Harnessing Voice AI: Building Authentic Customer Connections

Reading Time: 29 minutes

Are you looking to deepen relationships with your customers in an innovative way?

With the rise of voice technology and conversational AI, brands now have a powerful tool to create more personal and engaging customer interactions. However, mastering this technology to foster authentic connections can be challenging.

Today, we’re joined by Susan Westwater, the CEO and Co-Founder of Pragmatic Digital, a leading expert on voice and conversational AI. Susan will share practical strategies for implementing voice AI to build authentic customer connections, based on her extensive experience and insights from her latest book, “Voice Marketing.” She’ll also discuss the efficiencies AI brings to marketing, allowing brands to focus more on meaningful engagement.

AI in Marketing: Unpacked host Mike Allton asked Susan Westwater about:

✨ Authentic Customer Connections with Voice AI: Learn how voice AI can create personal and engaging interactions that deepen customer relationships.

✨ Strategic Implementation of Voice AI: Discover practical steps and best practices for integrating voice AI into your marketing strategies effectively.

✨ Efficiency and Focus with AI: Understand how leveraging AI for routine tasks can free up resources to focus on high-impact, meaningful customer engagements.

Learn more about Susan Westwater

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

Harnessing Voice AI: Building Authentic Customer Connections with Susan Westwater

[00:00:00] Susan Westwater: One of the most important things that comes into play when we’re talking about speaking and these relationships is trust. So the first important thing that we have to make sure is that we are hitting all of those signals that say, yes, this is the official, this is real. This is what connects back. You can tell not just because I’m telling you, but because you can actually authentically hear in the word choice, in the intonations, the phrases.

What we’re talking about, any of those particular things, what does that actual persona? And so we do a lot of work with brands, helping them understand that. How do you show up basically? And it’s just saying, if you have your visual guidelines done, that’s amazing. If you have your written, your writing guidelines done, that’s great.

You’re still only half done if you haven’t taken and you’re moving into conversational, what are you, what are you going to sound like when you speak? What is that persona?

[00:00:51] Mike Allton: Welcome to AI in Marketing: Unpacked, where we simplify AI for impactful marketing. I’m your host, Mike Allton here to guide you through the world of artificial intelligence and its transformative impact on marketing strategies. Each episode, we’ll break down AI concepts into manageable insights and explore practical applications that can supercharge your marketing efforts.

Whether you’re an experienced marketer just starting to explore the potential of AI, this podcast will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to succeed. So tune in and let’s unlock the power of AI together.

Greetings program. Welcome back to AI in Marketing: Unpacked where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into social media, content, advertising, search, and other areas of digital marketing. Oh, and you get to learn to subscribe to be shown how to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution.

And come out. Now, are you looking to deepen relationships with your customers in an innovative way? With the rise of voice technology and conversational AI, brands now have a powerful tool to create more personal and engaging customer interactions. However, mastering this technology to foster authentic communication Authentic connections might seem a little challenging today.

We’re joined by Susan Westwater, the CEO and co founder of Pragmatic Digital, a leading expert on voice and conversational AI. Susan is going to share practical strategies for implementing voice AI to build authentic connections. Customer connections based on her extensive experience and insights from her latest book, voice marketing.

She’ll also discuss the efficiencies AI brings to marketing, allowing brands to focus more on meaningful engagement. Hey, Susan, welcome to the show.

[00:02:33] Susan Westwater: Hi, thank you for having me. It’s exciting to be here.[00:02:37] Mike Allton: So glad to have you. Can’t wait to dig in. Could you start by just sharing a bit about your journey in focusing on voice and conversational AI specifically?[00:02:46] Susan Westwater: Yeah, it’s been a bit of a long road. I would say we’re, I wouldn’t say we’re the OGs because there’s a lot that predates 2017, but we’ve been around for quite some time. Our journey, actually my journey started actually way back farther than just even the 17s or 2000s. I actually am a few credits short.

of being a medievalist. One of the things to know about all of medieval history and a lot of those pieces is much of it predates printing press. And therefore in learning things, we learned word of mouth and we learned about this equalization that happened. With speaking in vernacular and talking within there.

When printing became then reading became a part of it. And therefore, then that was where we then we saw the strata of educated and uneducated those who could read and literacy. What’s exciting and what. Was first picked my whole curiosity when it came to voice and AI and conversational is essentially what happens if we go back to that, where we’re able to not have a literacy requirement to transmit information.

