With 5.6 million Australians now owning at least one smart speaker device and 67% using this technology daily, there’s never been a better time for brands to start learning how their customers are using voice.
The Lott - home of Australia’s Official Lotteries, inspires dreams, delivers wins, and brings you the games you love. So how did they decide where to start with voice and what steps did they take to get to the end result?
We talk to Lee Mathers General Manager of TalkVia about the initial pitch and the steps the TalkVia enterprise team took to take the project through to completion.
Hey Lee, thanks for weighing in and giving us a bit of insight into this awesome voice experience. Maybe we could begin by exploring the initial concept, give us the pitch!
The team at the Lott knew that digital assistants existed and that there was potentially a new way to interact with their customers but they didn’t have the experience or internal knowledge on how to go about building a “voice app”.
Through mutual connections, we were able to arrange an introduction and demonstrate the TalkVia tech, as well as walk the digital team through a few initial concepts about how people could talk with their smart speaker or digital assistant to be able to find out results and understand how to play the Lott’s lottery games.
It was all about trying to create a really convenient, interactive voice experience that allowed the millions of people that play lotteries each week to find out the content and information from the Lott exactly when they needed it.
We were happy to help!
Interesting. And did the final product deviate from this at all?
Once we’d signed the Lott as a client, we worked with them to be really clear on the scope of the initial version of the voice experience. We ran a number of workshops and helped them gather the data we needed to ensure that what we were building for them would not only make a great use case for voice, but would ensure that they were able to get the customer connections that they desired.
So the final version of the Lott voice experience hits pretty close to the mark of what they were trying to achieve. Now it’s just about adding to it over time and scaling it so that it reaches more people and answers more questions.
So what were the steps you took to bring the project through planning stages, into design, development and completion?
We’re very well versed at understanding how “voice” works best. So the initial stages were about gathering and analysing their customer data: understanding the type of questions that their customers ask of them and how we can turn that into an interactive conversation.
From there, it was putting together a detailed project plan and development roadmap to make sure that we could access the people that we needed inside of the Lott and then pull together the conversation design.
Once we had the conversation design sorted, we put the first versions of the voice experience through a lot of internal testing, making sure that internal the Lott teams were able to step into the shoes of customers.
And then it’s just been a series of tweaks to make sure that the conversation really lands, as well as working with their marketing team to be able to promote the voice experience and make sure that people know that it’s there to use.
We’ll be doing ongoing work by analysing the voice analytics and expanding interactions that people can have so that the experience is constantly evolving and growing.
Is there anything you’d change if you had the chance to do it all again?
Working with large corporates takes time. The team at the Lott are incredible people and we’ve absolutely loved working with them, but we now better appreciate that sometimes these things have to jump through levels and layers of approval.
We’re a small team at TalkVia, used to working quickly and iteratively and sometimes the person that you’re needing approval from in a large organisation has 100 other things on their plate. So it’s just a matter of balancing timing and expectations at our end.
But that’s all part of the fun.
Well that was really interesting. Thanks for taking the time to have a chat!