Voice’s disruption of the market

Great convenience for the users…

Econsultancy.com focused on January 2018 on the growing importance of voice in our booking behaviour. The huge changes that voice-controlled devices imply are the ease and convenience they are offering. Rather than typing selective key words (because search engines are not optimised for full sentence queries), here the artificial intelligence of those devices (such as Alexa, or Google Home) enables to ask what comes in mind directly, without thinking of the best words to find out what you are looking for. Moreover, it also reduces the potential misunderstanding that could emerge when searching online. Using the example of Econsultancy: is the user looking for a service or a product when typing “window cleaner”? The convenience is also the multitasking it enables: asking your smart speaker anything, even when you are already busy at something else.

… resulting in huge challenge for the companies!

This improvement is actually facilitating things mostly for the customers’ side. Indeed, digital marketing through Search Engine Optimisation will completely be disrupted by the voice-controlled devices. Here, the suppliers cannot expect the user to go through the top results: the smart speaker will only present hardly more than two suggestions. The latter will basically depend on the customers’ reviews, i.e. the ranking of the products (although the argument on whether Amazon, and others could give biased suggestions, deliberately more expensive, is not yet solved). That is to say that digital marketers will have to focus more than ever on good reviews, i.e. high customers satisfaction, as these devices will not leave huge chance of a visibility, even though the product is in the top 10 results.

The specific case of the tourism industry:

This article referred to voice-controlled devices in general, without really targeting one segment in particular. But we can deduce the implications of this change in booking behaviour in the specific case of the tourism industry. Indeed, this importance of customers’ reviews is already highly dominant, especially for hotels, with potential clients using metasearch to find the best deals, but above all the best value for money! However, this reduction in number of results showed, is a huge threat for small and independent hotels. Competing with big chains will be even more difficult for them, as more time, and effort (and obviously investment!) will be required to have an effective and efficient digital marketing, regarding these new devices.

On the other hand, the disruption will not spare the hotel chains, as it will completely reshape the loyalty framework. With voice-controlled devices, loyalty’s aim to have customers identifying to the brand will be less relevant. Regardless of the brand, the customers will value the products and services that appear at the right time, “i.e. at the point of user-need”.

Loyalty programs, and other CRM strategies, will have to evolve and accordingly adapt to the users’ new preferences. The improvement of technology, here with the example of voice-controlled devices, is getting more and more into immediacy, and the trend of “everything now”

Noëlie & Aziz 

Source: Gilliland, N. (2018, January 16th). How will voice technology change consumer behaviour? Retrieved from Econsultancy: https://www.econsultancy.com/blog/69724-how-will-voice-technology-change-consumer-behaviour