What happens when we can start to speak to things in our own tongues in our own language? It becomes an incredibly interesting and rich experience. Not just from a marketing perspective, but just from an information distribution perspective. So in 2017, when things started to really take off with Alexa, as well as with Google and all of those pieces, that was a moment where after having seen the evolution of the web I’ve actually, Old enough to have done stats and key lines and physical things as opposed to digital.

Being able to see how that worked, how that moved then from social and how mobile, it was sort of one of those moments of how many more major trends am I going to witness in my career? Let’s do something about it this time, instead of being the ones that are, The SMEs within an organization let’s become a lot more available to a wider global source.

So that was where Pragmatic Digital came from of basically focusing on AI, specifically voice and AI of how do we do it right? And how do we, you know, take advantage of this incredible technology?

[00:04:49] Mike Allton: Okay. First of all, this is fascinating because I too was a student of history, but a little bit later, more like Renaissance era where we did have primary and secondary sources, but they’re all written, right?

So we had a little bit of different path there but still that. That focus on how things have changed and how people used to communicate versus how they communicate today in the confusion that can happen. I remember studying Richard the III’s final battle and people were talking about an Earl of Sussex on one side of the battle.

And an Earl of Sussex on the other side of the battle. And we had to figure out, Oh, it was the dude’s son because he died during the battle and his son became the Earl of Sussex on the other side of the battle. It was very confusing time.

[00:05:30] Susan Westwater: Yeah.[00:05:32] Mike Allton: We’re not in that time. Now we’re in the time of AI and I’d love if you could share a little bit more about what makes voice AI just such a powerful tool for building these deeper customer relations.[00:05:43] Susan Westwater: Well, the amazing thing of it is, is if you can speak. And when we talk about natural language, that means, you know, the spoken word. So I don’t have to figure out what control to use. I don’t have to figure out what button to hit. I can just ask the question. And what’s really interesting about that is there is a research project.

paper that I’ve been involved with now. This will be the fourth year running. What was originally called the Voice Consumer Index, and then last year it was the AI Consumer Index. We see that people really are using it and why? Well, because you can do it hands free, because it’s technology that’s suddenly speaking your language instead of you speaking its language.

And it’s also what’s amazing is the literacy requirement. My son is probably, as I always laughingly say that we are the beta testers of the next generation’s technology. Seeing how quickly before he could read, he learned how to use search. And be able to search up the topics he wanted to very, very short lifetime of being the smartest people in the house he quickly figured out his parents didn’t know everything about dinosaurs, so he was able to research and look all of those things up using a tablet and showing him how to use those things.

That’s why voice is so powerful. It’s also powerful because of similar to sonic branding. You can evoke so much more emotion. You can solidify so many more tangible the intangibles. Into those conversations it becomes a much more aligned thing. Even as we think about our hunter gatherer roots, I’m going to go way back beyond, you know, the medieval times of how we used to do a hunting and gathering speaking is akin to that.

When we think about the non linear pieces of how we talk or how we discover, so it just is a lot more in line with some of our natural behaviors. Whether we know them or not. And so I think that’s what makes it incredible. It also has this whole new dimension to brand that is amazing of what, what happens when voice and tone become literal, what happens when that persona becomes a personality, because it’s something that someone is going to be able to engage with and, and it has to be authentic because, and by authentic, we mean, does that track with everything else that you’ve said you stand for in other channels or in other communications or other messaging?

It’s an incredible proof. Of the, we are the sum of those parts.

[00:08:05] Mike Allton: What I find particularly interesting is that I’m certified in NLP, not natural language processing, but neuro linguistic processing is a little bit different, but similar, still this idea of language and voice and communication, both body and voice and how we process that information.

So. To add on to what you’re talking about, as the conversational AI literally talks back to us, we’re able to hear and process what’s being said and that information in a different way than we would if it’s just typed out, often in a better way. Because to your point, being able to hear a voice. Which has tone and depth and tenor and speed that has different depths of meaning than just that written word.

But you also mentioned brand voice, which I find super fascinating. We’re going to touch on that, but I’d love to know if you have any examples of, of literal brands who’ve been using voice AI successfully, particularly when it comes to enhancing customer engagement.

[00:09:03] Susan Westwater: Sure. I mean, one of the age old examples is Dom with Domino’s Pizza.

