to complete the setup. After which they will be able to enjoy the convenience of reordering your favourite dishes and meals with Alexa anytime.
Diago
A renowned alcoholic beverage company Diageo is playing an essential role in the evolution of voice adoption. It is one of the few industries which have understood its importance in the upcoming years and are optimistic about it. Hence, it has recently invested in many voice-based applications for its brands over the last few years.
Diageo is a perfect example of how companies with multiple brands can both showcase their brands with the help of voice apps as well as create voice-interactive touchpoints focused on categories that offer the opportunity to highlight various brands at once. In an interview, they agreed that they realize that the voice ecosystem is in its early days, but they wish to test and learn and explore where and how it could be used to create great experiences for the consumers.
The Johnnie Walker brand, which also belongs to the company, was the first to experiment with voice launching an Alexa skill testing experience in 2016. This skill walked its customers through a Johnnie Walker tasting experience. It’s a website, The Bar, which inspired another Alexa skill a year later. In 2018, Diageo also launched the Happy Hour skill, which offers all it ‘sit’s customers a way to engage with the brand.
KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken)
“Alexa, ask KFC to play the Colonel’s Quiz.”
Have you ever wondered whether you could simply ask for food and watch it arrive?
KFC is another major fast-food restaurant chain that also has come up with an innovative Alexa Skill called ‘KFC Chicken Talk,’ or in India, it is known as ‘KFC India.’ KFC is bringing the next-gen eating experience by working on consumer engagement through factors like ease of access, digital menus, personalized engagement, etc. with the help of this Alexa Skill.
With ‘KFC Chicken Talk,’ a finger-lickin’ good conversation starts where Alexa entertains its users with jokes, pick-up lines, random thoughts, conversations, and musings primarily based on Chicken. All the user needs to say is, “Alexa, Talk Chicken To Me.” KFC also allows its users to ask Alexa to order their favourite finger lickin’ dishes by saying, “Alexa, Launch KFC.”
E. & J. Gallo
They are one of the most popular and in-demand wines among millennial consumers. They wanted to provide their consumers with the comfort of an at-home experience that could increase their engagement with the brand and make them more aware of their favourite brand. They used a Google Assistant Action that allowed the customers to experience a guided wine tasting. It allows its users to taste multiple wines, and the Action customized their experience for each wine and session.
Though it was voice-first, it did not limit itself to voice-only. To further enhance the user interaction Google Action even included soundscapes with different music tunes assigned to each wine to emphasize that varietal’s unique character. An Alexa skill, which was later added to extend consumer reach. It is a fantastic example of how voice apps can be effectively used to support seasonal campaigns and establish a foundation for long-term customer engagement. And it has proved to be very successful as far as a good consumer interaction is to be considered.
Domino’s
“Alexa, open Dominos, and place an order.”
Domino’s is one of the major food chains around the world and has been showered with immense love from everyone. It is one of the early custom skills for Amazon Alexa. Domino’s voice strategy mainly focuses on the seamless shopping experience for its consumers. It has been focusing on voice commerce from the beginning. And the implementation of the brand’s own voice assistant in its mobile app makes it stand out from the crowd. Custom, branded voice assistants, aren’t just for banks and media companies. They can be a concierge for any brand looking to make it easier and more comfortable for its consumers to engage with its products and services.
Starbucks
“Alexa, tell Starbucks I am hungry”
The coffee giant launched the voice ordering service on its mobile app and through Amazon Alexa in 2017. The reorder skill makes ordering your favourite drink more comfortable than ever, which is very useful for its regular consumers as the queues for ordering are long.
In 2018, Starbucks made news by enabling Korean coffee drinkers to use voice ordering through Samsung Bixby. Recently, it also launched voice ordering within Alibaba’s smart speaker, Tmall Genie.
Starbucks is committed to being wherever consumers happen to be using digital products and making the ordering process simple. From the beginning, Starbucks sensed that the voice assistants could be used as a tool to make it easier for users to order with less emphasis on engagement. It also enables voice app users to listen to its popular music collections so they can have the mesmerizing in-store experience even while they are not actually present there, helping them to be virtually present.
This technology is going to be very successful and popular soon when the majority of the population that visits restaurants and cafes will be from the millennial generation. So it is highly recommendable for all businesses to adopt these techniques to enhance customer engagement and increase their revenues.
If you’re impressed by the various uses of Voice Bots in a Restaurant or Café and wish to provide your restaurant with a voice, feel free to contact us, DataVizz – an Alexa Skill Development Company that aims to provide Voice Bot and ChatBot solutions to revolutionize the way businesses operate.