Why are consumers adopting voice?

Welcome to part two of a five-part series of posts where we’re going to dive into the art of doing business in a connected world. We’ll be sharing customer insights on voice and connected commerce, based on a 25-minute double blind online survey that Amazon Pay conducted in April 2019, among 10,297 consumers in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and India. To download an ebook that shares all of our findings, click here.

Why are consumers adopting voice services, and voice commerce, so quickly? Consumers love the convenience, speed, and context that voice offers. An entire shopping journey can be completed within the voice channel or span multiple channels. If a consumer is doing laundry and runs out of detergent, he/she can reorder at that very moment, just by using their voice.

The top two drivers of voice commerce are ease-of-use and speed. We speak two times faster than we type. Through this speed, voice facilitates convenience and satiates consumers’ desire to get more by doing less. This ‘doing less’ aspect is preferred by consumers because it frees them to pursue other activities. While it is possible to create a variety of experiences using voice, businesses should begin with skills and features that are going to make consumers’ lives easier, such as developing answers to frequently asked questions, tracking packages, or offering product details.

Additionally, almost one in three consumers likes the in-context/ in-the-moment aspect of voice, which allows them to move quickly from the ‘desire’ and ‘think’ phase to the ‘purchase’ phase. As businesses consider voice strategies, they should focus on events in the life of a consumer that could trigger them to pursue a shopping journey e.g., asking consumers if they want to order gifts for their family before Christmas, asking if they want to order movie tickets on a Friday night, etc. This contextual trigger is more likely to result in the consumer engaging with brands through the voice channel.

Similarly, a consumer can notice his/her friend wearing cool, new sneakers and use voice to add it to his/her cart in two different colors. They check out the sneakers on a website, head over to the store to try them on, and then buy the one they prefer using a mobile app on their smartphone. Once they have done that, they can even ask their voice service – “Where’s my stuff?”.

With the buzz around voice, one in three consumers will also try it for its novelty. While this novelty might motivate trial use, businesses need to execute on a voice skill that improves consumer experience if they want to increase use of this channel.

To access the full results of Amazon Pay’s survey and read more insights into the future of connected commerce, click here.