And actually, I love this example because it predates Alexa when there was a, a big push behind that. Actually, back in 2011, they added a way to order a pizza on the mobile app. And you had an assistant that could help you. And initially, this was a campaign driven. They were trying to essentially support a goal of digitally captured orders.

And now, today, after the success of that, they have found that I think there’s like 12 to 14 different ways you can order a pizza from Domino’s. Covering off on every single way from basically tweeting it or X ing it, I guess is what we call them now. And then moving back to and then moving back to just calling the store, but every word gamut in between, you can ask for it, you can use an Alexa skill.

You can do it through I believe a Google action, all of those different types of things and the mobile actions, not the voice actions. You’re able to work through all of those apps and be able to do that as an extension. It’s an incredible example of how they’ve been able to connect to that. It does do a little bit of upselling, but it doesn’t do it, it doesn’t get in the way.

And what’s also really nice is the first time that that particular Assistant worked out. It was a really difficult process to order something with your voice, especially a pizza. So if you’re familiar with the Starbucks app and the way that you can reorder it, you can reorder. They actually took the time to find out how do we do this?

How do we start a net new order? How do we make this a better experience and continue to iterate, which is an important part of when something is built, especially in conversational. I mean, we all know in digital, Launched isn’t done. It’s really the case when we start dealing with AI and conversational AI, because things change, we learn things from the behavior of how people interact with it.

Therefore, all these things come together and you continue to evolve as we’ve seen with this particular skill, but there’s even ones other examples of how using voice AI. Another way of one way was Nike did it with their BB with their basketballs their basketball shoes to prove that it was we’re about a place to launch it than during a game.

Therefore, how do I make it easy? Just ask your Google assistant to purchase your shoes. They sold out in six minutes. Being able to just do something as easily as just asking for it. is, is rather exciting. So I think there’s, I mean, those are some simple examples. There’s also Bank of America’s Erica which helps with a lot of ways of asking again, financial things.

This is a sensitive topic. But finding ways that you can ask these things and get that service and empower yourself to ask things. So it’s not, wait, if I want to know about the balance of my savings account, is that a high interest? There’s ways of being able to get at that without having to.

Unnaturally figure out what you’re asking for and just say, Hey, what’s the balance on my savings account because I’m working within after the firewall, it’s able to do that. So that’s another incredible example of just making it easier for you to get the information you want.

[00:12:04] Mike Allton: And just to clarify, these aren’t just the old chat bots.

That have voice capability, but still have very, very preset, predetermined questions and answers and workflows, and you can’t deviate from those. These are, you know, true conversational AI that have that voice element.

[00:12:21] Susan Westwater: They are. And what’s interesting now is in today’s date, and this is where I’m like, I haven’t looked at their, I haven’t looked under the hoods of these for a little bit.

But as we do move into this world of using LLMs and retrieval, you know, augmented generation and things like that, generative AI, there are some of these are even adding the extra layer of being able to then it is like more than just a chatbot. It’s a chatbot that actually then is able to adjust with the LLM and therefore.

Tailor those responses to what someone is asking for or being able to pull from that piece of information to try as an attempt when done well, should be providing you with a relevant answer. The key is when done well I always feel like I need to say that these days just because of the amount of hype that is out there in the world.

We, we very much, there’s a reason we’re called pragmatic, keep our feet on the ground about what capabilities are, are out there, but also what you can promise today versus what’s going to happen in six weeks.

[00:13:19] Mike Allton: That is one of the fascinating aspects of where we’re at today. You know, it’s, it’s been said many times that the, the models we’re using today are the dumbest.

And the worst that we’ll ever have to use in the rest of our lives. And a lot of us are still trying to kind of grasp you know, what they can do, what we can do with them. You mentioned Pragmatic. I’d love for you to share just a little bit more about the work that you do with Pragmatic and, and talk to me about how you’re advising clients when it comes to AI marketing strategy.

What are some of the components that they might need to consider when they’re, when they want to create. An authentic conversational experience.

[00:13:54] Susan Westwater: Yes. And when we talk about that and we start looking into those things, those types of customer experience, we look at it holistically. We have no choice because our content has to be similar.

So some of the things that we’re working with clients on are as one, do you have the right tech stack or it isn’t even, do you have the right tech stack is what can your tech stack do? It that’s probably a better way of looking at that of, you know, Where can we work within those systems? So you’re not reinventing the wheel.

