Revolutionalizing the shopping experience by embracing voice commerce in 2024 for seamless digital interactions
Today, customers expect a frictionless shopping experience across online channels. At Itransition, voice commerce is an effective and innovative way for businesses to make digital customer experiences more seamless. According to TechNavio, the voice commerce market is expected to grow by $55.68 billion from 2021 to 2026, showing a CAGR of 24.34%.
This article covers the concept of voice commerce, highlights the reasons to adopt it in 2024, and provides several tips on how businesses can overcome the technology’s common adoption challenges.
What is voice commerce, and how does it work?
As the name suggests, voice commerce enables customers to purchase via voice without manually browsing the store. A customer can say, “Siri, I would like to order a cordless vacuum cleaner” to their device, and a voice commerce system will provide all suitable options. After a user approves one of them, a voice commerce solution can automatically generate a purchase order.
Despite the apparent simplicity, voice commerce is more complex from a technical perspective. A typical voice commerce system includes two components, each critical for providing customers with relevant and accurate responses to their queries:
Device
Customers enter voice commands into their device (typically a mobile phone or a smart speaker) equipped with a virtual digital assistant, such as Google Assistant, Alexa, or Siri.
Software
Then, an ecommerce website or app integrated with AI-based voice commerce software interprets user requests and submits the relevant result to the user.
Why should retailers adopt voice commerce in 2024 and beyond?
A growing technology use
The number of voice assistant users is growing yearly, which will continue in 2024. According to Statista, in 2022, there were nearly 142 million users of voice assistants in the US alone, equal to almost half of the country’s entire population. By 2026, the number of voice assistant users should grow to 157.1 million.
Many of these users are potential customers and voice commerce technology can help businesses reach them. In 2022, 26.8 million US smart speaker users made at least one purchase via their devices, according to Insider Intelligence. By 2024, this number is expected to grow to 29 million, more than 10% of the US population.
Increased customer satisfaction
According to the recent Omnichannel Experience Index from Incisive and Blue Yonder, in 2023, convenience has become one of the main factors why people shop online. By equipping their websites and apps with voice commerce, companies can make online shopping even more convenient and seamless for customers, increasing their satisfaction.
Improved digital presence
E-commerce is one of the most competitive industries, and in 2024, the competition will get tougher. Local businesses and small to mid-sized companies will find it increasingly difficult to compete with giants like Kroger, Walmart, and Amazon and their nearly limitless digital presence and advertising investments.
So, instead of wasting resources trying to compete with the big companies in the digital advertising area, smaller businesses can stand out by implementing voice commerce.
With voice commerce, businesses can gain additional organic traffic from mobile users and those shopping via smart speakers. Voice commerce can be especially valuable for local businesses’ digital presence because customers often use voice while on the go to look up services and stores nearby.
Voice commerce challenges for business
Despite all its benefits, voice commerce adoption comes with many challenges that businesses must address.
Overcoming the lack of trust among users
Many users can be reluctant to use voice commerce because they fear their data (from contacts and addresses to purchase and transaction histories) will be shared with third parties or the government without their knowledge. Others can worry that their children would make an expensive purchase while unsupervised.
Companies can mitigate the first challenge by ensuring that their e-commerce stores and voice commerce software are GDPR-compliant and by informing customers of how a company collects processes, and stores personal data with the help of an online marketplace development company. The second issue can be solved by integrating biometrics functionality into e-commerce software. Voice biometrics can identify and authorize users based on their speech characteristics (such as tone, accent, or wording patterns), eliminating the risk of unwanted purchases.
Recognizing and interpreting human speech
Misunderstanding and misinterpreting human speech can lead to irrelevant and erroneous responses, which irritates users and negatively affects their satisfaction. Companies can prevent this and improve voice commerce accuracy by implementing the latest natural language processing technologies.
For example, developers can equip an ecommerce app with language transformers – self-learning NLP models that can understand the connections between words in a sentence, regardless of their position. Another concept, reinforcement learning, allows developers to train NLP models more effectively. These models are rewarded based on their good performance, and this feedback helps them learn faster to drive better results.
Providing customers with preferred payment options
Although voice commerce technology is growing more mainstream, the number of financial institutions ready to support voice-driven transactions still needs to grow. This factor only lets companies provide some possible payment options to their customers, limiting the appeal of voice commerce to its potential users.
Since ecommerce companies cannot influence banks and payment systems directly, it’s difficult to give some specific advice on how to overcome this issue. However, the situation is improving over time, with more financial institutions starting to support voice-powered payments, with PayPal, Capital One, and National Australia Bank among the most famous examples.
Final thoughts
Voice commerce technology transforms traditional interactions between businesses and customers, allowing the latter to find products and make purchases much easier. While the technology is advantageous for e-commerce businesses, the required proficiency in artificial intelligence makes it complicated to implement.
As an option, an ecommerce company can hire third-party AI experts to equip its ecommerce app with ML and NLP capabilities and enhance it with voice biometrics features.
