Will voice commerce supplant web commerce?

The voice is the most natural, fastest, most efficient and most popular medium for commercial exchange. From the origins of trade in the souks of the Orient 4,000 years ago, to the Apple Store of the 21st century, oral dialogue has always been the basis of commerce.

Even today, from market auctions to connected speakers, voice is the ideal channel for frictionless, latency-free commerce.  

Voice commerce: a booming market worldwide... And in France

The global figures for voice trading speak for themselves:

• 1 billion voice searches in the United States since 2018;

• According to Gartner estimates30% of web sessions in 2020 will be partially or totally voice-driven;

• Voice commerce will be worth nearly 40 billion dollars by 2022 worldwide, mainly thanks to the rise of voice assistants.

In France, voice commerce is also firmly established. A Havas Paris and Paris Retail Week study published in June 2018 highlighted that the French are already seduced by conversational commerce: 57% of them rely on voice assistants to make their shopping easier. Similarly, a majority of the French population (56%) claim to own a device with a voice assistant. Unsurprisingly, millennials are the most connected, with 74% of potential users, compared with just 45% of those aged 55 and over. Nevertheless, the primary medium remains the telephone.

The origins of voicebot democratization

While Siri has (already) existed since 2011, recent advances in voice recognition have widened the scope of what is possible, and are behind the democratization of voicebots.

In 2017, Microsoft claimed to be able to match human voice recognition performance, and today the failure rate for voice assistants is estimated at between 5% and 10%. Predictions are that a success rate of over 95% will enable voice to become mainstream by 2021.

A movement has thus been launched, and the giants of the sector are positioning themselves one after the other to try and grab the biggest slice of an ever-growing cake. Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are the main protagonists of this flourishing ecosystem, and are positioning their pawns in a market driven above all by the growth of the connected speaker sector, such as Google Echo or Amazon Alexa.

Voicebots are also highly coveted, as they have already been adopted by the younger generations. Eventually, placing an order via a voice query will become the norm for these generations, now accustomed to conversing with machines that obey them by voice.

Why voicebots have caught on so quickly

Above all, voicebots offer the crucial advantage of total availability 24/7, enabling immediate response to customer requests. This need for availability is one of the main priorities expressed by customers. In fact, according to a study conducted by Smart Tribune in 2019, 98% of them consider that waiting time by phone or chat is too long. As a result, they aspire to more autonomy, immediacy and adaptability from customer services, which voicebots are fully capable of delivering.

Above all, the voicebot bridges the digital social divide, offering a service ranging from the most technophobic of technologies - the telephone - to the nerdiest of services, with commands via connected objects. The voicebot is also the preferred tool of the blind and partially-sighted (1.7 million people in France), and represents a genuine revolution in their use of the Internet, offering them new perspectives, particularly in relation to traditional web commerce. What's more, voicebots are naturally multilingual. And yet, there are over 2.1 million people in France for whom French is not their mother tongue (Gartner study), and for whom voicebots offer the possibility of overcoming this language barrier like no other tool.

Finally, oral exchanges are much faster than written ones. Even someone perfectly used to writing on a computer takes 3 times longer to express themselves via a keyboard than by voice. And we're not even talking about senior citizens who aren't digital natives, or other populations sidelined by the written word! According to a Gartner study, while there are 10.5 million connected seniors in France, 95% of them admit to having difficulty entering text on their keyboard or cell phone. What's more, there are 2.5 million illiterate people in France, while 6 million schoolchildren have not yet mastered the written word.... yet speak very easily to a voice assistant. These are all populations for whom the voice channel seems an obvious and natural recourse when faced with their inability to use the traditional web-based sales channel.

Real-world applications that add value

Voice AI for commerce is therefore a reality that is taking root in our daily lives, and several of its applications are already giving us a glimpse of its potential.

Firstly, phone & collect represents a voice-based alternative to click & collect. It enables the implementation of a telephone ordering system, which returns the order directly to the sales staff or to a customer relations center by e-mail. Telephone lines are thus freed up, allowing orders to be taken in remote time.

Phone & survey allows you to carry out satisfaction surveys directly over the telephone. Vocalizing a satisfaction survey offers the possibility of personalizing and humanizing the collection campaign, and encouraging the collection of opinions in the words of the respondent.

Finally, we can mention phone & purchase, a process whereby a conversational assistant accompanies the customer through the purchasing process, based on a product catalog. This makes it possible to automate old-fashioned paper catalogs, or to target customers who are less familiar with new technologies.

Voice commerce: A definite potential... But real limits

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Voice commerce is profoundly transforming customer relations, and the use of voice is reshaping the purchasing process while simplifying the customer experience. However, there are certain limits to its expansion. First and foremost, technical progress is still needed to reduce error rates and improve understanding of voice assistants and other voice commerce tools. One of the challenges ahead will be to respond to more complex queries than current technology can handle.  

Similarly, we must not overlook the regulatory constraints linked to the use of personal customer data, closely associated with security constraints.

The human factor must also be taken into account: a certain fringe of the population remains resistant to the use of technology, and many consumers do not feel comfortable making purchases by voice, fearing an increased risk of piracy or accidental purchases, particularly when they have to communicate credit card information.

In spite of everything, voice commerce is taking over from traditional web commerce as a matter of course. While there are still barriers to be overcome before it can completely supplant traditional web commerce, its ascent seems unstoppable, and its progress will continue unabated in the years to come. That's why ViaDialog has developed a team of experts in the field. If you'd like to talk to our experts, don't hesitate to make an appointment with one of them !

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