I think. One of the things, especially in the hype cycle that we’ve heard today has been a lot of, okay, so you have to go hire a whole new team. You have to go get a new chief of AI. And yes, those are all wonderful things and yes, they’re needed, but not every company is going to have that budget or even have that bandwidth.

So what we often do are working with sort of the realities of what are the resources I have, where can AI work? And and this is even to where we talk about useful and usable of, it isn’t necessarily something where. As people go through it, how can we, what are the core tasks of what they need?

How can then we use technology to solve that? Cause sometimes it’s not AI. AI isn’t a silver bullet. It very much is something that needs to have planning process and implementation thought through and some care and feeding. It isn’t, you know, necessarily something flip a switch and go. So what we work with clients on is how, what does that roadmap look like?

How do I implement this? How do I start to pilot an AI practice or an AI program so that I’m getting my incremental successes, my incremental learnings? But I’m also supporting up of a, of a bigger a bigger initiative to support our objectives because is exciting as AI can get. If you throw it in a pilot and you leave it in a corner, we’ve found that it does well, but it doesn’t thrive because it’s not always scalable.

It’s not always something that can be rolled out or it’s easily dismissed as sort of, that was a one off. So what we like to look at is do we do a pilot that move feeds into a roadmap or do we help you with understanding Where are the places I need to first, because there’s not just when we’re doing an AI program, we also assist with how do I educate my team to maintain these systems that we’ve put together, how do I make sure that they can learn and continue to apply?

But also how can I get started so that it is a crawl walk run? Because we are living in a time right now where there’s a lot of prep happening that we don’t know about because no one’s going to talk about there. Their programs until they’re out there succeeding is how to what’s the groundwork I need to do so that I can start to move make those motions forward.

How do I build the case for voice? How do I, or conversational AI or even just using AI in general? Because there are still a lot of experiences out there that are less than desired. So how do we help them understand where they are in that whole maturity level? And then what do we do to improve, or what do we do to make sure that we’ve got that roadmap of constant incremental improvement so that we can keep showing progress and then add features or takeaway features, depending on.

What it is our audience wants to do.

[00:16:59] Mike Allton: You’re right. There’s a lot of prep work that has to go into it and it’s not a set it and forget it solution for virtually any aspect. Certainly a voice AI implementation. You mentioned brand voice earlier. So I want to come back to that because I’m really curious how that plays into the work that you’re doing, how important personas and personalities might be in voice AI and are there any best practices with this kind of thing?[00:17:21] Susan Westwater: Yeah, for sure. And there’s a huge debate. I’ll be honest. There is a huge debate that’s out there about whether or not bots should have personas whether it should, you know, do you disclose, don’t disclose what, what are all of those pieces around it and, and depending on who you ask. Now, I am of the camp very much of when you talk to someone, you will assign a personality to them.

And I think Wally Brill, who is that, I think he’s still at Google shared some studies a while back of. When people talk to someone or something, they will assign it a personality. So my whole feeling is, why would you leave that to chance? We think about visual guidelines, right? And how much work goes into brand style guidelines.

I, myself, having a content strategy and content governance background I can’t tell you the number of brand guidelines I’ve put together of writing guidelines and things like that. But when, as I said, when it becomes from that metaphor of voice and tone into actually, what does it sound like? We should be intentional about that, especially if you’re dealing with a large brand.

There are some, you know, CPG brands I’ve worked with Pharma brands some other particular organizations where They have a very distinct brand that exists that everyone’s associated that exists in the web. It exists even there in store. It exists in a bunch of places. Why wouldn’t you make sure that then how it’s represented from an audio perspective syncs up with how it speaks?

The personality around that. And how do we then, how do we put that together? So that way then also I’ll be quite honest, I can then give that information to either a copywriter or to a bot like an LLM or one of those particulars and say, this is the persona you should be emulating so that we have that consistent sounding, that consistent sound.

One of the most important things that comes into play when we’re talking about speaking. And these relationships is trust. So the first important thing that we have to make sure is that we are hitting all of those signals that say, yes, this is the official, this is real. This is what connects back. You can tell not just because I’m telling you, but because you can actually authentically hear in the word choice, in the intonations, the phrases.

What we’re talking about, any of those particular things. What does that actual persona? And so we do a lot of work with brands, helping them understand that. How do you show up, basically? And it’s just saying, if you have your visual guidelines done, that’s amazing. If you have your written, your writing guidelines done, that’s great.

You’re still only half done if you haven’t taken and you’re moving into conversational. What are you, what are you going to sound like when you speak? What is that persona? What is my brand when it becomes, and by the way, that brand persona isn’t always the icon of my brand. Depending on, do you, if it’s like if you have a hundred year old, like if it’s Tony the tiger, we’ll think twice.

about whether or not that should be there because that’s protected that is incredibly valuable. So then is it a narrator who helps them along, but thinking about that interplay too, as well, because again, it’s, it’s that representative. And we even deal with that on with some of our other clients who don’t have a brand per se, or, you know, Who haven’t don’t have a specific persona that that is that hardwired.

Then we look at too. Okay. So then what does that voice, how do we keep that voice consistent? And how do I make sure that if I’m talking to a messenger bot on, on Facebook, or I am dealing with the website chatbot, or I’ve called in to the 800 number for such for service, or I’m talking to a device that can help me along, how do I make sure that that’s all connected?

And it sounds similar or that the core values are there. If I’m going to say, Hey, I’m talking to a live agent now, does that live agent embody then the rest of what my spoken brand is? And so there are, as you can tell, it starts to really become quite the onion, but it is something that we advise and think about because.

We’re getting quickly to a point where again, folks don’t say, Hey, that’s the web content. And that’s the store content. And that’s the packaging content. They just see it as content. That’s very, also what we’re seeing now of it’s not, that’s my AI interaction or the bot interaction. That’s me interacting with that brand.

How do we make sure that that’s protected and well thought out? So that way then I’m getting every last ounce of goodwill from it. But also I’m trans able to translate and put into there, into those interactions without having a monologue. Because we know that conversations aren’t just, I’m going to tell you everything about the brand and their features and blah, blah, blah.

That’s not. That’s not going to be any more helpful. So how do we make sure that we’re embodying brand values in the words, you know, again, in the words and the persona in that whole experience without having to be so heavy handed that I have to say it, it’s kind of like, I think Barry Mendelin once said, if you had to say you’re cool, you’re not cool.

It’s very much similar, that type of way.

[00:22:16] Mike Allton: That is fascinating. You’re absolutely right. The brand is the brand wherever it shows up. Folks, we’re talking with Susan Westwater about the importance and the advancement when it comes to voice AI. And I’ve got several more questions, including one you’re not going to want to miss, but first let me share with you a tool that I’m using every day to help me brainstorm marketing strategy and even develop content like this podcast.

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with your audience. Don’t just market, market smarter with Magai. Tap the link in the show notes. So Susan, let’s, let’s talk brass tacks. What are some of the practical steps that brands should take if they want to implement voice AI into their marketing strategies effectively?

[00:23:55] Susan Westwater: Sure. First of all, I think The first thing you should not do is just go and build.

Step one, please don’t do that. Step one is to think about what are the important tasks that your audience or what it is you’re trying to achieve. Voice AI can be done from an external customer experience perspective. It can also be used internally. Some of the work I’ve done. As of late has been actually more b2b focused of internally, like, how do I make it so that someone can get a report they need?

Or how do we make it so that there’s an easier collaboration or information again, is passing and transferring. So the first thing to do is to determine Where and what you’re trying to achieve. How is that lighting laddering up to the bigger objectives that you’re trying to do? As much as it is exciting and the realm of possibilities is massive.

Saying, you know, wouldn’t it be cool? And then not following it up with anything else is going to set you up for a pilot that may or may not hit against a business objective and get to live to scale. So it’s important that we think through strategically of, are we solving really the most important problem?

And then are we solving it in a way that is actually going to be, is it going to make something easier? Because that’s the most important question. Especially today because consumers or actually anyone who’s using voice is getting pretty used to being able to say, you know, hey, assistant name, give me these things.

Therefore, we have to make sure that whatever we’re, we’re, we’re delivering on that, that question is, we’re going to, we have the promise of, I’m going to be able to answer it. So it’s starting with that. I think it’s also important to know. Where you’re at right now internally with what your stack is, but also what your content and how you’re showing up currently, like, what is being said about your brand today?

How is your brand being received? What is the relationship it has? Because if there are incomplete processes in the sense of, well, we handle everything different, or we have tons of silos, and that information isn’t getting shared. That actually, get that fixed, and you’re going to make a lot more moves than if you just started to then implement technology.

I think you’d very much need that within there. I think the other step, too, is to think through what is your tolerance of what you can invest. You might start with, hey, let’s start playing with Sonic branding, because that’s what we can enhance today, and we can make sure that. We’re showing up in the right places so that we’re showing up on the search engines or we’re showing up on the GPTs or the perplexities of the world making sure that you’re showing up through there and then moving along to those other places of where, hey, I’m learning a lot about what people are looking for.

I can add this to here. Customer service becomes a very natural win because it’s already voice driven. Therefore, it’s really exciting to be able to then say, all right, let’s add a bot to this so that we can now give 24 seven or so that I can free up my team because password resets don’t require that much human intervention or checking a balance or package tracking.

Finding out ways to be able to help someone to be able to do those things helps a lot. Basically round out the full customer experience. So I think it’s important to figure out where it is in the journeys that people want, they, they want the, they want this help or that they need this help. And then going from there and then saying, okay, these are the use cases.

Let’s start to build out and then talk about what that could look like. Because Rome’s not built in a day, nor is a conversational AI experience. There are many who will say that it can be done and sure it can. But if you, the more thought you put up front, the more you will be setting yourself up for success, but you’ll also then have that path forward that you can say, and here’s what we’re going to do next.

Here’s what we’re going to do next and be able to have that. So you’re not in a reactive mode.

[00:27:30] Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense. So suppose you’ve got a brand that’s going through some of these steps, maybe they’re working with your team. How do they start to measure the success of these kinds of initiatives that they’re rolling out across the organization?

How do they make sure that they’re meeting their business goals?

[00:27:44] Susan Westwater: And so it depends again, it goes back to that objective. If my objective, some objectives I’ve dealt with are called containment issue resolution, reduce callbacks. Another way is just general retention or increase in. repeat orders, especially on maintenance products or things along those lines of encouraging someone to be able to just feel like all you have to do is ask for that to be added to your cheer list or to reorder it.

You don’t have to. So figuring out through those particular things, those are some of them, depending also on what we have in freedom of being able to impose on certain metrics. We can look at the experience itself. How much is it being interacted with? How long? Are they complete? How many times do we have to think through the flow of where it’s being handed off to an agent because it’s getting over its head?

All of those things as well. How do those, how do those also then help us to understand what success looks like? As simple, as simple as how many times do it, does it not understand? Or how many times does someone ask for something that’s out of bounds or we it’s not in our capabilities yet what are those within there?

Are we serving enough or doing from there? So we can look at it from a perspective of that macro and then within the experience itself

[00:28:57] Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense and it all goes back to what you’re saying before for, which is to take the time up front to plan out what you’re going to accomplish and then roll into that, what the expectations are, what the goals, what the metrics are, and so on.

I’d love for you to talk about your book a little bit, just share some about, you know, what are some of the topics that you cover in there, particularly if there’s areas that we haven’t talked about today, that maybe dive deeper. That, you know, those of us who are listening that want to integrate voice AI into their marketing, and they could learn more about that.

[00:29:25] Susan Westwater: Yeah. So our book is focused on called voice marketing. It is on voice marketing, but it’s talking about basically what conversational is. So when we talk about conversational, sometimes we have voice. Sometimes we don’t because we consider chatbots and written. To be also conversational. But what we cover often there is I’m very excited.

Cause Paul and Mike, but from the marketing AI Institute helped with the first chapter of explaining AI from their words. One of the things we did in this book was it wasn’t just myself and Scott Westwaters opinions or a knowledge as well as our coauthors actually are the authors of a book called audio branding.

So Colleen Fahey and Larry Minsky wrote that. We came together then of a, what does it look like from a content and backend perspective? How do I get that started and think about it? And then what does it look like as from a creative polish perspective? A lot of these conversational experiences have room for, for what I like to call as creative polish of adding on that.

little bit sharper persona adding in some audio and sonic cues being able to work within all of those things. So we talked, we touched on all of that in a couple of the chapters. We also had guest perspectives included. So we have Roger Kibbe from Samsung Charles Spence from the University of Oxford on behavioral, as well as Steve Keller from Spotify.

So and Pandora being able to help us. Actually, I’m sorry, that’s Studio Resonate. That’s changed a couple names. But being able to have them give their perspective, and then at the end, we also have guest perspectives within the industries of healthcare retail, and etc. Of looking out through, how do I think about this within my particular piece.

Then the final piece that I’m actually excited is every chapter we’ve done a case study on a real world example of how it can be used for promotion, how it can be used for customer service, how we can use it to augment again brand loyalty or any of those other aspects of enhancing consumption or troubleshooting.

What are all the different ways that we can use conversational voice experiences so that someone can get the most out of it, but also that a brand’s. able to also reap the rewards from it. And so it’s not just, Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if someone could talk to it? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could talk to it so they could order more of our product?

Or can we make it easier for them to unbox our product? Being able to help with those types of things of allowing someone to invite their product. your brand into their home and talk with it.

[00:31:49] Mike Allton: I love that you included those, those case studies in every chapter. It’s been a recurring topic on this show, the need to show people very specific examples of how in this case voice AI, but in many of these episodes, we’re talking about just generative AI in general, right?

How that can be used in very practical useful, beneficial ways. Not just say, Hey, just push the button and get started. In some respects that can be helpful, but that’s not going to help me make a case to my boss for investing in AI. I need to be able to go to him and say, this is what we’re going to do.

This is how much it’s going to cost. This is the benefit that we’re going to have. And I can’t know that that’s even possible if I don’t see very specific examples and ideas. So I’m super glad that you including those. In there. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes. Susan, I’ve got just one more question for you.

I’d love for you to kind of take out your crystal ball and look ahead as much as you possibly can in this world where things are changing literally every day. But what do you see happening with the future of voice AI? And more importantly, how can brands and marketers specifically kind of prepare to leverage some of these trends and Potentialities.

[00:32:58] Susan Westwater: I think, as I said, I alluded to earlier, a little bit of my bias will show because I do come from a content strategy and content ops background. I think it’s the most important thing to do is get your content house in order. Making sure that you’re using similar pings and you’re not solving the same question, answering the same question over and over again, but looking and saying, Hey, how do I, how can I cover off and make myself complete?

As I know my whole journey and I know what questions are being asked at the beginning of the journey, as opposed to when someone finally takes action and makes a purchase or engages, or then how do I retain them? So I think it’s having a good knowledge of what those important tasks are that will help you understand where to focus first.

And I other, I think the other important thing is take a deep breath. It’s going to feel like you’re drinking from a fire hose. I can’t tell you if I had a nickel for every client who said AI. Technology, you know, conversational AI, we can barely get social. We can barely get website. We can barely get customer service, right?

And you want us to add a layer of that? Are you crazy? I, I just don’t have another channel to support. I can’t do it. And it’s taking a breath and saying, we can get through this together a bit and say what are the most important things because not everything is the most, and where can we make do the most impact to be able to help then is it a we need to do cost savings because we’re able to now reduce our hold line so that our NPS score will go up because people are actually getting to resolution faster. Or is it? I need to be able to make it so that someone If they don’t understand something, it feels like they have somewhere to connect with, or is it I can enhance this experience by adding a story or adding an extra piece of entertainment to whatever it is we’re interacting with to make it that much more a part of my life or for me to Basically show my fandom.

And, and those types of things is understanding that that part of your customer’s audience of that audience. And then knowing then that that can help prioritize the rest of it. We do a lot of prioritization exercises, quite honestly, when we’re figuring out these roadmaps to help get into a point of.

What’s practical, but what’s also useful.

[00:35:10] Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense. And I’m going to tie it back to our history conversation at the very beginning. Cause I was having, I was talking to some entrepreneurs earlier today, in fact, and we were coming at it from the perspective of social media marketing.

And I’ve often dubbed myself the unofficial historian of social media. Cause I’ve been writing about the social media networking space and the social networks themselves for over a decade. So I’ve written about networks that no longer exist today, like Google plus and vine and blab. And I’ve always preached to my business clients and readers and listeners to take a bit of a wait and see approach when it comes to new social networks. Don’t try to jump on the bandwagon. Don’t be the first one to market with those kinds of things, unless that’s your business model, which most of them it’s not

[00:35:52] Susan Westwater: right.[00:35:53] Mike Allton: You need to wait to see, will that network go mainstream?

You need to wait for other people to figure out how to use it, how to gain traction so that you can gain from their knowledge. You don’t need to be that person that’s learning all those things. Wait, AI is different. A. I. Is not a hype. It’s not a fad. It’s not gonna go away tomorrow. It’s pervasive. It’s in every element of every aspect of our lives and increasingly so every single day.

So it is something that you can’t just say, you know what? That’s like social. That’s like customer service. We don’t get it. And that’s okay. And for some businesses, that’s fine. If they don’t ever do social media, you can’t take that stance with a I.

[00:36:35] Susan Westwater: No, absolutely. I mean, and to give a little bit of numbers behind that.

I just saw a stat that 77 percent of all products have some form of AI within them. Interestingly enough, though, and this is in the U. S. About 33 percent of U. S. Consumers know they’re using AI or say they’re using AI. So there’s a bit of a Delta there between 77 percent and 33%. But regardless and even when we were looking, I think I want to say the number is like 37%.

It’s well above 30 percent of US and actually even in Mexico and the UK and Germany, based off the study we did. That many, more than that are using voice. When we think about when we decided in the UX world to say, we’re going to support web, it was when you hit that 30 percent mark, same with mobile and even same with like the interaction with social, when you clear that 30 percent mark, it’s no longer a fad, it’s still around and it’s become a viable, either a channel or a viable tool.

And I think that’s the hard thing with voice is I’ve heard many folks say, Oh, I’m trying to figure out the killer app. Which pains me in my heart every time because the whole idea, but the best description I’ve had is, you know, voice is actually the killer app. How you use it is a whole other story, but being able to use voice with certain things in enablement, that’s where that, that change comes in.

And that’s where then we’ve seen that inflection point of, yes, more than a third of people are using it daily. Now is the time to start getting prepared, and that’s getting your data set up so that you know, and by data, that’s, is it your customer data for personalization, or is it your answer data or your reference information?

How is that accessible to unlocked, shared across all channels, but then available so that my bot. Or my assistant can be able to pull off of it as well. So some of that is some background and good old information architecture. Where those folks can come in and help with creating that smarter structure so that we can start to work that way.

And so, and so some of this stuff goes back and like everything old is new again. And that’s nice of like, it’s important to have a structure. It’s just important to have those things. What’s nice with LLMs is you don’t always have to be structured. But it works better. And we have better control if we are structured.

So it’s nice to be able to have those things thought through. But when we look at those numbers, there’s enough of a number now to be compelling to say, yes, this is something that people are using and they’re still using. five years later. So it’s exciting to be able to say that.

[00:39:04] Mike Allton: And the good news is in the, in the grand scheme of things, it’s still early days.

So those of you who do think you’re behind, you really aren’t behind. You’re actually at a golden opportunity where you can jump in now and, and take the opportunity to clean up your data and do these steps that Susan, you’ve been talking about so eloquently throughout this pandemic. Yeah. This conversation and get yourself prepared for when technology continues to expand and explode 2025.

We’re going to see incredible improvements with what these language models can do with what they can do together interactively with voice agents. I’m sure are coming very, very soon where you’ll be able to have. Artificial intelligence agents who can talk to each other. And you can ask your AI to do one thing and it will go talk to several other apps for you and complete those kinds of tasks.

So those are amazing things happening. We’ll probably have to have you come back in six or 12 months and tell us what can we do with voice AI then that we can’t do today. But for now, you’ve been amazing for folks who want to learn more about you and from you, where can they go to find you and connect?

[00:40:09] Susan Westwater: I’m active on X, so you could find me at SJW 75 or through LinkedIn. You can also get in touch with me. You can also always, if you just want to know a little bit more about Pragmatic we are at Pragmatic. digital where you can pull up we have a bunch of reference information and some, a little bit of one on one as well, just to help folks know more about.

What they should be looking for. And just some points to ponder as we move into the like the next phase of digital.

[00:40:38] Mike Allton: Terrific. Terrific. We’ll have the links to that and everything that we talked about in today’s show in the show notes. Don’t forget to find the AI in Marketing: Unpacked podcast on Apple and leave us a review.

We’d love to know what you think till next time. Welcome to the grid. Thanks for joining us on AI in Marketing: Unpacked. I hope today’s episode has inspired you and given you actionable insights to integrate AI into your marketing strategies. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and consider leaving.

Love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you might have. Don’t forget to join us next time as we continue to simplify AI and help you make a real impact in your marketing efforts until then keep innovating and see just how far AI can take your marketing. Thank you for listening and have a fantastic day.

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